- [Presenter] What is it about four?
It may just be it's the way things are,
but it seems like really important things in life
show up in fours, like seasons, Cardinal directions,
the suits in a deck of cards, or the Fantastic Four,
the Fab Four, and CMYK.
Pretty sure I missed a few there,
but for this report, designers didn't.
Foursomes were on their mind.
And in particular, there was a complete obsession,
and I mean completely,
with the tidy practice of quartering a square.
Glad to admit that a square is a fundamental go-to
for favicons or an app button, or even a logo design.
And, wait for it, the shape.
It has four sides.
Uh huh.
And whether actually being used to neatly pack up
sets of four initials, or partners, or some other foursome,
it wasn't a mandate for this trend.
It could just as easily have been a way to signal
diversity or abundance, all packed up in a tidy container.
Don't forget that branding is largely about
building consistency.
And being able to demonstrate order
in a logo can not only be fundamental to our own craft,
but applied to the appropriate client, it's all the better.
Amongst others, it's not surprising to see these marks
frequently representing architecture, museums, builders,
and urban entities that are often called on
to create spatial organization.
But why four as opposed to knocking a square
into nine or 16 evenly divided sections?
Well, those good certainly be solutions and have been,
but dividing a square into quads
assembles a cluster of elements,
each still large enough to effectively scale down
as part of a single logo.
Theoretically, each of the sections contains
visual information that the eye still needs to interpret.
A Spartan design aesthetic can be a plus.
Thus, what appears to be basic geometry
inside of basic geometry is actually letter forms.
The Google Fiber logo keeps to this agenda.
Can't get much simpler than this.
And this mark for Alto and Cube
accomplish the very same task with letter forms,
but couldn't be more polar in the tenure of their solutions.
It's the recent popularity of this method
that makes the practice one to note.
I recognize conveying information in a quadrant
is pretty fundamental, and you can be completely expected
or surprisingly fresh.
My hope, as ever, is that any of these trends
progress through evolution.
You'll find a twist to keep it fresh,
or at least that's my forecast.