Branding logo
January 31, 2015
On the other hand, a brand is a name, term, design, symbol or other feature that distinguishes one seller’s product from those of others. Initially, livestock branding was adopted to differentiate one person’s cattle from another’s by means of a distinctive symbol burned into the animal’s skin with a hot branding iron.
Logo design is an important area of graphic design, and one of the most difficult to perfect. The logo (ideogram) is the image embodying an organization. Because logos are meant to represent companies’ brands or corporate identities, it is counterproductive to frequently redesign logos. The logo design, as profession, has substantially
increased in numbers over the years since the rise of the Modernist movement in the United States in the 1950s. Three designers are widely considered the pioneers of that movement and of logo and corporate identity design. They are Chermayeff & Geismar, Paul Rand and Saul Bass.
The current era of logo design began in the 1870s with the first abstract logo, the Bass red triangle. As of 2014 many corporations, products, brands, services, agencies and other entities use an ideogram (sign, icon) or an emblem (symbol) or a combination of sign and emblem as a logo.
As a result, only a few of the thousands of ideograms in circulation are recognizable without a name. An effective logo may consist of both an ideogram and the company name (logotype) to emphasize the name over the graphic, and employ a unique design via the use of letters, colors, and additional graphic elements.
Ideograms and symbols may be more effective than written names (logotypes), especially for logos translated into many alphabets in increasingly globalized markets.
Authentic brands don’t emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies. They emanate from everything the company does.
Designing a good logo may require involvement from the marketing team and the design agency (if the process is outsourced), or graphic design contest platform (if it is crowdsourced). It requires a clear idea about the concept and values of the brand as well as understanding of the consumer or target group.
Broad steps in the logo design process might be formulating the concept, doing an initial design, finalizing the logo concept, deciding the theme colors and format involved.
Brand name
The brand name is quite often used interchangeably with “brand”. A brand name constitutes a type of trademark, if the brand name exclusively identifies the brand owner as the commercial source of products or services. Brand names come in many styles:
- Initialism: A name made of initials such, as UPS or IBM
- Descriptive: Names that describe a product benefit or function, such as Whole Foods or Toys R’ Us
- Evocative: Names that evoke a relevant vivid image, such as Amazon or Crest
- Neologisms: Completely made-up words, such as Wii or Häagen-Dazs
A brandnomer is a brand name that has colloquially become a generic term for a product or service, such as Band-Aid, Nylon, or Kleenex—which are often used to describe any brand of adhesive bandage; any type of hosiery; or any brand of facial tissue respectively. Xerox, for example, has become synonymous with the word “copy”.