When designing your company logo, consistency is key. By Sam Polcer

You’ve got a brilliant idea for a new company. After working out your business plan, you have investors on board and production has begun. A catchy name has been agreed upon, and you even have a marketing plan. Discussion turns to how you want your company to be represented visually to the public. What message do you want to send? To whom are you speaking? What do you see this company doing in the future? How do you want to identify yourself in what may be a crowded market?

One of the first avenues in which you need to address these kinds of questions is with your company logo, and while it may look small on the corner of an envelope or at the top of your home page, it’s a matter of no small importance.

“Often companies don’t allow themselves an opportunity to expand: If they design a logo that is geographically specific or is product specific, it can be a limitation to their growth,” says Bill Gardner, president of Kansas-based Gardner Design and creator of LogoLounge.com, a Web site devoted to the appreciation of logo design, which spawned a successful series of books on the subject (LogoLounge, currently in its fourth volume).

Gardner has produced work for Nissan, Pepsi, Pizza Hut and the 2004 Athens Olympics, and his work has been featured in The Museum of Modern Art. He points out that as the size, structure and even focus of a company shifts and grows, it’s the logo that needs to remain consistent. Unfortunately, many companies don’t realize this up front and end up paying for it in the long run when they decide to change their logo.
Customers and clients are wary of such changes, and it ends up hurting businesses. “People want to know why you are suddenly changing it. They’ll ask, ‘Is this guy costing me more? What’s the deal?’” Gardner says.

Consistency should also be considered as a factor in building a successful brand today, not just when dealing with changes that can occur in the future.
Perhaps the most important reason for spending the effort on an effective visual brand is to establish a coherence that, to clients or consumers, extends beyond aesthetics.

“If there are highly consistent elements—working with the same typeface, the same color, the logo is placed in the same location and is used in the same scale as the other components, whether it’s on the side of a van or in a commercial, it works with the same kind of photography, and so on—if you develop this visual consistency, we infer that the company builds consistency elsewhere,” Gardner says, “and that the company is going to be large enough to fill the order that you’ve just placed with them.”

When it comes to the actual aesthetics of a logo, there’s a lot to take into consideration, including target demographic, trends within the design industry and the format in which the logo will be displayed. In any case, it is important to have an awareness of the design landscape in which it exists.

“I never fail to be amazed at some of the new identities that continue to come out,” Gardner says. “It seems like there are millions of logos, and at a certain point you feel like everybody must have used up every possible solution that exists. But new solutions continue to arrive.”

MARKS OF SUCCESS

Bill Gardner discusses three logos that pioneered three major logo design trends.

“The Bank of New York logo (used before BoNY merged with Mellon Bank) created by Lippincott established the ‘weave’ trend. It reflected the protective linear patterns engraved on foreign currency and certificates. The delicate framework showed a woven strength around the safe square core at the center of the mark.”

“We pioneered the ‘facets’ trend [for Lavish Boutiques]. The concept of a gemstone is so amazing—as it associates with companies—because any rhinestone, at one point, was a rock that got kicked around for a couple of million years in the earth before somebody picked it up and split the thing open and saw beauty in it.”

“Shift Thinkers of Portugal helped redefine identity design with one of the first ‘transparent 3-D’ logos. A jellyfish-like image for Grutas E Centro do Vulcanismo, the volcanic theme park on Madeira, glows like clear water and colored lava, creating a highly dimensional form.”