Q3 • 2021


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you go back through logo history, you can start to see a pathway, a trajectory of the evolution of logos. If you take the reports we created, you can start to see how the 15 trends we identified each year have merged their way forward by people standing on the shoulders of designers in previous years and pushing an idea into it’s next iteration.” Though they have helped make Gardner a household name in the logo design world, the Logo Trend Report, LogoLounge, and Logo Creed are always side projects to Gardener Design, the Wichita-based “brandcrafting” company that he runs, which specializes in everything from strategy to branding to digital expertise. Gardner operates his company on the belief that bridging the gap between the objective nature of business and the subjective nature of design leads to successful work for clients. “That is the biggest chasm that exists between business and design,” Gardner says. “And successful branding companies and designers understand how to bridge the objective and subjective, because every marketing company


The smartest designers will look at the yearly report like pins on a map—as part of a trajectory—and think, How can I move this forward?


walks into a client meeting and the CFO says, ‘Can you assure me the money I spend will equal ROI?’” For the design doubters, Gardner points to the Design Value Index, which quantifies the value of design. In 2015, DMI and Motiv Strategies released a study funded by Microsoft that analyzed the performance of US companies committed to design as an integral part of their business strategy. The dmi:Design Value Index


tracked the value of publicly held companies that met specific design management criteria, and it monitored the impact of their investments in design on stock value over a decade, relative to the S&P 500 Index. Results from 2015 showed that over the 10 previous years, design-led companies maintained a significant stock market advantage, outperforming the S&P by a whopping 211 percent. “When you can share these figures with the


investors, it makes a huge difference,” Gardner says, “because I can’t tell the CFO that the spend will equal ROI, but I can show them a study on design-centric thinking. It usually ends up opening up their eyes.” Two-thirds of the branding work that Gardner Design does is centered on rebranding, which he says requires designers to carefully navigate how to appeal to new consumers without alienating longtime brand fans. All too often, a brand with an identity problem doesn’t notice it has one because such things are easier for outsiders to see. Gardner believes the logo sits at the top of any brand hierarchy and updating elements of the logo gives it a longer life span. “If a brand hasn’t been touched, it can really


age in a six- or seven-year time period,” Gardner says. “Coca-Cola pulls out their logo every seven years and reevaluates it. They look at angles, or thickness and thinness. The dynamic swoosh underneath Coca-Cola was eliminated. The most astute brands are under this constant retooling. A brand staying on top of things is making nuanced changes, but if you just park it, you will have birds nesting inside of it.”


Author and social psychologist Jennifer Aaker


offers that there are five big personality traits a company can fall into: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. Aaker’s theory says that while every brand lies somewhere on the spectrum for each one of these attributes, brands that last normally emphasize just one primary trait and perhaps one secondary trait. Gardner says the brands that fall in a certain


personality category have design traits in common as well, which is a way for designers to move the conversation with clients from the subjective to the objective. “We are designing to match the brand personality traits,” he says. “It’s going from ‘I think this is cool’ to ‘Let me show why this is going to work.’ Identify what fits for your brand, and you’ll have a clearer path ahead in all of your marketing.” He may have put aside the magic tricks decades ago in order to be taken seriously in the design world, but Gardner is still doing his best to ensure that the search for the business objectivity that pleases clients doesn’t come at the cost of creativity that delights the consumer. “If we were all creating things off the subjective,


we would get nowhere for clients,” Gardner says. “On the other hand, pure objectivity gives you no sense of delight and no abracadabra. There is no magic to it. It will bore you to tears. It may help you find the right price point, but not the right outcome. It’s subjective nuance that is the gem that makes people say, ‘Holy smokes!’ That bit of magic makes objectivity successful.” 


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