How Logos Work

Right now there is a trend in logo design that is very hot with logo designers, and is super effective for branding large corporations. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean it would benefit your company or your brand.

That trend is the simplification of logos down to their essence, while still retaining the identity of that mark. The resulting logos are iconic and geometric, oftentimes employing some clever tricks such as the golden ratio as a way of creating visually pleasing designs that appeal to a large audience.

Although there are a lot of large corporate companies who are using logomarks like these with great success, not every company would benefit from such simplified iconic logos. 

Every industry has its own aesthetic. For example, if you tried to brand a soft drink with a logomark like the Nike swoosh, you would fail to reach a lot of markets, simply because people would not recognize the drink on a shelf as something they want to consume. They would not recognize it as a bubbly sweet soft drink.

Let’s look at a chocolate bar wrapper, any chocolate bar wrapper. What we most often associate with chocolate bar graphics is bubbly fun text with bright contrasting colours on a dark background.

Now re-redesign that chocolate bar wrapper with a white label and a clean black geometric design on it. … See!  It no longer looks like a chocolate bar. That’s because the wrong visual cues were used. It was missing the cues that we’ve learned as consumers, that inform us about the product inside the package.

Although we’ve used packaging as the example here, the same discipline applies to logo design.

Understanding the complex visual languages of logo design, iconography, package design and colour theory is a very important part of branding. What sellers show you both at the point of sale and in their packaging and advertising is all part of a complex group of languages that inform us, telling us about the products they sell and sometimes the dream they are implying that you (the buyer) will enjoy if you purchase their product(s).

So, although a beautifully distilled and simplified logomark might appeal to you, it has to appeal to you within the context of the product that is being sold for it to be an effective sales tool.

Here at logomonster.ca we understand these visual languages and the importance of understanding the markets that clients are trying to reach. Knowing when to design an illustrated logo versus a lettermark is incredibly important. Choosing the wrong logo can greatly affect your companies reach.

To learn more, let’s look at the different types of logos in another blog post: What Kind Of Logo Do I Need

Logo Monster