How do you know you have a good logo?
How do you Start designing a Logo?
Before starting, an important thing to know is what a logo is for. It's intuitive that a company needs a logo because everyone has one but have you ever wondered what it does? What it's function is? Is it aesthetic? Is there a secret to it? I like exploring things in first principles and this might get heavy but I ask you to power through because this method of explanation connects a logo to a brand, business, psychology, neurology and marketing.
What do we know?
We know one thing for sure - logos are built for people. If you look at the historical application, the first documented usage of a logo or a " brand" thousands of years ago. Cattle owners would "brand" their cattle with letters or a mark that would signify ownership. Behaviourally, this means that an individual who saw the mark would not only know who the cow belonged to, but also not to confuse it for cattle owned by someone else. Thousands of years later, this fundamental truth has not changed. We use logos to recognize the organizations that provides a product or a service.
When we talk about recognition, we also talk about the human brain. A signal travels from the eyes to the brain, is processed but the more primal parts of the brain and is pushed into the frontal cortex as either recognized or unrecognized. This provides us another insight. Recognition is not a matter of if the brain has seen something before or not, instead, it's a matter of how strong the neural pathway for the subject is. If this pathway is weak, poorly connected and has a slow firing rate, the memory is weak, sometimes weak enough for our brains to say it has no memory of the subject, even if it's been seen before.
We also know that strong memories are ones we have strong emotions of. You don't care much for your daily meals or when you brush your teeth but you do remember the day you got married or when a loved one passed away. They feel so different that you wouldn't even consider those activities the same thing when objectively, they have something in common - they are both at a very fundamental scale, activities. The insight we can draw from this is that the strength of a memory not only affects its salience (or recall-ability) but also our perceived importance of the scenario we're remembering.
Speaking of loved ones - if you are asked to remember your best friend, you don't have a single point of reference. Instead you have a complex web of individual memories of both good and bad, happy and sad scenarios, covering everything from how they look, sound and what their mannerisms are to abstract things like what their philosophies, dreams and goals are - their very own brand. As a system, the individual is a complex structure of memories that have been built over time.
And there we have it.
If a brand is a set of memory structures, a logo or a mark is the tool used to identity that memory, just like a face or a name is a tool used to identify an individual. To design a logo, all we need is to have a recognizable mark because it's a tool of identification. Identification cannot be achieved if a logo keeps changing or ages poorly with a trend so a logo needs to be timeless and permanent.
Exposures drives salience and usage drives exposure. To increase the capacity for usage, the logo must be versatile enough to be applied on the smallest and largest applications as well as on physical and digital media.
Committing something to memory becomes exponentially more difficult when it's complex. If we want to make the logo easy to remember, it needs to be as simple as possible.
We also have a duty to prevent the confusion of our mark to another - that is that in needs to be unique or distinctive.
Distinctive
Simple
Versatile
Timeless
Everything else that's added on top of this are different designers and strategists methods of differentiating their processes and services and some of them are useful depending on context, especially when the designer specializes in an industry or category. However, knowing the structure of human memory and interaction is a far more important knowledge pool.
Some companies insist on a logo containing a story and that is in fact a very valid idea if there is a budget allocated to market the story. Even the most beautiful story has no value if no one has ever heard it. Storytelling is one of the first mechanisms of knowledge transference that we have as humans and talks to a primitive part of the brain. This increases our ability to recall the story and the associated mark, however, marketing other aspects of the brand, like its personality or its purpose, generally yields better results.
I should mention that having these qualities doesn't make a brand famous - it just ensures that a logo has the potential to be famous.
And there we have it. If you want a visual guide to good logos, these guys are the best in the world.
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Dhyresh Mendis
is a Graphic Designer specializing in Brand Identity Design. His love for structures and systems has sent him on a journey to understand the fields that Identities support at great depth - Marketing and Brand Building.
How do you Start designing a Logo?
Before starting, an important thing to know is what a logo is for. It's intuitive that a company needs a logo because everyone has one but have you ever wondered what it does? What it's function is? Is it aesthetic? Is there a secret to it? I like exploring things in first principles and this might get heavy but I ask you to power through because this method of explanation connects a logo to a brand, business, psychology, neurology and marketing.
What do we know?
We know one thing for sure - logos are built for people. If you look at the historical application, the first documented usage of a logo or a " brand" thousands of years ago. Cattle owners would "brand" their cattle with letters or a mark that would signify ownership. Behaviourally, this means that an individual who saw the mark would not only know who the cow belonged to, but also not to confuse it for cattle owned by someone else. Thousands of years later, this fundamental truth has not changed. We use logos to recognize the organizations that provides a product or a service.
When we talk about recognition, we also talk about the human brain. A signal travels from the eyes to the brain, is processed but the more primal parts of the brain and is pushed into the frontal cortex as either recognized or unrecognized. This provides us another insight. Recognition is not a matter of if the brain has seen something before or not, instead, it's a matter of how strong the neural pathway for the subject is. If this pathway is weak, poorly connected and has a slow firing rate, the memory is weak, sometimes weak enough for our brains to say it has no memory of the subject, even if it's been seen before.
We also know that strong memories are ones we have strong emotions of. You don't care much for your daily meals or when you brush your teeth but you do remember the day you got married or when a loved one passed away. They feel so different that you wouldn't even consider those activities the same thing when objectively, they have something in common - they are both at a very fundamental scale, activities. The insight we can draw from this is that the strength of a memory not only affects its salience (or recall-ability) but also our perceived importance of the scenario we're remembering.
Speaking of loved ones - if you are asked to remember your best friend, you don't have a single point of reference. Instead you have a complex web of individual memories of both good and bad, happy and sad scenarios, covering everything from how they look, sound and what their mannerisms are to abstract things like what their philosophies, dreams and goals are - their very own brand. As a system, the individual is a complex structure of memories that have been built over time.
And there we have it.
If a brand is a set of memory structures, a logo or a mark is the tool used to identity that memory, just like a face or a name is a tool used to identify an individual. To design a logo, all we need is to have a recognizable mark because it's a tool of identification. Identification cannot be achieved if a logo keeps changing or ages poorly with a trend so a logo needs to be timeless and permanent.
Exposures drives salience and usage drives exposure. To increase the capacity for usage, the logo must be versatile enough to be applied on the smallest and largest applications as well as on physical and digital media.
Committing something to memory becomes exponentially more difficult when it's complex. If we want to make the logo easy to remember, it needs to be as simple as possible.
We also have a duty to prevent the confusion of our mark to another - that is that in needs to be unique or distinctive.
Distinctive
Simple
Versatile
Timeless
Everything else that's added on top of this are different designers and strategists methods of differentiating their processes and services and some of them are useful depending on context, especially when the designer specializes in an industry or category. However, knowing the structure of human memory and interaction is a far more important knowledge pool.
Some companies insist on a logo containing a story and that is in fact a very valid idea if there is a budget allocated to market the story. Even the most beautiful story has no value if no one has ever heard it. Storytelling is one of the first mechanisms of knowledge transference that we have as humans and talks to a primitive part of the brain. This increases our ability to recall the story and the associated mark, however, marketing other aspects of the brand, like its personality or its purpose, generally yields better results.
I should mention that having these qualities doesn't make a brand famous - it just ensures that a logo has the potential to be famous.
And there we have it. If you want a visual guide to good logos, these guys are the best in the world.
Dhyresh Mendis
is a Graphic Designer specializing in Brand Identity Design. His love for structures and systems has sent him on a journey to understand the fields that Identities support at great depth - Marketing and Brand Building.