I’ll use the evolution of our dealership logo as a miniature case study. See our current version above. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t. I learned during the process of developing it that I couldn’t please everybody on our own team, never mind the whole world. That’s okay, because we were optimizing for a lot more than just pure aesthetics. Following were our goals. The design needed to:
Make me happy. After all, I own the company (with partners), and I see this thing all day, all over the place. It’s all over my clothing. It needs to look good to me.
Observe what I call the “billboard imperative.” Almost no one will divert time and attention to absorb complicated messages while driving by a billboard, so the message needs to be pared down, simple enough to mentally process immediately. “Eat at Joe’s” is about the right length for a billboard message, and the same principle of distillation applies to logos. Ours stands out from all the other graphics that compete for customers attention. We used bright, bold colors, and all caps for the letters. It might not be pretty, but you remember it pretty well.
Look good in a variety of different media. To work on clothing, it can’t be too intricate because stitching is not very precise. When it appears without color on billing invoices, it needs to look good in grey-scale. The colors need to “pop” on a computer screen. It needs to be intelligible as our logo even when it’s small, for example as a favicon.
Stand out from common background colors. A white logo, for example, washes out on paper, white shirts, or white vehicles.
Evoke the values of the company. The green leaf suggests our significant commitment to minimizing our environmental footprint.
Suggest the meaning of the business name. We used a shadowy silhouette of an actual planet (blue Earth). If we had been Mars Subaru, we probably would have preferred a red base layer.
Include the business name in the logo. If you’re Apple, you have the money and global reach to brand a wordless image. For most of the rest of us, the name needs to be part of your logo so people seeing it for the first time will know what it is without having to expend any extra effort (because they won’t).
Tie in with our other marketing assets. See photo below—the font we used for “Planet” is the same on our logo and license plate frame. When you use consistent graphics across all your communication channels, you increase the likelihood that a customer will remember the business associated with them.
9. Graphically signal the services that the business provides. For example, a plumber’s logo would ideally incorporate one or more symbols of the trade: perhaps a pipe, some water, or a toilet. We could have done this with some roadway or car imagery, but we decided we already had too much going on. We opted for simplicity, and banked on people figuring out what business we’re in by the context where they see the logo (probably as a sticker on the tailgate of a vehicle, in concert with our license plate frame that many customers are happy to display).
How to change an existing logo
What if you already have a logo, but think it looks a little dated, or maybe there’s a lot of room for improvement? If you’ve been using it for years (on your delivery trucks, business cards, or advertisements), then you’ve built up some equity in it. Prospective customers have some mental recognition of it. It would be a shame to abandon that value.
We faced the same dilemma about a decade ago when we realized that our early logo (below) was looking a little dated. The ring suggested that the planet was Saturn instead of Earth, which didn’t really make sense in the context of our environmental emphasis. The overall impression was a little too cartoony, like the Planet Hollywood restaurant logo. But we had been using this logo for a long time. There were over ten thousand cars driving around with this sticker on the trunk, and plenty of people in the Boston metro area associated the logo with us. So instead of starting from scratch, we updated it. Our current logo is more contemporary, but bears enough resemblance to the old one that people would still recognize it.
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