Posts from — September 2008

September 30, 2008

With apologies to Robert Fulghum and students currently over-paying for a masters education, everything I learned about good design, I learned by the time I finished kindergarten.

Design, when it works, is self-evident, and fulfills a real need. This quality applies to the most pragmatic demands of any product design, from a simple milk pitcher to a complex device such an iPhone. The objects’ level of sophistication is irrelevant relative to the subject’s need being met.

Quality product designs follow laws of nature, like gravity, and the size and dexterity of our hands, among others. These laws guide the design process with immediate and constructive feedback and constraints. For example, if you put the handle on the wrong side of a milk pitcher, like the one on the cover of The Psychology of Everyday Things by Donald Norman, you can immediately see its design flaw. Even my five year old can. While it may succeed as art or a craft, it fails as design. 

Too many logo designs I see are just a flawed because they are illegible. And my kindergartner is just as proficient in pointing this out. You may think this point is dramatically overstating the ridiculously obvious, but it’s sadly not. While I’m not going to launch into why this happens or who’s to blame, I will say as a paid professionals, designers should know better. I’ll also say, clients, as a paid professionals managing a budget, should know better. Tragically, I know a designer who’s responsible for an incredibly illegible logo that gained national recognition from a national design organization for their involvement in designing (pro bono) posters promoting literacy. I’m starting to digress, but there is a real problem here! It can’t all be about the superficial and the altruistic and be of high quality. I’m insulted, not as a designer, but as a kindergarten graduate.

I like to think of legibility as a law of nature. I realize it assumes a certain level of intelligence, education and some context. But since an average kindergartner can identify a legible alphabet, it’s hard to contend a logo design needs not to adhere to such a law. If you looked at legibility as critically as gravity or key human factors (such as the size of your hand in relation to the pitcher’s handle), it becomes a wonderfully useful tool in recognizing higher from lower quality. Legibility is the beginning, the middle and end for a logo’s quality. It sets up other performance factors as well, such as reproducibility, and the opportunity for other values and meaning be attributed to it.

Regardless of what you pay for your logo, who you hire, or what exotic paper is specced for your business card, legibility is a must. Make sure you don’t forget what you learned when you were five.

September 29, 2008

We’ve all been there, the umpteenth round of random, conflicting, and unreconcilable request for more logo revisions. It’s frustrating, degrading, unprofitable, yet it happens more often than we’d care to admit. Here are a few remedies accountable to the designer:

1. Check your egos at the door. Their logo not about you, your portfolio, or your “art.” Logos are a design challenge. I’ll lean on Mr. Rand again and remind that “a logo derives meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around.” To achieve the most fundamental level of quality, cover these most rudimentary factors: legibility, reproducibility, and appropriateness.

2. Set proper expectations. Expectations that are based on the clients challenges you can realistically solve. Realistic in time, budget, quantity, presentations and amount of involvement on their end. It can be just as irresponsible to enable client expectations the logo that will solve business challenges like “sales force disunity” or “increase customer awareness.” A logo is a key element in introducing an idea or company or brand with it’s audience, not closing sales or building external awareness. It’s not the complete company history, or list of features and benefits, or an advertising campaign. By itself it won’t spike sales, gloss over bad management practices, or instantly change customers minds. But it can be a key component in establishing or reinvigorating certain initiatives.

3. Establish and lead the process. Clients aren’t experts at designing, and they aren’t experts at hiring corporate identity/logo design services either. How could they be, they only do it once in a career, twice if they are lucky. You’re the expert and make them feel like one too for hiring you. Random opinions, critiques, and endless rounds of revisions won’t ensure a solution. Taking responsibility to understand their key business challenges, addressing them the best you can, and managing their expectations will. In my experience, first establishing agreed upon criteria before showing visual ideas ensures a much more predictable number of revisions and minimizes random opinions and derailing thoughts. It’s a good example of the 80/20 principle. 

4. Make sure all people who are approving work are involved from the beginning. It’s a simple thing to ask, but easily brushed off, and is key in maintaining realistic expectations and a productive process. If the CEO or some other rogue voter drops in late in the process, you’ll end up with more random opinions and derailing thoughts to work through. Opinions from people who’s expectations, understanding, and expertise aren’t properly oriented will only hurt the quality. If this can’t be agreed upon upfront, do not pass GO, do not collect $200! Assure executive briefs will be part of any of the presentations or key process milestones to keep things in check and productive - we all have too many meetings to sit through. If you happen to find yourself facing a rogue decision maker late in the game, spend the “extra” time to orient and educate them before showing them anything visual to critique.

In my experience, if you explain yourself and why this is a good thing for them up front; in terms of achieving quality, staying on time and budget, you won’t get much objective from good clients. 

If a decision maker won’t agree to stay involved at even a high level from the start, the process will take longer, cost more money, and should be reflected in your proposed work scope. Then it’s on the table, and is their choice.