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Number
39: February 11, 2004
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This week in Katydid:
Designing
Logotypes for the Ages
Marketing, in my view, covers every interaction between a company and
its audience. We usually focus on collateral such as brochures, web
sites, advertising, and identity elements. Due to time or budget
constraints, we often ignore less prestigious pieces such as forms,
templates, and surveys. This is especially important with regard to logo
design because you lose control when it's in the hands of your
customers.
The word, logo,
is shortened from a printing term, logotype.
A logotype was a single slug of lead that contained two or more
characters integrated into one design. For example, the Latin
combination of letters 'a' and 'e' (æ) or the trademark symbol (™)
are common logotypes. This term translated over to corporate logotypes
that needed to be designed and cast individually.
When you had to have your logo engraved, adding color or detail was a
luxury. With modern digital printing, you can have detail with subtle
shading and color gradients at no additional expense. Many start-ups
create their logos themselves in low-end graphic tools like Microsoft
Paint.
Unfortunately, we can't always control how our logo looks when viewed
by others. If you want to maintain brand integrity with the logo, you
have to consider how common technologies such as fax or copy machines
will degrade your graphics.
A copy machine will turn your color logo to grayscale. A fax machine
on low-resolution will turn it to pure black. Additionally, when sharing
files over the internet via Adobe portable
document format (PDF) or in Microsoft Word documents, you won't be
able to control the output device. It is likely to be printed on a
grayscale printer.
You don't want your image to degrade when viewed in these common
ways. Therefore, you should observe some common principles during your
logo design (or redesign) process:
Make sure your logo works in pure black
You want to have a version of your logo specifically for one-color or
grayscale printing. In addition, your color version should still be
legible and recognizable when reproduced in one-color (pure black) or in
grayscale (shades of black). The easy test is to copy it yourself or set
your printer to print in black or grayscale. Be especially careful of
color on color where the tones don't have high contrast.
Make sure your logo works at all scales
For printing, it's preferable to have a vector-based
version of your logo. These let you scale your logo to any size and keep
smooth lines. (Bitmap
graphics become jagged when enlarged and fuzzy when reduced.) Of course,
once you shrink your logo to a size suitable for a business card, you
may find that that the logo is hard to read. Logos with fine lines and
details may become muddy and indistinct.
Separate the text and graphic elements
Classic logos like 3M
or IBM
have the advantage of integrating design and text into one. Most logos
have separate graphic and text elements. Make sure that either stands
alone. In some cases, separating the elements will make one part look
unbalanced. Commonly, letterhead will use only the text element, while
report covers are good candidates for using the graphic mark by itself.
Another way to look at these recommendations is to design your logo
as if you had to have an old-fashioned engraved logotype. Those
restrictions forced designers to create dynamic logos that lasted
generations.
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Taking
Sound out of Context
In marketing, you have to consider the context of your audience in order
to frame your story properly. If you think context is unimportant then
consider the latest CD-ROM
from Philomel. It presents a series of auditory illusions that shows
how subjective our senses are.
The CD-ROM compiles some demonstrations by Diana Deutsch of the
University of California, San Diego. She is a cognitive psychologist who
has performed studies of how we interpret sounds. In particular, she's
studied tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese, where the meaning of
words will change depending on the speaker's tone of voice.
You can hear some samples on the web site that will give you a taste
of the illusions, but she demonstrated one of the most interesting
illusions on a Radio
Lab show broadcast on WNYC radio. The show has some fairly avante
garde content and you can safely skip everything past the first 25
minutes. However, the auditory illusions are fascinating.
One of the things Deutsch demonstrates is a sample of speech - a
simple line of text read in a normal reading voice. Then she clips one
phrase and begins to loop it. Within a few repetitions, it begins to
sound like singing. The effect is more powerful than sampling used in
modern music. It even has a melody that begins to grow on you.
This reveals a musical quality to our speech of which we are not
normally aware. Somehow, isolating speech out of context makes us aware
of this quality. This is much like how a word will lose its meaning when
you repeat it continuously. The repetition effectively isolates the word
and we can no longer interpret it as speech.
Learning a new language is difficult because we hear foreign speech
as a continuous stream of sound. We can't isolate the words because our
brain does not have a template with which to interpret the sounds.
Without context, we cannot ascribe meaning. In fact, we think we have
pauses between spoken words, but it's not true at all. In most cases,
it's easier to understand a fast speaker than a slow one.
When you look at the way you communicate with your clients and
customers, are you aware of their context? Are you communicating at the
same speed? You might find you're not even speaking the same language.
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Thanks for Reading
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Kind regards,
Kevin Troy Darling
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