You’ll bump into Top Ten lists all over the internet. How to do this. How to do that. You’ll even find dozens of numbered pointers telling you “How to create a great logo” or some variant thereof, and all are valuable to some extent. We thought we’d take a slightly different angle and take look at ways you can screw up a perfectly good logo design project (some based on actual case histories from gigs at The Logo Factory that, for one - or more - of the reasons listed, have gone off the rails). I’ve tried (you can judge how successfully) to write this with both designers and clients in mind. So without further ado, here’s six ways a designer can sink a perfectly good logo…

#1 - Design with mangled visual metaphors

Everyone wants their logo to mean something - to represent some vital part of the company, product or service. That’s usually the point of the exercise, though often easier said than done. Creating a graphic image that tells a specific story about a sometimes fairly specialized business activity can be a daunting task and always runs the risk of becoming a mangled visual metaphor. Especially if the logo is designed in a ‘closed loop’ and even more so if created by someone without any real experience in design. Mangled visual metaphors often feature pictograms of human figures (the ubiquitous character with a circle for a head and a three-pointed graphic indicating his/her body) and often the activity being illustrated can very easily be interpreted as something else. This often involves logos that end up looking like naughty bits, or characters participating in activities that are much less than G-rated. No doubt the designers of all these logos started out with only the best intentions, but somehow, somewhere, went seriously off the tracks and the mangled metaphors weren't caught until the logo was in wide circulation. They knew exactly what they wanted to depict, and in their minds-eye, that's exactly what they saw. Trouble is, most people who are viewing logos for the first time have no preconceived notions about what it is they’re supposed to be seeing - and they'll interpret the logo into an image that they can recognize. And once someone has seen an alternate interpretation of your logo - especially if it’s racy - they will find it next to impossible to ‘unsee’ the naughty version.

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#2 Throw in the visual sink

This is a true story: we were developing a logo for a town - let’s call it Whereville - to brand the community's bicentennial celebrations. Seemed fairly straightforward and as per the original project brief, we focused on a a monument in the city square, a fairly famous landmark. Fair enough. The monument was unique to the town, was where most of the planned events were to take place, and instantly identified the logo as representing Whereville. The initial round of preliminary designs went to committee and the request for modifications came back. The monument graphic was “just really nice", but the client wanted to add a few more things” to make the logo “more wow”.

They wanted a train (lots of people arrived at the town via rail), the train needed a station, so add that, the community boasted lots of farmers so work in a barn (we also needed a windmill), throw in a few cows, some trees, there’s these mountains, and oh yeah, Whereville looks great at sunset so if you could toss that in too, well, that would be great. And while you’re at it, the residents are particularly proud of the new City Hall so we’d like a fully rendered graphic of that to boot. A few design elements had become a full-blown laundry list - a veritable cornucopia of disparate graphic elements, all competing for real estate and attention. The logo was to be used on freebie key chains so one of the planned uses saw the artwork being reproduced one colour at just over an inch wide. Unfortunately, it was inevitable that every one of the elements would end up as featureless squiggles when reproduced at any size less than 15 feet wide.

The designer handling the project voiced concerns about the complexity of the logo, but was overridden by the client and their committee. Each of the requested elements was sketched, rendered and added to the increasingly complex graphic. Of course, creating this myriad of illustrations expanded the time line significantly, so in addition to skyrocketing production time, we also had an increasingly impatient client on our hands. Once the revised graphic was completed, it went once again to committee, where it was decided that well, maybe the logo was now too complicated, and that it should be pared down to featuring the monument from the town square. That design was completed two weeks ago, when the original concepts were handed in. But now the client was frustrated - “this is taking longer than we expected”, as was the designer who’s perfectly rendered barn, windmill, cows and train would never see the light of day.

Moral of this story - the simpler the better. I tend to lean towards an illustrative logo style, so I'm not as arbitrary in applying this ‘rule’ as others, but generally speaking - the simpler the logo the more chance you have of if being remembered, and the less headaches you’ll have in various applications, especially when used as smaller sizes.

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#3 - Use visual cliches

Your logo features Stars and Stripes because you’re patriotic. You have a globe in your logo because you’re global. And yeah, the little tripody figure with the circle for a head represents some dude or another. Beams of light radiating from your icon indicates that there’s so much goodness emanating from the portrayed company, it simply can’t be contained within the central graphic. Most people will fully understand that replacing a dollar sign for an S in the logo indicates that you’re portraying something to do with finance. Similarly, there’s very few logos where a molar (smiley face optional) can be found other than a design for a dentist. Trouble is, Murphy the Molar is used in a lot of designs for dentists. Some others? Trees represent growth. Swooshes represent hi-tech. A light bulb represents an idea.

These are visual cliches, classified as such because they’ve already been used, ad nauseam, in thousands of designs. There’s far too many to list here, but they’re usually the very first thing that pops into your head when conceptualizing a logo for one industry or another. For that very reason, they should be discarded just as quickly. It’s very rare that the very first idea that you will crank out is the best idea - it’s called a design process for a reason - and the first idea you have runs a very, very high risk of being a cliche.

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How to screw up a logo Part 2 >