When it comes to marketing and branding, the first step a company takes is to create a logo. I interact with a lot of startups and have realised that they find the creation of a “perfect” logo a daunting task. The common perception is that a logo is set in stone and once created it cannot be changed. It’s time we burst this bubble of a perfect logo…. But to burst this bubble, we’ll first have to get a better understanding of what logos are….

Logo defined

Think of a logo as your profile picture. It’s a little mark which means something very big. It has to remain you, but you can dress it up, change the background, add a frame etc. Logos are empty vessels which over time have to be filled with emotions and associations with them.

Logo Types

Logos can primarily be divided into three categories. Let’s take a quick look:

Wordmark

This is the easiest one and something that we are very familiar with.The company name itself becomes the logo.

Pictorial

Here you see a picture and say what’s in the picture and that goes on to identify the company’s name. The pictorial logo can be both direct and indirect.

Direct

when you see this image of an apple you automatically say “apple’

 

Indirect

You see this bird and it is read out as Twitter.

Abstract

This is where the magic happens.

Instead of being a recognizable image—like an apple or a bird—it’s an abstract geometric form that represents your business.

So now that you have your basics down and can differentiate one type of logo from the other…take a look at the umteen number of logos around you and try putting them into these three categories….( Drop your comments on your assessment of logos that fit and logos that don’t)

Because in my next post , I will blur the lines of these clearly demarcated categories and introduce to you a fourth kind – The Logo System and the burst the myth of the ‘perfect logo.’