Logotypes

Creating and operating on a solid business plan, is as essential to a company as defining the brand. The first and starting point is the logo. Creating mood boards are a great way to start the beginning of crafting a logo, as seen here, but knowing what logo style is best suited to the task at hand, boosts the potential of designing a great logo.

logo-

before vowels log-, word-forming element meaning "speech, word," also "reason," from Greek logos"word, discourse; reason," from PIE root  *leg- (1) "to collect, gather," with derivatives meaning "to speak (to 'pick out words')."

In other words, your logo should speak. Before go into the different logo types, I will show a few examples of logos that "speak" to clarify exactly why the design of the logo is such a major part of your corporate identity.

This giant known by many seems like a plain design, but on closer inspection there is a lot happening. First off the arrow is in a sunny yellow color, making the design friendly. It also looks like a satisfied smile, which is another positive reference aside from the sunny yellow. The other feature is that the arrow moves from the letter a to the letter z in the title. This can be interpreted 1, as them selling everything from A to Z and 2, point A to B which is a direct line. This logo definitely tells a story.

Sticking to digital, here is another example. The letters ‘va’ are made to look like an analog wave, and the ‘io’ resemble the numbers 1 and 0, representing a digital signal or binary code, which is what systems are built upon. Vaio represents the integration of both analog and digital technologies in its products. This is also a logo that tells a story.

Moving away from tech into something more indulgent. have you ever noticed the bear inside the mountain in this sweet logo? The bear represents the honey flavor of this chocolate and it aligns with the location where this product is produced, "the city of bears". The mountain of this image relates to an image that is well known, the swiz alps, helping class this product under Swiz chocolate, and Swiz chocolate is great! In fact the mountain is supposed to be the Matterhorn Mountain, but Swiz alps is more memorable.

So now for the logotypes. There are eight main logotypes, each one has characteristics that can help identify what the company is all about.

The Word Mark is a popular choice and many famous brands including Coca-cola, Google and Oracle have this logo type. Like the name indicates its a mark made by a word, the name of a company. Many companies shorten the word mark to an initial because Icons are such an integral part of our existence and responsive is a way of life, the shortened version works well on apps and small print. Switching between Word Mark and Monogram, which is the second logo type.

Monograms are used primarily in companies that have a long name. Logo's tend to look best squared, the more rectangular a logo, the harder it gets to crop it to smaller scales. Examples of monograms include Mc Donald's and Gucci and Volkswagon. Good examples of a merge between word mark and monograms is the Google logo, Facebook, and Disney. This is where a relatively new type of logo comes in. The Responsive logo.

A Responsive logo is very popular these days to switch between different media and media sizes. The full google logo is great for when you are online, but the shortened version looks better on mobile. The shrinking logo is an ever increasing trend. Responsive logos can also include Pictorial or brand marks, which are two other types of logos. A great example of this is the Heineken logo.

Pictorials are a another way to accentuate the visual representation that may be the word that your company name is. For example Apple uses an Apple, plain and straight forward. It may also be a visual representation of a feature of your company name. For example Twitter uses a bird, the sounds birds make are tweet sounds, they twitter, although its not a direct association, its still a feature. Pictorials can also be Brand marks.

Brand marks are more abstract forms of pictorials. Think Adidas, Master Cards and Pepsi. These are pictures which do not have a specific universal meaning. These types of logos are not easy to pull off because there is not a lot of information to go with it. Usually successful brand marks are the result of years of fine-tuning and development. Brand Marks works best when creating Combination logos.

Combination logos are extremely abundant. A lot of really successful companies use combination logos and its not difficult to understand why. They are extremely flexible. The combination logo has both text and image elements in them. Examples of these kinds of logos are Starbucks, Hallmark and android. All three of these contain the written name of the company name, and an image although all the above have different images types. Star Bucks do not have an instant connotation of coffee to mermaids, but sounds rather more like a sports team, Hallmark has a crown in its logo. Although a crown is not a direct connotation, it falls within the symbolic representation scheme. Android is an example of instant connotation because the name and the image are both the same thing.

Next up is the Emblem logo. Emblem logos have been around for centuries. They originated as family and regal seals. This kind of logo works well when they will be used to print on a large scale for example as a sticker on a product, or a flag. For these reasons they work well with the automotive and beverage industries, but also governmental institutes. Some examples are Alfa Romeo, Smirnoff and the United Nations. They have been simplified over time as can be seen in logos such as Ford, Vans and Ikea.

The last logo type is the Mascot logo. Mascot logos are great for creating affinity to a character. Most of us do it, we relate to characters and have role models. In most cases they tend to be animals especially in sports teams where they are used most. But they can also be people for example KFC's Colonel or the Monopoly man. They can also be abstract characters like the Michelin Man, the Michelin Man is a character constructed out of tires.

So now that you know what logo types there are, it should help you define that one logo that will represent your company fully.