"Alex Hudson" home@alexhudson.com writes:
eyesight, in terms of detail and colour. A logo doesn't need to be complex and flashily coloured for it to work well. An example in the UK would be the BBC (http://www.beeb.com/) - an easily recognisable logo, but extremely simple and monochromatic.
Of course, the BBC logo is only recently back to its monochromatic state and now has harsher edges than most previous executions.
The moral? A logo is for Christmas, not for life.
Uh-uh. The Beeb spent millions getting it right, and have been changing it over the past few years. It's permeated every section - every regional organisation has their own marque, for example. The BBC were forced to change their logo because of the associated costs of the old one, and have changed their complete corporate identity. Every channel has the corporate branding, all the websites, everything. That wasn't easy for them to implement, and they can't/don't change the logo at a drop of a hat. They're not going to change it again for probably a good ten years, if not longer.
Seriously, while I agree that the basic image needs to remain constant, I'm sure there will be opportunities to revise it if it's failing to meet the demands placed upon it, in light of experience. Hopefully we can do this without spending vast amounts on "brand consultants"...
Yep, but there's no harm getting it right in the first place? If you've ever printed a run of publicity for something, be it a school show, or for an exhibition, you know how expensive it is. Printing colour runs is astronomical. Printing t-shirts with more than a two colours is expensive. If we can have a logo that looks as familiar in monochrome as in multicolour, we can make these savings right off the bat. The problem the Beeb had, for example, was that they couldn't with the last logo - it contained red, blue and green. There is no contrast separation between those colours, so when the logo was monochrome it looked very different, and not nearly as effective. Take the FSF's GNU as well - the only FSF tshirts I have are monochrome, and they work as well as they would do in colour. Don't underestimate the importance of monochrome!!
Corporate image is extremely important - if you keep changing and rebranding, you confuse people. The FSFE surely doesn't need that.
Cheers,
Alex.