StatData

Sometimes, your business logos have been so successful that they’ve burrowed into the public conciousness to a degree that it would be seriously destructive to make any major changes. This is a rather privileged position to be in, and one you’ll want to maintain (unless your current image is exclusively negative of course), so keep your logo unchanged to insure that customers remain loyal. But the truth is, even the best brands in the world need to change (and have changed) to reflect changing trends. There is no such thing as a single ‘timeless’ design, even if there is enduring appeal behind a certain basic logo. The following are couple of brands that rose to the challenge and met with great success with a measured approach to change.

logo designers are regularly criticised by the press when they achieve it at great expense, but the key to reinvigorating some key brands really has been to take designs and simplify them. The logo for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has shown that there’s room for this in even the most simple logos. And yet, the BBC design was always simple: it was original a simple serifed ‘BBC’. This was replaced shortly after with a sans-serif font in the 60s. This font was italicized, and by the end of the 60s it was enclosed by rounded, slanted boxes. This basic design was carried forward into the 1980s when it picked up a set of blue, red and green underlines. But this was a true 80s aesthetic and one unlikely to last beyond the often garish early 90s: the current, non-italicized, sanserif logo has been in use ever since.

The Apple logo is another logo that went through a similar contemporary change. Their design language has steadily come to emphasise the sophistication of their products. The use of multiple colours in logo design however, has long since stopped being a marker of high-technology. Their traditional rainbow scale apple simply had to go with the advent of the iMac and iPod. So is simplification the elixir of life for logo design? This seems unlikely. But it is certainly a tried and tested way of squeezing extra life out of previous unfashionable desings.

The best business logos can persist for a long time. Branding has only really existed for just over a century in the sense we know today, and only really since the 1950s have companies really understood the design aesthetics of what makes a logo work. But this isn’t to say that great designs have been custom logo design persisting for a good century. Coca Cola is among one of our most enduring brands, and an example often wheeled out in these cases. The distinctive swirls of the logo were coined early in the twentieth century. Coca Cola is surely among the list of brands most likely to survive for centuries to come, and it’s difficult to imagine that it’s logo design will not remain unchanged.

But if the aesthetics of lasting logo designs are a matter of common knowledge, why is it that we find competitive, healthy companies redesigning so often? Coca Cola is an all-too rare example of a successful design that has simply been repositioned and tweaked, but then, most products don’t enjoy the status of being both the market leader and the market original. It almost seems that even when two brands are created almost simultaneously, whichever can establish its claim to being the original will gain (for a variably indefinite time) the privilege to retain its original branding. The other most continually be seen to innovate. Pepsi has been constantly flitting around Coca Cola’s static design for its entire lifetime. Of course, it isn’t always about playing catch up. The first half century of Pepsi Cola design was essentially carbon copied from the Coca Cola aesthetic, with a signature style design that featured a flowing C, performing the same underlining function seen in the Coca Cola logo.

World War II’s most trivial effect was probably the addition of patriotic red white and blue to the bottle caps of Pepsi Cola bottles, resulting in the circular symbol soon adopted into the brand. You’ll find this circular element a constant an sophisticated fixture of all designs since World War II, but designers have been moving the text inside and outside the logo for fifty years, almost as if they’re unsure what exactly unites the two facets of the design. The Pepsi circle is meaningless by symbolic. The text is typeface is constantly morphing. Every five years or so, Pepsi decides to overhaul its logo.. Coca Cola changes logo with a similar regularity, but its typography is seemingly set in stone.