Last time, I talked in general terms about how to make your own successful logo. On the subject of design, I mentioned simplicity, alignment, and logic. Today I want to go more into why simplicity is so important.
Lovely logos you’ve seen
I’ll bet if you close your eyes, you can easily remember the logo for McDonald’s, FedEx, Nintendo, Subway, or Apple. What do they have in common? The most obvious answer, to me, is that they’re simple.
Simplicity is important for several reasons. It makes your logo memorable, understandable, reproducible and flexible.
Understandable
If your logo requires someone to study it to figure out what it’s about, it’s not going to be effective. Take a look at this logo for a sports bar. Ignoring the colors for a moment, notice that the logo involves several different images, drawing the eye all over the place. We have the words “sports bar”, a football, a baseball(?), and a checkered flag. An effective logo can be grasped in an instant. This unnecessary complexity interferes with what the company wants to convey.
What if, instead, they’d created a single image that indicated sports, without making the eye dart around searching for elements? This image conveys information very effectively (though without much pizazz).
Here’s another sports icon. It has problems, but the use of several different sports images is not one of them. They’re tied together in a way that makes them a unit.
Memorable
Simplicity also affects how memorable your logo is. This is a very (very) rough treatment, but look how paring down the Clovis logo changes how you perceive it.
Flexible and Reproducible
A simple logo is flexible and reproducible. Take a look at the Subway logo here. Its clean lines mean you can shrink it, and you can use it when you don’t have color available.
You can emboss it on metal, embroider it on a hat, or carve it into a picnic table. Any use that comes up, it just works.
You can even make it really, really small (which comes in very handy when you’re making a business card). Imagine what would happen to the Cazz’s logo above if you shrank it like this.
The apple logo is another excellent example of a simple logo. It’s recognizable and memorable, and amazingly flexible. In fact, look at all of it’s superpowers—stencil it, invert it, even shrink it, and it stays clear and convincing.
Simplicity can go a really really long way toward making sure your logo makes a positive impression, and helps your business grow.
Logo rants continue next week, same bat time, same bat channel.
