Home » Archives » August 2007 » Today's Thought on Logos [Previous entry: "New Rejected Work: ACEP 40th Anniversary Logo"] [Next entry: "More LogoPond Junk"] 08/30/2007: "Today's Thought on Logos"
There is this idea held by designers that logos are to be applied "as-is," or as they designed it originally, forever and ever, amen. It's easy to see in the Graphic Standards like the one I pointed out from AllTel (see this blog entry on AllTel's Graphic Standard).

I am not one of those people. I believe that logos need to be living things in order to survive. Logos are, after all, a visual representation of you company. Your company needs to adapt to survive, so why shouldn't your logo?

Most of the companies that have really successfully leveraged their logos encourage their designers to adapt their logos, to twist them, to destroy them, take them apart, and use the pieces independent of the whole.

Many of them even do well enough that they convince us to PAY them to wear their promotional material everywhere we go. I myself, as I write this, am wearing a particularly rad Nike t-shirt that looks like it was stenciled (badly at that), with paint drops and splatters and drips.

I sport at least three Apple logos most places I go these days (iPod, MacBook Pro, and a Sticker on my car...although I have been an Apple user long enough that the first Apple sticker I put on my car was rainbow colored.) and it's become a little bit of a status symbol.

You'll notice that the Apple logo doesn't say Apple or Apple Inc on it anywhere, although if you look at their graphic standard I bet it shows the complete logo as the Apple symbol (designed by Clement Mok) along with the words Apple Inc (or, previously Apple Computer, Inc) set in either Apple Garamond or Myriad. They know that they don't need to have the whole thing everywhere, every time, in every application. The word "apple" isn't even on the home page of their website...and they don't need it.

Let that be a lesson to you, brand managers and graphic sticklers of the world. Ease up on the freakin' standards and let the designer have some fun. You might just end up with something that you, the designer, and the consumer will be proud of.