08


Q3 • 2021


COVER STORY


TIPS Looking to update your brand logo? Bill Gardner offers a few pearls of wisdom.


Start with a Brand Audit


Whether you are a client or a designer working on a new logo for a client, do a brand audit of old advertisements, products, logos, photos, letters, and whatever else the company has in its back catalog. Then, do some in-depth research on the competitors in the industry and identify where the client sits in that ecosphere.


Mine for Stories


Remember that exceptional brands are often built on anecdotal stories. If you can tell me a story that tugs at my heart, it will tug at the consumer’s heart too. You want to convey the essence of those stories within the brand, so engage the people of the brand into telling you stories, because those end up being the foundation.


To discover the trends, Gardner buries himself


in his office—with an unhealthy amount of coffee—for weeks on end and combs through every logo submitted to LogoLounge over the prior year. This year, on the first pass, he pulled 2,400 standout logos (out of the 25,000 submitted since the last report). Next, he looks at each logo, one at a time, in search of similar shared attributes such as geometry, line weights, or maybe a unique way of demonstrating a shadow or another unexpected design aesthetic. From there, he groups the logos into clusters. Eventually, he lands on 30 to 40 clusters (trends), which he then shares with a panel of trusted designers around the world. From there, the list gets culled to 15 trends, which are explained in the Logo Trend Report. Today, even the creator of the report questions whether it’s all a case of art imitating life or vice versa.


Strive for Consistency


When you are designing a logo, you are trying to convey the level of professionalism of the brand so that consumers see there is consistency in the company. Consumers think, If they are consistent with how they treat themselves, they will be consistent with how they treat me.


Remember That People Assume


We bank on the idea of assumptions. People can’t vet every decision they make. They make decisions based on what they think they know. We all know very little about actual brands, but I bet you could go on about what you think you know. So, give the consumers something that they can base their assumptions on.


“Sometimes, the year after a trend report, I


wonder if they saw the report and were inspired by it or if we were on target predicting trends,” Gardner says. Why are these trends important? Gardner


believes it’s because it’s more important to know where you’ve come from than where you are. In logo-speak, it also means that if you emulate what’s on trend now, it’s already being done. “If I stuck a pin in the middle of a US map and


told you it represented a person traveling, then asked you where they might be tomorrow, you’d have no idea,” Gardner explains. “But if I gave you the same map and dropped pins to show you where they were the days before, you could see a trajectory there and maybe forecast that they’ll be in Nashville tomorrow. If I show you just one pin, it’s no help. If I show you a logo and then you see where it came from, that’s helpful.”


Lose the Literalness


If there is a sin in creating a logo, it’s trying to be literal. You’re trying to convey an essence. Coca-Cola doesn’t make you think of cola visually. It reminds you of everything you’ve grown to know about Coca-Cola.


The Name Is Not Always Necessary


A logo may have aspects that are descriptive, but you don’t need to describe a logo with the company’s name. The logo is the vessel, container, or skin through which you are imbuing those things that are all about the company that makes whatever it makes or sells . . . even if it’s drywall.


Gardner is quick to point out that the trend


report is simply that: a report on the trends that he and the other panelists are seeing. The smartest designers, he says, will look at the yearly report like pins on a map—as part of a trajectory—and think, How can I move this forward? Years of looking at these logo-design trends


tell Gardner that the trends seem to happen on a pendulum cycle and on multiple pendulums— from realism to flat colors, from thin lines to thick lines, from gradient colors to flat colors. Designers, he says, love to fill a void, and by looking at what’s going on design-wise, you can see the way things are swinging. “I get loads of emails from people saying,


‘Thank God I wasn’t in the trend report, because I wouldn’t want to be thought of as trendy,’” Gardner says. “But ‘trendy’ is something that is quick lived. Trends are long-term trajectory. If


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