What is a good logo? What is a bad logo?

There are a lot of misconceptions about logos and their purposes being spread online or even within professional circles. As Sagi Haviv, partner and designer at Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, has said -

People think logos should say a lot about what you do, or that a logo should be pretty, or even that you should love your logo - none of these things are true.

Being told you shouldn't love your logo is harsh, but this couldn't be more accurate.

What makes a good logo?

A great mark fulfills three basic criteria: appropriate to the brand, distinctive enough to be remembered, and simple enough to work in every situation. Let's break these 3 criteria down.

1) Be appropriate. This doesn't mean expressive, a logo shouldn't be pressured to say a whole lot about what it is you do. Being appropriate is more about a feeling / core idea of something, for example: Sports can be bold or dynamic, and fashion can be elegant. These are the kinds of feelings you want captured in a logo and this assists in people gaining immediate insight about your organization just by a glance.

2) Be Distinctive. The mark should be unusual enough to persist in someone's mind. After 1 or 2 times of seeing the logo that same person should be able to describe or draw the mark. If you're reading this and are going to be deciding on a logo soon you might want to conduct the "doodle test": continue the room's discussion for 10 minutes after all the marks have been shown and then take out a piece of paper - which ones can you draw immediately? That is the doodle test - highly recommended.

3) Be Simple. A mark should always strive to be as simple as possible - all the way down to abstract geometric shapes if feasible. Simplicity plays a huge role in the reproduction of a mark and can be encapsulated into one question: "What are all the things this mark is going to touch both digitally and physically?" Ideally, your logo should be recognizable at the size of 4 pinheads formed in a square (a website's favicon) and still scale all the way to the size of a building to be viewed from a distance.

The continuum upon which logo designers work is between distinctiveness and simplicity. How special can one make a mark while keeping it uncomplicated? How simple can the mark be while avoiding being generic? When working with a talented logo designer these are the parameters in which they work.

Some of you might be wondering why timelessness is not a criteria. This is due to the fact that timelessness is a result - not a directive. When these 3 criteria are executed well that will bring about a timeless mark.

What makes a bad logo?

If a logo is complicated or generic, it's a bad logo. Now, if that's the case why are there so many logos that fit this criteria?

Logo misconceptions

1) "I don't think this logo says a lot about what we do." Remember, logos shouldn't be complicated nor should they have the burden to communicate exactly what it is you do. We don't want our beautiful recognizable mark to suffer from state flag syndrome.

A logo's job is not communication - it's identification. A mark is the period of a sentence, and not the sentence itself.

Logos are never seen without context and that's important to consider. No company releases material with just the mark on a white piece of paper and expect people to extrapolate meaning from that; it's just not how logos are used.

2) "I don't like any of the logos shown." Fair enough, but let's take a moment to gain our objectiveness to what a logo's job is: identification. That is a functional pass or fail objective that can be met when following these guidelines.

There's also another problem at play with this statement - it's immediacy. What do I mean? Logos are entities that thrive through familiarization over time. Here's a cold truth: most good logos are met with initial tepidness. In 1961, Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv (Chermayeff & Geismar at the time) redesigned Chase Banks' logo and met massive distaste from the primary decision maker of the organization: Chairman, John J. McCloy. After a 2 hour discussion after initially showing the mark he was only going to allow it to be shown at their retail banks; not on my business card, not on my building, not on my letterhead. Harsh right?

What's great about good logos though... is that familiarization with a solid mark can produce positive feelings. After 6 months of this mark being used Chermayeff & Geismar ran into McCloy in the hallway of the new Chase building in Manhattan, but noticed something interesting. the symbol was embroidered into his suit coat, his cuff-links were in the shape of the mark, and he was wearing a baseball cap with a big Chase Bank logo embroidered right on the front. As Sagi Haviv would say, "good logos are not always love at first sight."

3) "I feel like I could slap this on anything and it'd fit" Honestly, this is a huge compliment to logo designers. If you're able to design a mark that can be slapped onto anything then you have one fantastic mark. That's why when I unveil a new logo to a client I put that logo on many different applications across the board to show it's versatility. A logo, more than anything, should be a vessel in which you can fill it with everything it's trying to symbolize. If that vessel can hold more than what it was originally designed for then you have an amazing vessel that will last through company reorganizations, refocusing, or new missions and objectives.

4) This looks so simple, did you do anything at all? Simple isn't simple - much less is simple easy. Let's take a great behind the scenes look at a few different largely successful marks thanks to Florian Popescu and his series Famous Logo Grids vol. 1 on Behance.

These show fantastic executions of gridding. That is when a designer goes the extra mile and constrains themselves to only using straight lines, circles, and ratios. The marks produced after this process are extremely appealing to the eye due to their innate mathematical symmetry paired with the experience of the designer who executed small changes for optical symmetry. That's because occasionally if something is perfectly symmetrical it is actually harder to look at due to how human eyes work - so you make small changes to appeal to a sense of optical symmetry.

Conclusion

I hope you were able to gain some insight as to what you are looking for in either how a logo designer works or how to choose the best possible logo for your organization. Remember, not your favorite logo, but the best logo presented. When picking a new mark it's important to stay objective and voice your concerns - you have a subject matter expert working with you to make this just as big of a success as you want it to be.