- Your logo is the tip of a whole look.
I've touched on this a little as we've gone through.
You generally don't design a logo in a vacuum.
A logo is part of a larger look for your enterprise
that includes colors, shapes,
similarity of layout and so on.
As you're designing your logo you need to be thinking
about these things.
You need to work the whole look at once.
If you don't, you'll have no continuity.
Your logo may be green,
but everything else is red.
I saw a logo recently that was very pretty,
delicate, airy, full of light and soft color
but its website was opposite,
like it had been designed by someone else.
It was a grid of heavy blocks and dark outlines,
a completely different thing,
and it overpowered the logo as though it wasn't even there.
That pretty little logo had zero presence,
you couldn't even see it.
UPS, on the other hand, is a model
for how to sustain a look.
You saw this earlier on its airplane.
Take a prominent characteristic and amplify it.
In this case it's the brown and gold colors
and the curve on the shield.
And you see how the curve on the shield
and the curve on the airplane are the same.
Beautifully done, super strong theme.
To illustrate a little of this,
since you're probably not designing airplanes,
I'd like to show you several pieces of work
from a favorite designer of mine, Karen Barranco.
First up is Cake Monkey.
Cake Monkey is a popular
sweet treat bakery in North Hollywood
for which Karen designed the logo and the look.
She said, "You know, it would've been so easy
"to design a cake with a monkey on it
"or a monkey holding a cake.
"But that would've been corny and cliche."
So she took the classy route and did just the tail.
And I love this
because it's simple and it's festive and it's fun
and it gives you a point of engagement,
there's a story there.
Its simplicity allows it to be transferred
to every venue easily.
Pink and brown are the theme colors
so here it is on a cake box.
Note the box has been designed too,
it's as curvy and simple as the logo.
And look at the cake roll
if you want to see where the money tail came from.
Very clever, very simple integration of elements.
Other things going on,
the logo is round like those rolls
and a circle as we saw earlier is just as strong a shape.
Two-sided business card,
because of its simplicity,
the logo works on a dark background too.
If you want to be flexible like that, keep it simple.
And round card corners continue the theme.
Beautiful gift box,
the pink stripe is derived from the logo,
everything, just neat and tidy,
and you can see how all of it works together seamlessly.
Super clean, excellent design.
The Lighter Side is a lighting company.
You're seeing the before
which is a spotlight cast on a name on a dark wall.
This is a simple image but it's not pretty.
It's the kind of image that's very hard to work with
mainly because of the black box.
The box pretty much overpowers the name,
the name is just a small portion of the total area
and the effect is dark not light.
Karen's redesign is the opposite.
Now everything is light as it should be
if your name is the lighter side.
The dots represent spotlights as well as
stepping stones in, as she put it, life's events.
Because the dots are receding,
this is an active image.
It has movement and story and it's just fresh and open,
easily transferred to other venues
like this aluminum wall sign.
M Industrial Design was started in 1954
by three art center schoolmates
as Emerson, Johnson and Mackay.
You're seeing its original logo on the left.
Of its many products over the years,
I designed the original view master
and the original water pick.
It's headed today by Spencer Mackay,
the son of one of the founders
who renamed it M Industrial Design
and brought in Karen to design the logo,
which you can see here.
I love this image,
super simple, just well-paced and organized.
The line of the round corner square
is the same width as the line of the m
as well as the white space on either side of it.
I'll give you a moment to look at that.
It's why it looks like there's so little to it
and it makes it very easy for your eye to process.
The theme besides the color
is to have the m bleeding off the edge wherever it appears.
You can see it here on stationery,
business card, envelope, pencil holder,
even the bag is green.
The idea behind this is that the logo travels,
it looks like it's going somewhere or has been somewhere.
An incomplete form like this
makes a viewer want to complete it
and so it's a point of engagement.
The back of the business card has a photo
of two of the founders, a point of homage to them
with the new logo.
The look extends of course to the website
as well as the outside doors of the building
in both color and shape consistently applied.
Hatch Consulting is a New Orleans-based
social enterprise consultancy.
This is an unusual logo
but it has a story,
the nest, the hatchery for new ideas.
When you're working with an image like this,
you want to handle everything else very conservatively,
which you can see has been done here.
Stationery, business card, notepad, notebook,
very organized.
One thing I want to point out is the back of the notepad.
That's the logo in large to super size
and used as a decorative element.
It's a super graphic and yet it's low-key at the same time.
Just a reminder from earlier,
when your mark and your name are separate,
you can do things like this.
One more quicky,
Hancock Park Elementary School.
You're looking at the before which isn't really a logo,
it's just a name with an outline on it
that someone typed and put on a blue field.
The problem being that it's not only unattractive,
but that blue box and not the name
is the dominant element
and it'll be disruptive every time you try to use it.
Here is Karen's stylish makeover.
This has been designed for grownups, not children,
although the stylized balloon is a childlike element.
Really what I wanted to point out here
is how well the look is integrated
into the interior of the building.
Two walls of flat color,
the logo pattern at the bottom of the front wall
with the logotype in open space,
very handsome.
The book cover is another example.
The logo with those bars and colors
is the design theme for the school.
In this case the mark is dominant,
the name is small,
and you can only do this
when your name and mark are separate.
So that's it.
The takeaway here is to think beyond your logo.
The last thing I want to mention
is that many of the images we've just seen are mockups.
Make mockups.
When you present your logo to a client,
always, always, always, without exception,
present it in context.
Never present just the logo and nothing else.
This does two very important things.
One, it'll get the client excited
because he can see his logo in real life at work
like we've just seen.
People generally, and this often includes us designers,
are not very good visualizers
so mockups are a huge help for everyone.
Second thing it does,
and this is even more important,
is that it forces us, designers,
to think the process all the way through.
You know, "How will this stuff work?
"How will these colors be?
"How will these shapes be?
"Will they work here?
"Will they work there?
"Are they making the right message?"
And we stay out of the trap that happens
when we design in isolation
and wind up making some pretty little logo
that has no presence,
no role in the real world.
I can tell you that when you're designing a logo,
if you're thinking context,
your logo will be different and better
than it would otherwise be.
It's exciting.