The world’s biggest brands have gradually simplified their logos over many years. Is this a fashion thing? we think not.

Its probably more to do with data captured from testing these brand logos with experts is more than likely pointing towards the fact that ‘make it simple, makes it easier to remember’. Large corporate companies spend millions if not billions of pounds a year ensuring they have the correct image branding for their organisations. This does not always correlate to the fact that they spend millions on advertising, to make their brand remembered. But that they have realised that a logo broken down into a more basic, simplified format works best in the minds eye of the consumer when it comes to trusting a brand and persuading us to choose one company’s products over another.
This is true of all the big brands we see today our in the corporate world. Logos appears to have started out more complicated, more ornate – maybe as a personal project of the company’s owner. They were usually badly drawn and poorly executed only goes to enforce this theory.  But having a billion dollar advertising budget allows you to simplify even further. Brand recognition allows a logo to broken into smaller parts and these are still strong. Look a the McDonalds’ arch for example – they no longer need to use the word ‘McDonalds’ in any of their marketing, the ‘M’ alone is now recognised as a stand alone concept.

Another example of this is Nike for example. Nike’s tick or ‘Swoosh’ as its known has taken 30 years to evolve to just the swoosh without the NIKE lettering. Back the late 60’s and early 70’s the typeface for Nike was in a different typeface and placed over the top of the tick. This looked very confusing, but at the time was probably the fashion the font hankers back to the old baseball style of lettering. But over time with billions spent on advertising the Nike logo evolves so just the ‘swoosh’ is enough.
Another example is the Pepsi logo. This started its life around 1898 as a very ornate in fact difficult to read font in plain red, but very thin and spidery.  This was thickened over the 1900’s and in the 1950’s the blue was added to become its bold red white and blue distinct colouring, then in the 1960’s they dropped the ‘Cola’ and it became known as just plain ‘Pepsi’, probably to help distinguish it further from its largest competitor Coca Cola.

Some logos were simplified due to need to make them appeal to a mass market, companies were outgrowing there sales territories – now becoming global. A logo which may have been great for a far east company will not have the same appeal within another company the other side of the world, this suggestion can be seen here with the Japanese photographic company Canon. The original logo has a very typical far eastern feel to it, over time the company names was altered to appeal to the western European and American markets.

The original ‘Kwanon ‘ logo could even be regarded as a religious style, the development of this tends to look towards a Coca Cola style of lettering and curls. Only a year later a more sedate logo was developed dropping the ‘W’ from the name, this was then made worse by fashionably trying to reduce the font weight in the early 1950’s, only to do a back track for the exiting logos – juts made a little heavier but still remains the same as the design from the 1935.

General Electric are an exception. They obviously got their brand logo right first time. There has been some minor ‘simplification’ alterations been made over its lifetime, but overall the swirl GE has stood the test of time, bearing in mind this is over some 120 year period.

So what you can gauge from this is that a logo even with infinite marketing and advertising budgets have developed over time to become simpler. Yes, graphic design techniques have altered over the years, you can safely say that all designs before 1970’s were probably hand drawn. Since the advent of Apple Macintosh computer and desktop printing in the 1970’s and 1980’s, computer graphics software has developed hugely to become an industry in itself. But even the fastest computer in the world cant’ designs logos automatically, its has to come from an individuals creativity and its proven that the more simple a design kept, the more likely it will be remembered, especially in todays ever more competitive advertising market.

Dean Williams

Dean Williams is a design and marketing blogger working for Print-Print Limited, promoting business and building brands through quality print marketing. If you’re interested in small business promotion then please get in touch hello@print-print.co.uk