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The logo is under attack, cautions the author.
Everyone loves a logo, or loves to hate one. Designing logos is the most easily understood example of the graphic designer's work. Among the additions to visual culture since the 19th century, the logo ranks with television and cinema. Stand in Tokyo's Ginza or New York's Times Square and you will be overrun by them. In India, we experience a booming town through the sprouting of familiar logos on its streets.
Ironically, to the extent that this view is valid, the logo is under threat from the same processes that made it so successful in the first place. Though logos are ancient in terms of marks that denoted community (the cross, the shaivite tripundara or the swastika), the modern logo is a creation of trade, media and transportation.
By the middle of the 20th century, the power of the visual trade mark was firmly acknowledged, and the forerunners of the modern brand consulting firms were born. The logo became big business, a store of both value as well as meaning. This is where things started to change.
This turn in the logo's fortunes was linked to the evolution of the language of marketing, and then a new understanding of the brand, approximately in the last quarter of the 20th century. The brand was now not just the name of the business, but an evocation of new ideas - benefits, values, promises and other more or less emotional fragments, tied by association to its name and other 'signifiers', like the logo. Oh, and it had a personality, like a human.
This complexity now required the logo to distill this bundle of properties, and made it a strategic decision: big business for consultants. But this wasn't all.
New, geographically dispersed brands, including the modernised corporate brand (so went the thinking) now needed a consistent visual appearance, implemented via a centrally mandated visual system: a set of graphic assets, such as colours, typefaces and added graphics, governed by rules for correct usage.
Over the next decades, these visual systems grew in sophistication and ingenuity. In addition to ensuring recognition, they now cover the style of imagery and the mood of the communications, across product design, retail spaces, advertising and more. Often not rigidly consistent like their forbearers, they may go by names like 'brand world' or 'experience'. The argument: sufficiently well executed, brand worlds obviate the need for a logo, while still delivering a powerful whiff of the brand, so to speak.
There's another strand to the anti-logo argument. Logos, by themselves, have no meaning, but derive it from the businesses they mark. Mercedes' three-pointed star gets its value from the consistently admired cars it sits atop, not the other way around. So why bother with the hype and fuss of designing them to distill the brand into the logo?
We can see these as a clash between two notions: brand as experience, versus brand as a symbol. Deep Design believes that the brand-as-symbol perspective is under-appreciated. Symbols as carriers of identity are inseparable from human life, from tribe to kingdom, ancient to modern. And all aspects of brand experience - even the taste of Johnny Walker whisky - whisper to our identity (and are thus signs). Taste is sensory, but also associative, and there's neurological evidence for this: it just tastes better with the label.
Second, symbols such as logos focus organisational and social energies, by substituting a physical thing for an idea that must be defended, in war or in peace. Most of all, a logo can travel from the bonnet of a Mercedes car to an advertisement, and trigger the same feelings with incredible economy of time and space. Of course, there's no doubt that it's a part of a 'brand world'.
Does the logo rank with television? Just look out of the window: far from a burial, the party is in full swing.
(The author runs Itu Chaudhuri Design, a design and branding firm, in New Delhi)