Simple logos
Main logo: Oxford Coalition
Project: Simple logo design treatment for a university community group.
More: Simple logo gallery

Of all the design categories we've worked with over the years, simple logos are the designs that are favored by most designers, but the most difficult to 'sell' to clients, especially when dealing with the end user. Many logo buyers are looking for value in their project, and want a design that looks as it a lot of time was invested - bang for the buck kind of mentality. Sometimes it's a short-sighted approach - many of the most memorable logos are simple, uncluttered designs that work because of their simplicity, not despite it. Trying to put simple simple logos into a definition we'd use terms like staid, solid, and clean. Over the years however, the delineation between corporate logos and their more complicated counterparts has blurred, and with the advent of Web 2.0, it's difficult to define what a simple logo actually is - more of a 'I'll know it when I see it' factor. One way to see examples of iconoclastic simple logos is to view the corporate identities used by most of the top-ranked Fortune 500 companies. Simple, clean logos that are usually text driven and if an icon is used, it's ruthlessly simple and linear.

Simple logos for a stable corporate image.

Simple logos are favored by companies that are trying to brand under a flag of stability - banks and accounting firms for example - and wish to avoid cute visual cliches and woo-hoo graphics that become dated in a relatively short time. As these designs avoid trends and fads, simple logos have the longest shelf-life and appeal to the widest market possible - extremely important for companies that are concerned about general population demographics. Simple logos are usually the easiest designs to reproduce and are infinitely adaptable for every media imaginable. They're also instantly recognizable, even at the smallest sizes. There are a few downsides to a simple logo - it's difficult to develop a truly unique brand, and it's only through repeated exposure of the mark will it gain any traction.

That's not to say you need to throw war and peace at your corporate logo - you don't - but the concept of a simple logo can be misleading - it's not just slapping a piece of nondescript art together with rudimentary type work. Far from it. Simple logos are often the most difficult to design - it takes a fairly skilled designer to pare down complex concepts into a few graphic shapes.

Simple logo gallery

Orphic Rez. Even the most simple logo can 'mean' something. Case in point - this brutally simple icon for a sound production company is an abstract head, complete with headphones. Text is simple lower case font.	Igility Capital Advisors. Financial institutions often lean towards text only treatments, and when they do use icons, they're usually pared down o the bare essentials. This design uses two simple shapes to add a little 'something'.	Dineomyte Cocktail Lounge. Bars and nightclubs sometimes lean towards frantic, illustrative logos to drive their brand. Upscale lounges on the other hand, utilize tasteful imagery to appeal to a more trendy market segment.
People Dynamics. For this logo, the client had requested our designers work in some figures, in order to illustrate the human resources theme. We developed three intertwined figures, made up from dots and lines. As simple as it gets.	Annecto Internet. A deceptively simple design uses a custom letter form and a swoosh to indicate movement (without over doing the swoosh element). While the blends add depth, they don't add any cost to reproduction - they're percentages of the two spot colours.	Infomsaic Corporation. Rather than a fully rendered globe, our designers used a simple sphere with linear accents to imply the Earth. Sans serif font allows the logo to remain linear and graphic without the elements competing for visual attention.
Dante's Cafe & Bistro. Text logo for an upscale eatery uses a series of outlines to emphasize the restaurant's name. This design was developed with 3D signage in mind - a more complex logo wouldn't have worked, or would have been prohibitively expensive.	Southeast Iowa Great River Region. Municipal and community logos need to be extremely adaptable for a wide range of uses. These types of logos can't be too far 'out there' and must be acceptable to the widest range of the community as possible.	Sight Effects. Even though this design is very linear and simple, it's deceptively sophisticated in the way it was designed. The icon contains an 'S' and 'E', the company initials, all within an eyeball graphic. Sans serif text adds to the graphic theme.

Due to their inherent linear nature, most simple logos can be developed in spot or one colour designs.

Simple Logos

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