- Keep it simple.
A simple drawing. One strong feature.
The surprise is how difficult simple is to do.
If I gave you an assignment to make a logo
for an organization that's involved in
the exploration and study of the natural world,
that charts, what, climate change,
that makes maps, that publishes a monthly journal,
what do you think you'd come up with?
How about this?
This is so simple.
Can you even call it design?
Absolutely.
An entire global enterprise summed up
in a yellow rectangle.
How cool is that?
To get one strong feature, you'll need to edit
because there will be a lot of things
you want to say, and that you'll want to picture.
For example, Kalgen is a travel
management consultancy that didn't edit.
So they have their name, ocean waves in there,
a palm tree, their slogan,
and the real thing they want people to see is that
green plus, which to them, suggests more.
So to fix this, they focused on the plus, and made this.
This is very nice. It's a strong logo.
It looks good. You get it right away.
You remember it, and it'll work everywhere.
While we're here, note the slogan is back on the page.
It's at the bottom, but it's not longer part of the logo.
It's a marketing statement, which is what it should be.
When it comes drawing, which is different from idea,
the three key elements are color, type and shape.
If your logo is predominantly a color,
and you use that color everywhere, it becomes a strong identifier.
We're really tuned to color.
We see it instantly.
The mustard jar on the store shelf.
You see the yellow before you read the label.
T-Mobile does this.
For the last few years, every time we see
pink, we think of T-Mobile.
This can be a workaround for you
if you're unsure of your design skills,
you might think about having color as your
primary identifier.
Like a sports team.
Everything in the organization
is going to be blue and gold.
If you do this, stick to one or two colors.
Bold colors are better than pastels.
And use them everywhere.
Shape is almost as strong as color.
Pause the video and see if you can identify
these logos just by their colors and shapes.
Did you get Subway, Lego and Domino's?
The basic shapes are circle, square, triangle.
They can be physical shapes or they can be phantom shapes.
Let me take you through them.
The most basic shape and the strongest is the circle.
The circle is unique. It's an endless line.
No sides. No corners.
The center is equidistant to every point on the perimeter.
There's equal pressure all around.
It's a natural focal point, meaning it draws
the eye in, and speaking of eye,
the circle is the shape of the pupil,
the window of the soul, and it's at rest.
Many many famous logos
are in the shape of a circle.
Elongate the circle and you get an oval.
The oval is somewhat ambiguous.
It's still an endless line, and still soft,
but it's less focused.
It's lost the strength that comes from
that equidistance.
Physical ovals are not common in logo design,
although they do make good badges.
Carmarkers like them.
Pharmaceuticals like them.
An oval is pill-shaped.
Pfizer tilted their oval, although not the name,
and this gave it a shot of energy.
Related to the oval is the arch.
a graphical arch will often be made
with converging lines like you see here,
meaning a line that's thick on one end,
and thin on the other.
Arches are hard to work with.
What you don't want to do is add an arch
to a dull logo just to give it some movement.
That's a gratuitous use.
An arch is its own thing.
This is a beautiful example
by designer Carolina Villamizar
for the arches portray a railroad terminal.
Type in an arch is very effective and popular.
It's like the banner over the door.
The announcement. The herald.
A little bigger than life.
After the circle, the most common shape is the square.
A square has some very interesting properties.
Four straight equal sides, four equidistant corners.
A center. It's also a shape that does not occur in nature.
It has a stable quality to it.
It's on the ground.
It's planted.
Because it has no natural counterpart,
it suggests the built-in environment.
It's geometric. It's man-made.
It looks like a structure.
It's symmetrical, and it has something
you may have never noticed, and that's
four outward pointing arrows at the corners.
So because our eyes follow lines,
a square moves our eyes horizontally
and vertically and diagonally outward
while at the same time presenting a center
that tends to draw our eye inward.
So it's a lot more complicated than a circle.
A square is suitable for things that want to convey
precision or look built and purposeful.
The edginess can be eliminated by rounding the corners.
Now the arrows are gone.
Round them more, and you get a hybrid
between a square and a circle.
Very soft. Kind of neutral.
Not very masculine. Not really feminine.
Great for children's things, all of which
are characterized by round shapes.
Skew the square and you get speed.
Elongate it and you get more speed.
This is the natural shape for things wanting
to convey, well, speed, activity, energy,
urgency, and so on.
Turn the square 45 degrees and you get a diamond.
This, too, is a simple shape, but you don't see it often.
I'm guessing because it doesn't give you much working space
and also because it's an unstable form.
It's perched on a point.
There's nothing level. In real life, it would fall over.
We tend to like things a little more settled, unless
a little off-balanced and edgy is the effect you need.
Great for the X Games.
Round corners will soften the diamond like they
did with the square, and that changes it a lot.
This is a more inviting shape.
There's more room to work.
No arrows. It'll make a nice label.
Related to the diamond is the triangle.
We often see phantom triangles, but not
many physical ones.
A pyramid like you see here is a very
stable geometric shape in real life,
but in design, the top feels very weak,
like there's nothing here, and room for nothing.
And it creates a very strong upward pointing arrow.
So it has three conflicting characteristics.
The base makes it stable.
The angles make it edgy, and therefore,
energetic, but then it just tapers off into nothing.
Reebok uses a triangle which suits a high-energy
product like athleticwear, but I'm surprised
by how conservative they are with it.
Delta Airlines uses a triangle too, and of course,
it makes sense for them, given their name.
But even here, it's not the dominant element.
It justs snugs into the line of type.
Even on the tail of the plane, where it's huge,
it's in low-contrast colors, it's angled, it's cropped.
So it really loses that sense of a pyramid.
Very low-key.
The most successful triangle logo I'm aware of
is this one, which you'll recognize as Nabisco.
But even here, it registers less as a triangle,
but more as a box corner, which is how it's used.
A variation of the triangle is the shield.
This is a great shape mainly because of its associations.
The shield has ancient roots in combat,
in heraldry, in royalty, as a family crest.
A variation of the three-point shield is the two-point one.
Anytime you want to tap into tradition,
into a sense of establishment, patronage,
royalty, a crest shape is the one you want.
It's great for badges, groups, clubs, all that.
Those are the basic shapes.
I mentioned phantoms.
Shapes aren't always literal.
They're more often phantoms.
This handsome acronym is a phantom triangle,
and the arrow, which looks triangular,
is actually built in a circle.
So the takeaway here.
There are three reasons to think shape.
One is that our eyes are tuned into shapes.
We recognize them quickly.
Two is that shape is an organizing force for you.
It'll help you keep your graphics
focused in one spot, and not sprawl.
You don't want oddball shapes like an L-shaped logo.
And three, shape is a visual force
that can convey meaning and association.