Fw: Logo considerations

Alex Hudson home at alexhudson.com
Tue Jan 16 08:01:50 UTC 2001


> "Alex Hudson" <home at 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.





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