I love logos. I mean, I LOVE them. I love to look at them, critique them, analyze them, take them apart, create them, think about them, and redo them. I have said it numerous times before, If I could I would happily spend every day coming up with a new mark. I would be perfectly content with that career.
This comes as a surprise to many graphic designers. Ever since I was in school, I have been asked how I can possibly LIKE creating logos. Many people believe they are the bar-back of graphic design, the janitorial work, if you will. I love them.
If pressed as to why I enjoy them so much, I’d have to say it’s sort of the same way I feel about prime numbers and stacks. If you were to come over, you would see my stacks in place; the newspapers are with all the magazines but not with the mail and every stack gets smaller as it rises. The mail is with the receipts on top of the new magazines on top of the refrigerator. Most everything that doesn’t need to be readily available is sight and stacked. Everything needs to be just so – not neat and tidy – but just so. I make the best stacks. (Maybe that’s why I like pancakes, hmmmm.)
Prime numbers are clean. You can’t do anything more to them to make them any cleaner. A prime number can be divided evenly only by 1 and itself. That’s one hot number if you ask me.
I feel the same way about logos. I realize that they are never perfect (you can always change a mark, even a “perfect” mark can be tweaked indefinitely) but they’re kinda like the prime numbers of graphic design. They need to work when they are small and in black and white. They need to work large as well, all the while holding onto whatever integrity you gave them when they were born.
I love that. They are the nearest example of perfection I can think of in Graphic Design.
Anyway, as I was sitting here the other day finishing up a first round of logo I am working on for a client in Ohio, my eye fixed on one mark in particular. I knew that was the one they should pick. I knew that was the better of the bunch. Yesterday, they client wrote letting me know not only that they were going to choose that mark, but that they loved it as well. I was elated.
Anyway, I want to talk about logos. Here is my favorite mark right now:
The more I see it, the more I like it. (I think we know one of its creators.)
A few other marks I like: FedEx (of course), Northwest Airlines (before they recreated it), Saturn and Amazon. Those are the bigger ones that come to mind. However, I can think of a hundred logos most people probably haven’t ever seen before (because of the exposure) which are pretty incredible. I just don’t have the time to search for them all.
On the flip side, I can’t stand the Verizon logo. Quite frankly, I have no idea what those people were thinking.
Mihow 
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