kartooner

Logo design is a pre­cious com­mod­ity for your busi­ness. With­out a dis­tinc­tive and appeal­ing logo your busi­ness could gar­ner the impres­sion of amat­uerism, and result in a loss of what would have oth­er­wise been a suc­cess­ful transaction.

Com­pa­nies such as UPS, Microsoft, C|Net, Adobe and Office­Max under­stand this notion in logo design and as a result have instantly rec­og­niz­able logos. Their inten­tion is clear; to attach an iden­tity and earn the respect of their con­sumers which retains and solid­i­fies (in most cases) repeat service.

Of all the cor­po­rate logos plas­tered on bill­boards, pok­ing out from mag­a­zine and tele­vi­sion ads, the one logo for me that sticks out the most is Fedex. One of the more inter­est­ing fea­tures of the logo is the neg­a­tive space inbe­tween the ‘E’ and the ‘x’ respec­tively. If you look closely there is an arrow that, while at first nearly invis­i­ble, sticks out like a sore thumb once you real­ize it’s there.

Accord­ing to FedEx Cor­po­rate sales­man Jess Bunn, inter­viewed in Cicinatti’s Enquirer; “The arrow was indeed inten­tional as a sec­ondary design ele­ment.” He men­tions the logo was “intended to com­mu­ni­cate move­ment, speed and the dynamic nature of [FedEx].” The new logo, revi­su­al­ized in 1994, not only sports a mod­ern look but requires just 5 let­ters as opposed to 9 when the logo was spelled out in its entirety.

As men­tioned, it was inten­tional for the arrow in the FedEx logo to rep­re­sent a sec­ondary ele­ment, but some­times a logo can look like a vari­ety of things. Take for exam­ple the logo for Toy­ota, which to me looks both like a Texas Long­horn bull and as my brother-in-law pointed out, a rugged cow­boy. The Toy­ota logo’s intended look was that of two con­join­ing oval discs form­ing the let­ter ‘T’.

It’s inter­est­ing that logos, a bril­liant art­form in my opin­ion, can take on other mean­ings just by their appear­ance and how the con­sumer inter­prets them. Next time you see a logo float­ing out there in soci­ety take a moment to give it a sec­ond glance, some­times you’ll be sur­prised as to what you may or may not see.

Related links: Design by Fire: Per­sonal Ding­bats, DWM: The process of redesign­ing a logo