A Love Song for Logos – Part II: Don’t Be a Statistic, Be Someone’s Case Study

A good logo is versatile, meaning that it can be used equally as competently for the corner of a business card as it is the monogram of a t-shirt. Logos must have the ability to be used on stationery, products, clothing, signage, websites, emails, billboards, mugs, bumper stickers and small pens that we steal from the bank. The Internet has devalued the logo in my opinion. Many designers are designing icons or web 2.0 logos and, though they look outstanding, they are frequently not thought out very well. What looks good on a website cannot accurately be depicted on a Polo-style shirt or on a vinyl sign atop a trade show booth. The fancy glare and drop shadows should be accents, not the basis of the piece.

Take the logo of a corporate giant like Ford, for example. At ford.com, you’ll see their logo includes a slight gradient from a light blue to a royal blue with a slight shadow behind the cursive word. Some of their online ads show a glare, more shadows and depth, and other web 2.0 details. But at the core of their design, is that spectacular blue oval that signifies the blue-collar America as well as a known color of trust, outlined in a thin white stroke for an added touch of class and the cursive font for unique, historic style. That logo can be altered in a variety of formats while the structure and impression remain the same. Another example at a small business level is a small East Texas company called Metal Depot Inc. Metal Depot is a family owned company that has maintained a specific logo for many years of a black sans serif font and a symmetrical grouping of lines that illustrate a roof’s peak over a black background. Very masculine and bold, this logo has served their company well for many years. So when it came time to update their website, this logo kept its frame and the integrity of the mark that has served them so well and added an arced glare for an icon look, variations of crimson and black with individual glare lines and the ever-popular Web 2.0 glass reflection. No need to change all their signage, work shirts, stationery and brochures that bear the flat vector logo. The “web-ified” logo and the standard logo are ultimately the same design that serve different purposes.

These are things to look for in choosing your organization’s design as well as choosing your designer. Consider if they are designing with the future in mind, consider whether they’re creating with versatility in mind. Years ago a client came to me very downtrodden because she spent a good amount of money towards a logo for her company with a designer she found online doing it for cheap. The portfolio looked great, including other designs that featured reflections and stylized typefaces so she said the decision went quickly and easily. The first draft consisted of all these tricks and all the decorative icing, but the substance was dense and incomplete. These flashy extras, however, looked wonderful initially as JPEGs going back and forth over e-mail. Frustration soon set in when the artist was late on correspondence, wavering on artistic direction and – you guessed it – he kept charging for disappointing revisions and subsequent drafts. Before she realized it, five months and hundreds of dollars were lost and all she had was a folder of subpar designs that would ONLY look good atop a website header or as a signature in an e-mail. Once I was hired, my team and I scrapped the extras and went for a straight forward, vector design. The client now has a logo fit for TV commercials, company apparel, signage, web and looks best on her printed materials. Always ask for vector first, always ask to see it in black/white as well as color, always ask to see it displayed on various mockups of stationery/web/product/clothing, and always ask for a standards document that include the raw materials of font, Pantone colors, etc. Your designer(s) should really supply these without you asking if he/she is legit. If you do have to ask, though, it will definitely help your case. Your designer will take the job more seriously knowing that you know what to look for and as a result you will get exactly what you need. And you’ll probably even get a tighter design in the end. Who knows? Yours could be either the statistic or the case study.

Hug your logo designer today. It is a lot more than just making pretty colors and something that looks cool or girly or fancy or plain or smart or strong or cheap or playful or techy or sporty or professional or hip or funky (I’ve had requests of all of these). There is marketable thought, experience, and time-wrenching research that goes into a good logo and in the words of people much richer than the most of us, “…better you than me.”

- Lance LaRue, Advertising & Creative Manager at Americom Marketing Ad Agency 2010