What’s the number one thing you should do when creating logo?

I’ll give you a couple of clues: it’s just one word, begins with r, ends with h and rhymes with research.

This is one, because there are many, of the key aspects that unfortunately some creatives forget to leave out of their time-lines. Sometimes you can scrape by without it for a whilte, but more often than not you’ll get called out for it. Like the creative who forgot how gears worked when they designed the logo for Department of Innovation at the Smithsonian.

If you look even briefly at the gears in the before version you can see that they’re locked in place, unable to move without breaking. Hardly a fitting logo for a department that is supposedly forward thinking and perhaps even planning to be innovative. Upon its debut the logo was met with widespread criticism from the internets, and rather than reason with the beast the Smithsonian sent the designer back to the drawing board and they came back with the revised logo on the right. Though the gears may work in this version it still doesn’t address the other fundamental flaws with this design. Such as the fact that gears have been around for nearly two thousand years, possibly longer, and can’t really be considered a current innovation, or perhaps the issue of the five stars, the deployment of the letters and so on.

When a logo is designed with the correct amount of research and thought the results can be astonishing. Have a look at the logo above for the Sony Vaio sub-brand; the interweaving of the analogue and digital themes reflects the integration that Sony strives to achieve with their Vaio products. As well as being attractive to the eye, simple and easy to understand, it also manages to communicate the brands core values. Of course, sometimes you might just want to have some fun with your logo. Which is why LG have Pac-Man hidden in theirs.

Without doing the research you can’t know what the client wants in their logo, and you can’t know how implement it.

If you need a logo, or anything else, designed then why not submit a brief to the Creative Services Exchange.