It's hard to say exactly when logos went from being essential but lackluster business tools to the international graphic design superstars they are today.
Was it in the early 1990s when teenagers around the world began tattooing Nike swooshes onto their ankles and arms? Or was it earlier, in the 1970s, when a generation of women took to heart actress Brooke Shields' proclamation "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins" and made logo-imprinted jeans shirts, and handbags a billion-dollar industry?
Whatever the event that propelled logos to stardom, the fact remains that today's most effective logos do much more than stand for a company,product or service: They trigger emotion, create desire, even forge communities.
Of course, logo is just one element in a corporate identity system, but it is arguably one of the most important. Unlike business cards, letterhead, or Web pages, elements that can be continually updated to reflect management changes, new business offerings, or shifts in public tastes without much confusion among viewers, the most successful logos are like flags, that is, they are durable, universal and timeless.
And yet, when it comes to their actual design, successful logos are a disparate lot: They might be monograms or pictograms; letters or numbers; circles or squares; animals, plants, suns, stars, or moons.
Despite these differences, however, successful logos do share several qualities. For one, they are practical. They work in big sizes and in small, in black-and-white and in colour; they translate well across a broad range of media. For another, they communicate something, whether it be a company description, a business aspiration, or simply an emotion or mood such as elegance or friendliness. And in the end, effective logos share something else, a quality that is a bit more elusive: as visual forms they offer "sheer pleasure".
There is no one answer to the question "What makes a logo work?". This article is meant to feed and kick-start your creativity in rethinking about your corporate logo, open your eyes to other well-known logos and others which are less so, and raise the question why as well as how can we make our logo design works for our businesses, and hence, how will it affect our web presence in a macro view as we move forward into 2008.
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