What Makes a Great Logo – Four Critical Qualities That Nobody Talks About

https://boingboing.net/2019/01/16/slacks-new-logo-is-a-playd...

The "faxable" criteria. This really means that it degrades well, down to single color, poor resolution, with noise, and yet still retains its recognition. Even if we intend the logo to only be used on screens, it helps distill the simplicity into something the brain easily remembers.

I'll disagree with the article about the ability of users to reproduce it. Logos are about branding, mental association and to some degree, identification between the person and the brand. Many popular logos have strong mind presence in people who are yet completely unable to reproduce it; "they know it when they see it".

A HUGE percentage of even the largest companies in the world have their name as part of their corporate logo.

Is your company bigger and better known than Disney, Microsoft, Verizon, Ford, Amazon, or Facebook? If not, you should probably think twice about whether your arcane little graphic will be enough for your customers (and even more importantly your prospective customers) to confidently ID and recall your brand. All those companies incorporate their name in their logo to this day.

Even the companies who can get away with just the graphic now--like Nike, Apple, McDonalds, etc.--started out with a logo that incorporated their name, in some cases for decades.

Here's the truth: text-free logos are the rare exception, and can't be confidently predicted. Your logo's job is to help people remember your brand name. Focus on that, and then, maybe, if the stars align, you can one day take off the text. But that should be an aspiration, not a design constraint on day one.

Sure, Nike and adidas and McDonalds have logos which are easily hand drawn from memory, as does the average geometric shape stuck above the text in a half-assed 99designs submission. On the other hand, Coca Cola and KFC are really, really hard to draw properly and yet equally widely remembered and admired (an easy to draw shape also matters a lot less for a logo mostly printed on bottle labels and boxes and meant to convey fidelity to tradition than it does for one cut out of shoe leather and meant to look sleek in motion)

Being remarkable is nice to aspire to, and yet there's nothing remarkable about the Nike or Pepsi logos cited (and whilst you could definitely make a case that the McDonalds "golden arches" logo is, most people familiar with the brand have never seen the architecture of the outlet that inspires it)

And of course, founder CEOs can be as self-aware about the relative unimportance of their own sense of aesthetics as manager CEOs

Then there's this "This means the designer is responsible for convincing the founder that their solution is the right one."

I found this funny because 25% of my job is usually convincing the client that my designs are good, despite their own (admittedly) bad taste/poor decisions.

Logos or not, this is the elusive character that I've been unconsciously seeking at companies. Whenever there is a significant mis-estimation or placement of talent/trust in upper management there are recurring issues that are hard to pinpoint. It is not enough to place an amount of trust commensurate with talent, both must be high for effectiveness.