Recently I read 2 completely unrelated articles that point to the same idea. The idea is that the traditional logo is no longer an important part of an organization’s brand approach.
The first article “Logos are Dead” suggests that instead of focusing on one mark to represent the face of a company, an organization should invest more time into developing a brand environment. The design of this brand environment would honor and present all pieces of content that a company chooses to release. Another article, “The Internet is Hard” suggests that the audience (particularly website visitors) completely ignores appearance and that they are only interested in the “big button” that will allow them to download the latest app, or whatever else they happen to be hunting for.
I’ve been chewing on these different ideas for a week or so now, and I still am not too sure that I know what I think.
Recently I’ve seen sets of branding from Aol. and Burnley that do not rely on a singular mark. Instead the brand is created from stylized imagery. The imagery isn’t necessarily defined by color even, it simply has a “look” that is consistent from one piece of collateral to the next.
Experience and the brand design tradition says that a company needs a logo create a face with which the customer can interface. When a letter or email is sent, it is the logo that identifies the sender. These marks can be used in a variety of ways to represent the different things that the company aspires to be or to provide. Logos can also be used to evoke emotions that help to create a bond between a company, a company’s product and the end user or client. But, with that said, have we reached a point where the traditional logo has become so commonplace that there’s not much ground to be gained by having one? Maybe.
Take for example the user pool in the article, “The Internet is Hard”. This article was written as a response to what happened after this article was posted. Here is a company blog that has it’s own branding. By some strange SEO magic, the article appeared at the top of the search results for “Facebook Login”. Some 200 readers completely ignored the Read Write Web branding, thought that somehow Facebook had changed, and they began searching for the button that would let them log into Facebook. You have to ask, was this an isolated incident or is this the result of brand saturation in our society.
The users that commented angrily all the while thinking that Facebook had somehow changed, were in most cases either very young or very old and maybe somewhat technologically challenged. All of the first 200 or so of those to comment on the article ignored the branding on the page. They didn’t notice that the site didn’t have Facebook’s header, logo, typeface, or even colors for that matter.
As a visual designer, I’m still in disbelief that in this day and age, this happened. I don’t think that everyone has become blind to branding, I think that it’s probably just a select demographic. Also, you could argue in this case that the blame could fall on a combination between weak branding on Facebook’s behalf as well as weak branding on Read Write Web’s behalf. Personally, I dig both sets of branding, but who know’s? Maybe that is part of what’s going here.
Ultimately, I don’t know what the answer is, but I can say that have a hard time believing that branding doesn’t matter.
