Logo design. What it is and what is isn’t!

Logo design. Visual Identity design. Brand design. All these get talked about quite a lot in this area of graphic design. Some people have a hard time understanding and indeed explaining what a logo actually is and does. A logo is NOT your brand - and a brand is NOT your logo.

“A brand is not a product. A brand is not a promise. A brand is not the sum of all the impressions it makes on an audience. A brand is a result. It’s a customer’s gut feeling about a product, service, or a company. It’s not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is. A brand is your reputation.” Marty Neumeier

One of the best explanations I’ve heard regarding logo design is from Sagi Haviv, partner and designer at Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, a brand design firm behind some of the world’s most recognisable logos. Read on…

What’s a Good Logo?

There are a lot of misconceptions about what logos should be or should look like. Many people feel a logo should be pretty, or say a lot about the company, or be well-liked. According to Sagi, these are just simply not true.

A good logo needs to be three things: appropriate, distinct and memorable, and simple. The magic happens when a logo is distinctive and simple. It needs to be recognizable and translatable across platforms. One way you could test the simplicity and distinctiveness of a logo is to try and draw it by hand from memory.

A bad logo, then, is rather complicated and out of tune with the brand’s personality. It’s not reflective of the company, and it tries to be too many things.

What a Logo Is, and What It Isn’t

A logo is not communication. It’s identification. It’s the period at the end of a sentence; not the sentence itself. This is why simplicity of the logo is so important.

The simpler a logo is, the more recognizable it becomes, and the easier it is for us to identify what company that logo represents. The point of the logo is that it endures over time.

Sagi Haviv