Developing a new or refreshed corporate or brand identity is often a response to change. Many factors will drive that change – new management, mergers, acquisitions, product development, or a competitor’s threat to a core business.
A brand’s identity is a combination of visual, auditory, and other sensory components that create recognition, aid in memory encoding and decoding, represent the brand promise, provide differentiation, create communications synergy, and are proprietary. The logo is one key component. Here is what The Blake Project looks for when we evaluate logo design:
When organizations and brands are in the process of changing their identity, I’ve noticed a tendency that it’s easier for executives to focus their energy on “breaking the change to the world” through measured marketing communications, rather than creating a prior strategy of bringing the inner-vested into the identity conversation early on.
Contrary to what many believe, the logo is still the main event in communicating the essence of what a brand represents. Within our obsessively condensed attention spans, the logo is more important than ever.
In an era of crowd sourcing and online $100 logo design, the specialized skills and talents involved in identity design are seemingly being marginalized even further. Are big iconic brands moving in that direction?
