One of the hardest parts of designing the winning logo will be getting something memorable, but flexible. We’ve discussed recently about some designs lacking an obvious signia or iconic element that could work on its own, such as Spreadshirt TM by Family:
I planned to post about the London 2012 logo at some point, and whilst browsing found this example. This logo is one London used during their successful bid for the Olympic Games. I thought it was an interesting example of how a logo that is lacking an obvious stand-alone icon (the rings itself representing the olympic games, not londons bid)
The second image is a proposal for adding it to St Mary’s Axe or “the gherkin” as its affectionately known (I guess this didn’t actually happen). But its shows that the colour ribbon band can be removed and used as a stand alone graphic in a variety of settings, outside of traditional logo locations. Seeing this example really made me appreciate the strength of the logo more.
Found via 38one, the logo design blog
Interestingly the design by Norman Foster of Kino Design won a contest similar to OLP which received over 1100 entries! Does anyone else have similar examples with other logos? Whats the most flexible design you’ve seen entered so far?
It’s hard to gauge as there are so many good designers submitting good quality logos, and we don’t always see what each designer intends for variations to the logo.
Of the ones I think are most successful, it’s clear that something that has a separate icon (usually placed to the left, like theoze’s ‘pencilshirt thingy offers more versatility, but I’m not sure there’s a magic one yet that suffers huge reduction and standing alone (like a favicon) that 100% does the job. It could just be one that’s shortlisted or in the final that needs some final adjustments/tweaking.
In comparison, the one in the final that’s a little tag attached to the ’s’ of spread (can’t remember the name, but it’s on a black background and the tag is orange) doesn’t have that standalone icon – if you showed it without the ’spreadshirt’ text it would make no sense (as of yet).