Why Your Logo Should be Boring
Heuristics for Designing a Perfect Logo
Why Logo Design is HARD
Design is a field where nearly everyone thinks their critiques matter. This is why the best designers are also great salespeople. They have to convince their clients and stakeholders – who likely have no design experience – to accept their work.
Probably the hardest design task is logo creation. Go look at 𝕏 comments on recent logo redesigns from Stripe to Cracker Barrel and you will notice everyone thinks they have a good take simply because they have functioning eyeballs. Internally, a company’s owners will likely have high attachment to whatever logo they started with, and a strong to desire to feel personally attracted with whatever new one fits the company best.
This makes selling the logo especially challenging. I’ve only created a few and generally avoid this kind of work now. But, I still think about it all the time and have created a set of heuristics that can be used to objectively evaluate the viability of a logo.
Heuristics for a Perfect Logo
- Objectively appealing
- Color agnostic
- Underwhelming
- Simple
- Vague
1. Objectively Appealing
Most people believe great design is subjective but this is mostly wrong. When you study design you learn there are general rules you can follow to make something broadly appealing. If you use analogous or complementary colors (determined mathematically) you are achieving objective appeal. If someone hates the FedEx logo because they have a personal preference against orange and purple, that’s subjective and doesn’t mean the logo is bad.
An acronym for one set of these objective rules is CRAP (contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity), which must be carefully attended to deliver something beautiful and easy to consume. I won’t go into detail here, but some obvious examples:
- Contrast → too low and text is illegible, too high and its not intriguing
- Repetition → too low and you have a weak brand, too high and you lose meaning
For logo design, achieving objective appeal means covering the basics. If you are a pro, you will get more precise and leverage what we know about how human evolution influences aesthetics (eg. fibonacci ratio).
2. Color Agnostic
A perfect logo has to look good and be recognizable in any color or gradient. The shape of Apple’s logo is beautiful, and no matter what color is used, the symbolism is never lost. It can be black on white for print, it works when it’s rainbow, and it can even be different colors for different services without degrading the brand.
However, Mastercard, Google Drive, and the old Stripe logo rely heavily on color to be recognized as part of the brand. That’s a huge failure, the shape needs to be distinct. The primary purpose of the logo is to be a stamp you put on your ads, products, and everything else to tell the world “hey this is us, we made this!”. If the shape of a logo alone doesn’t point to your brand it’s not perfect.
3. Underwhelming
One feature of a perfect logo that most get wrong is that it should be underwhelming. Ramp, On Running, and Notion logos are objectively appealing, color agnostic, and at the same time, completely underwhelming. If you love these logos its probably because you love the experiences you have had with those companies.
A logo’s job is not to communicate the vision, origin story, or unique offering of the company it represents. If you are trying to make everyone immediately fall in love with your brand through it’s logo, you are is trying too hard, and everyone will sense it.
Versace, Alpha Romeo, and the original Apple logo are all overly complex, try to communicate too much, and end up communicating nothing at all. When I was grabbing images for them I genuinely could not remember what they look like (and I have pretty good photographic memory). If your customers cannot draw your logo without looking at it for reference, you do not have a perfect logo.
4. Simple
This heuristic is similar to the one above but makes adds an important rule. A logo should be simple enough to fit and work everywhere. The Cracker Barrel redesign sparked a lot of controversy. The social implications, loss of familiarity, and loss of character are generally what made it a devastatingly bad rebrand. From a design perspective, however, new logo was objectively much better.
Their giant, complex logo fits fine on a billboard but go search for their website and you’ll see something different for their favicon. If you find yourself designing multiple logos because the main one doesn’t fit in all the places you need to use it, your logo is not perfect.
5. Vague
Trying to pack too much meaning in your logo will always result in poor outcomes. When the Kraft, the University of California, and the 2012 London Olympics, tried to pack in too much symbolism on their redesigns, it resulted in ugly, confusing logos that distracted from what they were meant to represent.
On the other hand, the subtle easter eggs of meaning in the Amazon and FedEx logos work extremely well because they are still effective for customers who don’t notice the deeper message. When you show someone your logo they should never ask what it means or struggle to understand it.
The Ramp logo looks like a ramp but you don’t need to notice that to like it, it’s just a great shape. If you’ve used Notion for a long time you might understand why the logo is a block, but that’s not necessary to view it as a good symbol for the brand. And, when you look at the Notion logo for the first time, there is nothing about it that makes it feel like there is something to be understood. The 2012 London Olympics, though, had to release a 20-minute explanation video about their logo.
If someone looks at our logo and asks “what does it mean”, or asks “what is it?” you’re cooked.
Putting it to the Test
It feels appropriate that I critique some of the logos I designed now and see how they stand up to my own heuristics.
The first one I made was for a rock climbing app I built. The mountain feels off proportionately and does not appear to utilize the golden ratio or other patterns from nature. Also, looking back, I hate how it looks neither sharp nor rounded at the corners. It’s also completely dependent on color to make it recognizable, the shape is not unique enough to stand out from other generic mountains. Finally, it’s not vague, its meaning is actually too obvious and explicit, unlike the mountain in The North Face’s logo.
The other two I’m relatively happy with in retrospect. The ReSource “R” logo shape is just slightly off, my eyes are bouncing around to different parts when I look at it instead of seeing it as a solid symbol. Otherwise, they are shaped well, color agnostic, underwhelming, simple, and are vague or have no meaning. You probably don’t have any strong feelings about them, but if you got to know the brand, they would start to represent how all your interactions with that brand made you feel.
The Perfect Logo
A perfect logo is a simple stamp you can put on all your work so that work is associated with you. Then, as your customers feel aligned with your brand’s identity, that stamp becomes a badge they can wear proudly.
It’s incredibly easy to overthink your logo. For most design tasks you should not be afraid to be bold. When it comes to logo design, don’t be afraid to be cautious or straight up boring.