Loading summary
Transcript56 lines
- [00:06]
A
Have you ever had trouble getting people to notice your business or even to care about it at all? Now, there are several reasons why this could be happening, but one of the most common is that your visual brand doesn't set you apart from your competitors, which means potential customers don't think of you when they have a problem. That's why today's episode is all about logos, as John Felkins sits down with my senior creative officer, Tim Newton.
- [00:34]
B
Thanks, Dave. So we're gonna go through some of the most iconic logos that there are, Tim, and I appreciate you being here, but first, I want to ask you, what do all of those brands do really well to have logos that win?
- [00:46]
C
It's really only two things. When it comes down to it, okay, really great logo. It has to convey meaning or feel like you have to be able to see it, that it feels like something. And the reason is because our brain is constantly scanning everything, and our unconscious brain is scanning and making decisions about everything that we see. And if a logo isn't visually showing the meaning, then our brain isn't catching that meaning. And so there has to be intentionality about how do the shapes convey the meaning of the brand? Like, everything comes into play. Colors and lines and typography and spacing, all that stuff means something. And so it has to convey meaning in some way. The second thing is that it has to be a recognizable shape, you know, like, and that's. It just has to be recognizable because you have to. It has to be able to be unique from the crowd. Like, there are millions and millions of brands out in the world and logos out in the world. And if your logo looks like somebody else's logo, then you're never going to. You're never going to make the mental connection that you're hoping the logo is going to do. And I think about it like this. As a. As a character illustrator, one of the things that tells you if it's a good character is if you can look at the silhouette and you know who the character is. And so you think about any famous character like Mickey Mouse or Homer Simpson or anything like that, you can look at the silhouette and be like, that's Mickey Mouse. That's Homer Simpson. That means it's probably a pretty memorable character, you know, and same thing with the logo. You need to be able to look at it quickly and say, oh, yeah, I know exactly who that is. But if you don't create a unique shape for the logo, you're never gonna get that. And you're trying to stand out In a crowd of millions of logos, we see 5,000 brands a day. And you have to stand out against five.
- [02:26]
B
We see 5,000 brands a day.
- [02:28]
C
Really? Yeah. I know it sounds insane, but that's a real stat. We see 5,000 brands a day. Wow. And so that's how many logos, that's how many things we're seeing just as we're going out in the world. It's insane. I mean, when you're driving down the road, you're seeing all the brands of the cars, you're seeing billboards, you're seeing buildings, and they all have branding. You know, your logo has to be memorable out of those 5,000. Okay. So it should probably be pretty unique, you know?
- [02:52]
B
Yeah, I think I understand.
- [02:54]
C
Be unique. Right.
- [02:55]
B
It's got to stand out from the 5,000, but convey meaning. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
- [03:00]
C
So if I were to say that our brand needs to convey moving quickly, what kinds of things would convey moving quickly? If you take a line and slant it forward, it's going to convey moving quickly. If you draw a lot of little lines behind a character that's slanting forward, that's going to convey speed. Right. If you want to convey trust, it should probably be a lot of 90 degree angles, very straight up and down, very tall. Because we trust things that look like that. It looks stable. Even colors play a role into this. Like purple indicates royalty, red indicates love.
- [03:34]
B
Okay. So those are the things that the great brands or the great logos have. One of the most common mistakes people make, like, how do you screw this up?
- [03:43]
C
Yeah. Well, actually, you could even take those two things I said and just flip them and go the opposite way. And that's what people do wrong. So what I mean is, you talk about being unique, right? Yeah. One thing I see all the time, and this is whether you're a leader of a business or you're the designer, I see it all the time that people will design logos that just look cool. And that's the whole point. That's all they're trying to do is make something that looks cool. And what they end up doing a lot of times is they'll go on places like Pinterest or they'll go on Dribbble, which is a place where you look at great design work and they'll just copy something cool that they see, but there's nothing unique about it. And it's gonna look like everybody else because you're just copying what everybody else does. Also with just looking cool, you're not conveying any Meaning, because you're saying this looks cool, but there's not any tensionality around what line am I choosing, what shapes am I choosing, what colors, what typography, kerning, leading. All that kind of stuff isn't being put into play. And so I see it all the time. For instance, how often do you see a logo that has two arrows crisscrossing and then words in the negative space? And on the left and right, it says established on one side and then a date on the other side?
- [04:47]
B
I have seen that.
- [04:48]
C
Have you seen that before? Yeah. Aesthetically, it's pretty, but I am not going to see that logo and connect it to any one brand, because thousands of brands do that exact same thing. And you're definitely the whole purpose if you're doing that. It might look cool, but you're not going to be memorable. And the whole point is to show up the same way over and over again. And so then when people see you eventually and see that logo, split second, they know exactly who that is. That's not going to happen if you're copying other people's logos. And so that's the biggest thing I see people do all the time, is you're just copying something else, or they're not thinking about any kind of meaning and making any intentional choices. They're just saying, this looks cool, and they're just going off of gut, man, that's cool.
- [05:26]
B
They hadn't really put themself into it at all. So it doesn't really reflect anything about who they are.
- [05:31]
C
Yeah, not at. At all. Yeah.
- [05:32]
B
Let's talk a little bit about some of the logos that have just crushed over the years. Right. And I know, you know, several come to mind. I think one of the most popular ones, of course, is Nike, the swoosh.
- [05:44]
C
Right.
- [05:45]
B
Break that down for me. Why has that worked?
- [05:47]
C
That's such a good one. Because. Okay, when we're talking about. We're talking about conveying meaning, right? Right. So Nike, if they were to ask themselves, what do we want people to expect when they interact with our brand, what would they want people to say? Probably fast and winning. It's probably the things, Right. That's probably what you want with Nike. Right. And so what that logo does, you talk about a shape that conveys meaning, that shape is conveying fast and winning because you got the swoop in the logo, right? Which is movement, and then it just speeds up and goes to that really fine point on the right side. Right? That is movement and speed going up, the fast movement like that. And when it comes to winning. I know that that logo originally was designed based off of, like, the wing of N, the goddess of victory in Greek mythology. And so it's such a simple shape. And, you know, they also kind of have the advantage, I'd say, of that logo was created in the early 70s. And so you don't have the millions and millions and millions of logos you got now. There was definitely a lot then they really got it established. Yeah. Do something really simple, and that conveys the meaning. And now they have decades of brand equity and decades of wrapping, speed and winning around that logo to that. Now when you see that logo, that mean is so incorporated with. It's so associated with it that they're able to really. To really take advantage of that, you know? And what's funny about that logo, Phil Knight, he famously didn't like that logo.
- [07:16]
B
In the beginning and didn't pay much for it.
- [07:18]
C
He didn't. I think it was like, 35 bucks or something like that. You know, she has been taken care of since then. But that's why it's so good, is it conveys meaning, and it's also a pretty unique shape. I've never seen a logo that looks like that. Like, exactly like that. And people might have tried to copy since then and certain elements of it, but it was very unique when it came out, and it conveyed a lot of meaning. Winning and victory, or victory and speed.
- [07:38]
B
That's cool.
- [07:39]
C
Yeah.
- [07:39]
B
How about another one? How about FedEx? That's a logo we see a lot of.
- [07:43]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That one's pretty fascinating, too. And it's famous for a reason. Very intentional and very well done. But we'll ask the same question. If the FedEx people were saying, what do we want people to expect when they interact with our brand? What would they say? They probably say speed and efficiency.
- [07:59]
B
Speed and efficiency.
- [08:00]
C
Yeah.
- [08:00]
B
Reliability, trust. Like, you know, we're gonna get the package on time.
- [08:05]
C
Yeah, exactly. Okay. And so let's take a look at their logo. Then you talk about trust and reliability. Right. The fact that the F and the E tall. Very stable. You know, like, those look like really strong fonts. Right, right. And at the same time, those lowercase letters are pretty low to the ground. And when something's moving fast, it gets lower to the ground. Right. And so it has that for speed. Right. And you look at the kerning. And the kerning is just the space between letters. Okay. So you got Y or very tight turning. It has super tight turning. Like, the letters are touching each other. Okay. And so that also indicates movement and speed. There's a little bit of tension when you look at it because the lines are touching and you kind of don't want them to touch because it adds that tension. But you also have tension when there's speed and movement and everything. Right. So it has the tension. And then you famously got the arrow in the negative space. We were talking before about the unconscious brain and what it picks up. Right. Unconscious brain is always taking in information that our logical brain doesn't know it's picking up. So the fact that they have an arrow in there in the negative space, normally someone has to tell you the arrow is there, but it's just an unconscious thing they did. And clearly the arrow is about momentum and speed and efficiency and all that stuff. Movement. Yeah. So that logo is so well thought out about what it's trying to say to where when you see the logo, you just kind of feel speed and efficiency and that's what you want. People might not consciously say speed and efficiency, but you definitely feel, feel it when you see that logo. And they. Very intentional. They did a great job with that.
- [09:28]
B
Let's. Let's do one more.
- [09:30]
C
Yeah.
- [09:30]
B
Amazon.
- [09:31]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [09:32]
B
Break that one down for us.
- [09:33]
C
Yeah. So I'm guessing they probably want their logo to look happy. So what do they do? They chose a font that's very curvy and very bouncy looking, which is very happy and playful. You know, they also don't use a capital A, which shows, you know, their customer first approach. Humility. Right. Like they're doing that with it. You obviously have this smile that's underneath it, which also conveys happiness. But you know what I find so fascinating about that logo is you could pretty much get anything with Amazon, right?
- [10:01]
B
Yeah.
- [10:01]
C
Did you ever notice that the arrow goes from A to Z somehow?
- [10:05]
B
I knew that, but I didn't notice it at first.
- [10:07]
C
And so there's so much thought in that logo and what they're trying to convey. And it was very intentional. But that's what I mean at the beginning about the mistakes. Like if, if the, if the person creating the logo is intentional about what are we trying to say? What do we want people to expect? How can we do that with typography and shapes and color and lines and all that kind of stuff?
- [10:25]
B
You know, just some intentionality, just thinking through it.
- [10:27]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [10:28]
B
So those are three of, like, the biggest brands in the world.
- [10:31]
C
Right.
- [10:31]
B
But a lot of folks that watch Entrez leadership, they're running an H Vac company or a construction company. And a lot of them are multimillion dollar companies. They're not messing around. But also they're not Amazon. They're. They're maybe a business just in their community there or in their part of the state. How does this translate when, I don't know, when you're running a small construction company or something that's really just. I don't want to say just because we love Main street businesses.
- [11:01]
C
But it's different. Yeah, well, it is different, but the same rules apply. Whether you're a business of 1 or 2000 or 20,000, the same rules apply. And I'll give you a really good example of this. We were using a plumber before, and the plumber, not great. And so we said, you know what, forget this. We got to find somebody else. So anytime we run into a problem and we need some help, there's always a first brand that comes to mind. The first brand that comes to mind is going to be the one that's been the most consistent and the one that you can look at them and kind of understand what they're about, right? And so the first brand that came to mind was this plumber called Hiller Plumbing. And it came to mind because I see their logo everywhere. I see it everywhere.
- [11:44]
B
That big yellow happy face.
- [11:45]
C
The big yellow happy face, and even the red type next to it that's very tall, very bold, but very curvy and everything, right? You put those two things together and it looks strong and it looks happy, it looks reliable and it looks friendly, right? Like that's what it looks like. And I see this van going around the community all the time. It's the same van, the same logo. I see that logo on people's shirts. I see that logo when I go to football games. And it's the same logo showing up the same way every time. And so since they've shown up the same way and since it looks friendly and reliable, Hiller, first brand that came to mind in a split second, I'm like, I need a plumber who's a Hiller. You know, look them up and then went with them.
- [12:21]
B
What's interesting to me about that is you're saying you needed a plumber and that came to mind. Hiller came to mind because of the brand, because of the logo, not because of word of mouth.
- [12:32]
C
It wasn't word of mouth.
- [12:33]
B
It was literally just the branding and the logo that did it.
- [12:35]
C
It did. Nobody told me about Hiller Plumbing. I just saw it all the time, you know, and since I saw it, show up the same way every time. And I kind of understood what they're about. With that big smiley face, you can't miss that big smiley face. You know, before we talked about conveying meaning and being unique and memorable. That big smiley face is pretty memorable. Right. And so when I see it on vans and shirts and everything, it just gets imprinted in my mind. Right. And so then when I finally have a problem of plumbing, that's the first one I called. I called them. They did a great job. Now that's who I use, you know, and the logo just. It's powerful. It really is powerful because you can. The logo. Logos are so interesting because they're like writing a headline. Writing a headline is one of the hardest things to do in copywriting because you're trying to take a lot of meaning and put it in the fewest amount of words possible. It's the same with a logo. You're trying to take a lot of meaning and put it in the smallest shape possible. The reason you're trying to do that is so you have something simple that can be imprinted in people's brains. And you want it imprinted in people's brains not for today, but for tomorrow, when they actually have a problem. When they have a problem, you want to be the first one that comes to mind. And if you did a good job of creating a great logo and had it just show up the same way all the time, you'll be the first that people think of. You're being printed in their brain, and that's what you're trying to do.
- [13:48]
B
Yep. That's cool. Thanks a ton for being here.
- [13:51]
C
Yeah, no problem.
- [13:52]
B
This is super helpful.
- [13:53]
C
Oh, good. Appreciate it. All right. Glad to be here.
- [13:56]
A
A strong logo does way more than just make your website look good. It can shape how people see and remember your business. But here's the thing. Branding isn't just about logos, colors, or fonts. It's about the full story your business tells every time someone interacts with it. Thanks for watching. See you next time.