Design: Good Logos, Very Very Bad Logos

When it comes to logo design, there’s purely great, occasionally clever and more often then not absolutely horrendous. A talented designer can work a reference into a logo that suggests what the company does or what they stand for. For example, the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo (#4) suggests forward motion (perfect), the 31 in the Baskin Robbins Ice Cream logo (#7) calls back to the day when the 31 flavors was part of their promotion. The hidden meaning of the VAIO logo, below, is obscure but cool once you know about it.

The second part of this post is about logos that failed miserably. They were meant to be thoughtful and professional but for the most part just turned out to be obscene and creepy. How else can you look at the Catholic Archdiocese Youth Program logo (bad #2) without being thoroughly creeped-out. My thought is that some of these might be fake or that I may have a serious problem, but I’ll leave it up to you.

THE GOOD

VAIO Computers – The Vaio logo also represents the integration of analog and digital technology with the ‘VA’ representing an analog wave and the ‘IO’ representing a digita lbinary code.

NASA – Nice use of negative space to suggest the moon

Spartan Golf Club – Easy to see, great use of type and imagery

FedEx – I never noticed the arrow formed by the E and the X. Now it’s all I can see in this logo.

Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club – Note the M and the B to form a catchers mitt

Pittsburgh Zoo

Baskin Robbins – ’31′ Flavors

Eighty 20 – This logo was complicated to figure out; the blue squares represent 1′s and the gray squares represent 0′s. This makes a 1010000 sequence on the top line, represent eighty in binary, and the bottom line reads 0010100, which represents 20 in binary. For the nerds.