In my humble opinion, a logo should mean something. That being said, I do in fact believe that the business world is full of hundreds upon hundreds of “meaningless” logos and identities. If it’s a company’s goal to create a logo that stands out, that’s understandable and justifiable, but when the day is over, there’s still a chance that it’s essentially meaningless; if what’s created doesn’t symbolize anything, then it’s imperfect in my opinion.
Whenever I think about logos out there, that I think are “great logos,” off the top of my head, the featured above ones stand out. I don’t like the Mets as a team, but damn if I don’t think their logo is a fantastic blend of meaning, symbolism and an aesthetically pleasing color combination. The skyline features symbols of the five New York boroughs, a bridge overlapping them to symbolize connection between them all, the Mets word mark in classic script, all encapsulated within a fairly subtle baseball silhouette.
FedEx seems like a fairly inconspicuous word mark logo, but when the arrow within the E and X in Ex were explained to me, it was one of those can’t not see it anymore moments, which is subtle genius, because the arrow represents the forward progress of shipping logistics.
The Denver Nuggets logo, I’ll admit that I’m not that aesthetically impressed by, but every single element of it is so methodically thought out and considered, that I can’t help but respect it as a meaningful logo. From the thick, “Wild West” serif-style font used for the word, integration of the Rocky Mountains which Denver is famously known for residing near, to the prevalent use of the color gold to represent the gold nuggets Denver was historically known for harvesting, every single element of the logo has meaning, and is brought together in a pretty aesthetically solid single unit.
Naturally, I wouldn’t blather on about logos like this if there was no impetus behind it; and since logos are somewhat of a creative endeavor, and despite my general lack of creativity at my job, it’s still a part of what I do, this is naturally a story about how I was tasked with creating some logo options, and how it predictably went wrong, because I’m writing about it. Surely, I wouldn’t write about something I succeeded in??
Anyway, I was tasked with creating some logo comps, for a sub-team within a segment of this gigantic company that I work for. Because for whatever reason, they feel that they’re so big and mighty compared to their peers that they can develop and have their own identity within. From the start, the only intel that I was provided was an acronym (which is an ironically sad story within itself), a vague idea of what the team does, and one key color that had to be integrated into it.
Long story short, I focused on the key element of what the team does, integrated numerous options of the acronym into the artwork, and utilized the requested colors. I gave them five options that showed varied typeface options, styles in which the artistic elements could be utilized, as well as examples of how the logos might look on actual real-life collateral material.
Most importantly, I explained that these are comps, which is to say that these are prototypical materials, in which any acceptable elements or concepts could be extracted and saved for future use, and any disliked elements or concepts could be tossed and discarded. So naturally, my options were accepted as finalized, polished options, open to all sorts of subjective criticism from people who didn’t really know what they wanted in the first place, but have all the ammunition in the world to explain what they didn’t want.
This isn’t to say that they absolutely hated and loathed everything I provided to them, quite the contrary, they didn’t mind some of my more minimalistic, yet more meaning full options, compared to the litany of repurposed and color-modified iStock.com vector pieces this company has been using for years prior to me. But they gave me absolutely no criticism that was remotely constructive and entirely subjective. It was pointed out to me that my pieces looked repetitive, save for fonts and conceptual construction.
Selectively ignored were the parts where I stated that these were ideas and not polished products, and that I was open to interpretation to what they might actually want. Such is often the case in the creative industry, but sadly, despite doing creative work for a living, I’m not really in the creative industry anymore, but in something vastly further back in prehistoric times, where nobody can visualize, nobody can imagine, and nobody can actually explain what they want to see.
My manager, trying to do their best to deaden the non-constructive criticism with rhetoric about unleashing more creativity and that more improvement should come from my end, stated that “we’re the designer.”
Are we really?
When the day is over, we the designers are ultimately still trying to cater to the aesthetics of a person(s) who has the final say, and the creative process gets to a point where if the end user really has no clue of what they’re looking for, they’re basically taking away the title of “designer” from the designer, and putting it on themselves, when they’re scrambling and going back and forth, picking and choosing, revising a hundred times, something that they have no idea what they’re looking for.
The creative process goes both ways, and any designer that claims they don’t get exasperated with a clueless client is lying, because eventually every designer reaches a point where an assignment stops being a creative challenge, and becomes a tiresome exercise in futility that they just want to get over as soon as possible so that they can pursue a creative challenge elsewhere.
Thankfully, this logo request was more of a side-project than my day-to-day workloads, and I’m back on an assignment to where I can put this on the back burner. To no surprise, the sub-team seemed to favor options that were quite literally, repurposed iStock images, where the colors were modified to match their criteria, and their acronym was integrated into it. Personally, although I can’t deny that they’re eye-catching and aesthetically engaging, I can’t derive any meaning out of what they’re liking. Without meaning, they’re kind of pointless, but I guess given the nature of my job, that too isn’t really that big of a surprise.
