Vancouver Logo Design
So we have picked a name and a direction. Now it’s time to start thinking visually.
From our meetings, I can get a concrete sense of the message you want to articulate and its tone.
Visually, finding the style it’s wrapped in is a little trickier. Everyone has their own subjective tastes and styles.
Refining the message is the logical part of the process. Discerning the style is intuitive.
Some clients leave it up to me to get a feel for this based on your current communications materials, your presentation*, your current website, and other ads, brands, and logos that you admire.
So once I review those materials, I ask for other logos you like.
OTHER LOGOS YOU LIKE
The don’t have to be in the same field, or even the same industry. For instance you might be drawn to the cleverness of negative space—see the white arrow in the Fed Ex logo?
You might like the safe, trustworthy styles you find in insurance.
Or straightforward but modern like pharmaceutical logos.
Is there a semiotic specific to your industry? For instance, medical clinics often use the staff and snake imagery and the medical cross. Lawyers like their scales of justice. Sometimes this can be cliché. Sometimes this can lead to new places.
Snake cult or tapeworm twirlers? You decide.
Do you have a preference on type? Serif, San Serif, classic or modern?
Logos I Like
I’ll get the ball rolling.
For modern minimalist, I like Tangerine.
For more of a classic look, I like Versace’s Medusa.
I’m a fan of logos that tell stories.
BMW used to make planes.
To this logo designer: props.
Chupa chups commissioned Salvidor Dali to design their logo. He opted to put the name on the very top of the wrapper, changing the entire way it was displayed in-store.
The MLB logo is both a left and right-handed batter.
Nike paid $35 for their swoosh logo and took Just Do It from the last words of Gary Gilmore before he was executed by firing squad. If only he could see what a sensation his last words were. Oh wait, he can. There’s even a song about it.
Just Don’t.
I love stuff like that. If you can think of a unique backstory, it might be cool to have some elements of it in there. Nods to history, origins, tradition, etc. are always interesting.
Insurance as we know it started in Scotland with a snail in a bottle of beer.
Caesarian sections link back to the Roman Empire.
Lamborghini was a company built out of spite. It’s bull logo reflects its hard-headedness.
I named 43K Wilderness Solutions based on the first trail they ever built, which was the North Coast Trail. It’s 43 kilometres long.
Once I know the cut of your jib, I translate this into design-speak, prep my designers, and even take a few crude stabs on my own, before bringing in the experts to make it pretty.
*Your presentation is how you dress. It’s what your office looks like. It’s the way you do your hair, what you drive and what you eat. It’s the way you talk, or how you hold a coffee cup. It’s your tie, or lack of one. It’s your sense of humour. Your values and judgements, manners and idiosyncrasies. It’s your sense of flow. It’s the way you show yourself to the world.
Every piece of communications that leaves your office needs some of your presentation captured within it. That’s what your brand is. It’s unmistakably you.
Like your favourite pair of shoes, they fit just right because they’ve formed to you as much as you’ve changed to make them fit.
