Things your logo design is better off without
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While gradients can look great, subtlety is often the key. A densely saturated colour faded to white? Not so great. Lets get rid of that.
That’s better, now I can actually read the brand name. Now, what about that swoosh. What does a swoosh say about a business… 99.9% chance its got nothing to do with it. Lets get rid of it.
The first thing I notice now is the brand name, not the swoosh that looks like a million other logo designs. Now that I think about it, that tag line is pretty generic too. Lets see what it looks like without it.
It looks better. That underline is nearly as thick as the letters though, that has got to be distracting.
A nice clean wordmark, I like where this is heading. While we’re going crazy lets get rid of that drop shadow as well.
So crisp and clean! Without all those other distractions I can see that the spacing between a few of the letters isn’t quite right though, lets do a little kerning.
Nice. The difference is subtle, but it only takes a few minutes so why not?
The final test, the before and after comparison.
The above pictures are only a quick example obviously, I’m not saying that every logo should to be a plain wordmark, but they can definitely do without generic slapped on elements like the ‘swoosh’.
What do you think?
For me the simple, strong new logo is instantly readable while I have to spend a few seconds puzzling out the original.
In comparison, it almost looks like the first logo was just thrown together in Photoshop in five or ten minutes. But that never happens, right?
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Reminds me of the Capital One logo. What IS that swoosh doing there? Swooshes should be banned by law ;)
Andrew,
We could form the Swoosh Police, “Keeping your logos safe from Swooshes”.
We’re going to need a lot more members though I think…
…I’m sure many disillusioned designers would get on board.
Right here, sign me up for the logo swoosh police!
I think it is rather apt in view of the subject matter of this blog to mention this fabulous competition someone told me about – to design a dreadful logo :)
Be warned though, the small print says you can only win if you live in the US. But some designers may still want to enter for exposure and also, it’s fun!
Clean look, hands down – and add me to the swoosh police :)
At work, I needed to design a logo for Work Pairing which is sort of a mini apprenticeship scheme we have going on. My logo was just like the final version of the one above but in Calibri font; workPairing with the ‘Pairing’ in bold type. It looked ace in purple with a white background.
Just goes to show you, better looking logos are better left without useless decorations.