The Friday Fillip

If a picture’s worth a thousand words ( — who coined that, anyway? perhaps one Fred R. Barnard, who, I hope, with a name like that learned to draw — ), a well designed logo is worth millions. Words and money.

Seems paradoxical, perhaps, that an image so lean, so simple should be that powerful. In part the power that these commercial glyphs have comes from the fact that they’re repeated endlessly, presumably because of some marketing equation that runs “cognition = recognition = approval = purchase”. But ubiquity is only a part of it: there’s the small matter of the quality of the design.

It’s not easy to draft something that we can stand to look at repeatedly without our becoming annoyed or, worse, hostile; after all, familiarity can breed contempt. The design has to be . . . good. I’m not about to plumb the shallows of logo design. I don’t have the tools. (If you want an expert’s opinion, check out David Airey’s rules for “What makes a good logo?”) But I can adopt the sometime judicial stance of “I know it when I see it” and offer you leads to sites that feature good works.

Let’s start with GoodLogo.com, home of over a thousand logos and where we learn that these are the current “top ten” of them:

1. World Wildlife Fund
2. Coca-Cola
3. MTV
4. Puma
5. Nike Classic
6. Adidas
7. Major League Baseball
8. Mickey
9. Apple
10. McDonald’s

You hardly need to be reminded of what they look like, but in case you’ve been too busy to go outside over the last couple of decades, if you click on the names you should see the logo pop up.

These wouldn’t be my picks, perhaps. I tend to be a fan of logos that appeal in part through cleverness. Here are two examples of the sort of cleverness in design I mean (found on Logo Faves), though neither of these could become truly great logos because they don’t miniaturize well, and not everyone is a sucker for a visual joke:

Of course, there’s a downside to being firmly attached to a particular image; and I suspect BP has slid pretty far towards the bottom of that side by now, given the contests to see who can design the best anti-logo for that company. See, for example, the Greenpeace collection on Flickr. It shows, too, by the way, that it ain’t easy to do a logo well. Here’s the original and one of the better parodies (click on the image to enlarge it):