An Intelligible Logo Design Book

March 21, 2009 | David Raffauf

The text of many design books seems to either read as Confucious style life lessons or philosophical divinations.  It can be difficult to find a design book that has business rational, but Logos: An Essentional Primer for Today’s Competitive Market has it in spades.  This book serves as a fascinating read for creatives, as well as business people, on how to plan for, create, and implement a logo. 

I’ve read a couple other design books in 2008 including Rockport’s Making and Breaking the Grid and Taschen’s Guidelines for Online Success.  While I found both of these very helpful and interesting they didn’t attempt to incorporate business needs in any depth.

For the business minded, this book considers as integral parts of the process: including the right people in the process, communicating the significance of an updated logo and educating staff.  The authors, Capsule, recommend differentiating yourself from competitors, but also setting a vision for where you see your business when it is the market leader. 

For those that aren’t familiar with Brand, Identity and Marketing they offer helpful suggestions like making sure your logo is recognizable in black and white, and that it will work on anything from business cards to billboards.

For designers this book offers some solid processes you can use to blast through that creative logjam. They recommend creating design boards for all of the closest competition to recognize the design trends of the field.  They also recommend putting together concept boards with imagery matching a small subset of brand attributes.  These serve as a way to help develop a feel for a logo, but also to deconstruct later with clients to see what imagery and tone works for them.

One thing that is so simple, but I never would have thought of, is to make a grid of brand attributes on one axis and concrete nouns on the other: think person, place, animal.  Using this matrix you can quickly sketch out a number of possibilities, find the ones that work and then repeat the process with more refined language.  I think going through this process with a good concept board would really speed things up.  There is an invaluable chapter at the end that provides a breakdown of some great logos by industry. 

I found this book to be a quick and entertaining read.  It has enough depth that I’ll keep it on hand as a reference.  Although I’m not in the business of creating logos, I do frequently need to create icons and I think a similar but less stringent set of rules applies.  I’ll be keeping this title on my desk.