Logo Design | The Finalization Stage

The Finalization Stage

How will the RSL Communications logo turn out? In this lecture, we'll trace its development through the finalization stage.

As you may already be aware, shape is the fastest component of visual recognition. Other aspects of visual recognition, such as the ability to identify a pattern, text, and even color, are understood less quickly.

This is one reason that logos are such a powerful element in a company's or product's identity.

This lecture will discuss the finalization of a logo, with a specific focus on the relationship of positive to negative space. The case study will take an extraordinary turn and hold more surprises than we could possibly have imagined.

 

The Coca-Cola company (also known as Coke) has a very detailed script logo with well-established brand equity. Very few companies have a stronger brand recognition than Coke does, but it is not necessarily because its logo is well designed.

When Coke acquired its logo before the turn of the century, there was no competition. Since then, the success of its refreshing beverage has created a strong brand that makes the logo instantly recognizable almost anywhere.

It is interesting to consider that if a new company were to launch a logo of this complexity, the company might never succeed. The logo is detailed and ornate. Coke has periodically considered modifying the logo, but could not make any substantial changes without damaging the brand.

The classic bottle shape is another logo used by Coke in places such as the company's website.

Coke solved this challenge by revisiting an earlier identity solution. The designers placed the logo on a red circle. A field of strong color on such a simple geometric shape is a very powerful visual unit that is hard to disrupt and stands out in the crowd. Like many other beverage companies with long histories but young audiences, Coca-Cola keeps the main logo design, but often revises the shapes and other visuals that surround it. This maintains the long-term success of the brand while appealing to its modern consumer.

It's imperative that a logo's shape is strong and coherent, achieved through strong delineation of positive and negative space.

Positive and Negative Space

Fine details and thin lines usually do not belong in a logo. In fact they are the major enemy of successful logo design.

A logo must consist of as few elements as possible while still conveying its message. Some challenging techniques are used to ensure this effect. The most important is to use not only the positive space of the shape (indicated in black below—the areas that are printed) but also the negative space. Negative space appears as white within black below, the areas that are "empty," formed by the positive space and not actually printed with ink.

Logos created by Malcolm Grear for the Audubon Society of Rhode Island.

This technique's benefits are twofold: It allows us to define shapes without using thin lines. Using lines to define a shape in logos is practically considered cheating. It is much easier than using positive/negative space, but it makes the logo unable to support reduction, as we discussed in Lecture Two.

These three logos, for a record company, a freelance copywriter, and a conservation organization all have one thing in common: successful use of negative space in their logo designs.

The other benefit is that it allows you to display twice the information with less detail. Detail, as we know, easily gets lost when the logo is small or the viewer is quickly browsing by.

Above, you can see a couple of nice studies of negative space from a Studio Vistas book. Here, very simple and clean letters create interesting images. The numbers on the left are from an experimental booklet on typography and the letters to the right are the logo for a steel company.

Creating letter shapes with negative space is a great way to reinforce a brand name with subtlety.

We're used to seeing and recognizing the positive area first, so it can be a real challenge to discover the "gold" hiding in the negative space. When you are developing logos it is smart to invert everything you are working on and continue working on it in reverse. This way, what used to be positive is now negative. You may have a better chance at discovering the essence of your work.

The posters above created by graphic designer Malcolm Grear are not a part of a logo but they take advantage of the famous shape of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York.

This logo for a photographer makes excellent use of both positive and negative space, creating strong, stylized hand and eye shapes.

While negative space must always be considered as you design a logo, it's not required that you create a shape with negative space in every logo you design. Sometimes it's the perfect solution, but not always. It is more important that you create a strong, defining shape for a brand regardless of whether it is in the positive or negative space.

None of these logos forms a new, specific shape with negative space. Bold, memorable shapes are formed with the positive.

Sometimes, the negative space isn't seen immediately, but makes an impact. We've all seen the FedEx logo, time and again. Can you see the arrow?

Walter Landor developed the logo design for FedEx in 1994, complete with "hidden" arrow, suggesting speed and efficiency.

 

Case Study, Part III
Moving Forward with the Mercury Approach

In the previous lecture, we looked at the many directions the RSL Communications project could take. That was the rough stage, now let's look at the fine variations of a few samples.

The thumbnails to the left and right are a few of the trials for the mercury logo approach.

Since the Mercury logo is a face, it requires a lot of attention. The expression is very important and very subtle. Some of the faces look too old, some look too young. In a few instances we even arrived at a face that looked dumb or uninterested.

Look around at the thumbnails and see if you can register different facial expressions for each of them. It is interesting how different they can be! We were looking for a proud, heroic figure to give the company a strong, reliable appearance.

The thumbnail with "RSL COM" under it was close, but there was still something wrong where his ear connects to the "sound waves," and it was still a little too complicated. It is closest to the next stage which we presented to the company:

This was an early "final" stage Mercury for a preliminary meeting with RSL COM at their headquarters in New York City. Note that a logo has to be presented in several sizes to prove that it remains legible from billboard to letterhead.

Although the logo seems final, there is still a lot of fine-tuning to be done once a "final" gets client approval. If you compare the logo above with the corrected and fine-tuned version below, you will see that this one is more stylized, and has a cleaner structure.

All the lines are now on a grid to make sure they have equal thickness and that the negative space is balanced. We were very close to done, or so we thought. We'll catch up with RSL Communications one last time at the end of this lecture. But first, let's talk some more about this idea of refining your logo to a final version.

Fine-Tuning and Presenting a Final Logo
Defining the Final Product

You've researched like crazy, designed dozens or even hundreds of preliminary marks, found the perfect typeface, and narrowed your concept down to the best of the best. But that's not where the story ends.

In most cases, like RSL COM logo above, the design you've decided on needs some final tweaking before it's ready for launch. But at this point in the process, you may have stared at your logo for so long, that it's hard to see where to tweak or when to stop tweaking.

Try to step back and look at your logo as objectively as possible—as if you've never seen it before. Does it look crooked? Oddly spaced? Too drab in color? When you've identified problems, take time to correct them carefully, considering:

	Placement of every single letter of type. Is the kerning or tracking attractive? Are the letters close enough to feel bound together, but far enough apart to be readable? Alignment of images and type. Is everything properly aligned to a grid? Or if intentionally misaligned, does it look intentional and not like a mistake? Color. Have you selected proper colors that will work well in the intended media—packages, Web sites, trucks—wherever the logo will go. Line weight. Are your lines of an appropriate weight for printing at various sizes? Are the weights consistent throughout? Legibility. Do tweaks to all of the above affect the legibility of the image or text?

The logo for Alaska's travel industry is an example of one with clearly intentional misalignment. None of the letters share a common baseline on a grid, lending a feel of ruggedness that's appropriate for Alaskan travel. This was likely dealt with extremely carefully in the fine-tuning stage of its development. If any one of these letters was moved up or down slightly, the intentional misalignment might look more like a design oversight.

It's also likely that the designers of this logo dealt with the space between the letters very carefully. Notice how neatly they all fit together without feeling squashed.

Television network HGTV most likely went through a similar process in the development of their initial logo. They may have also worked with the details of the negative space "G" to make it as readable as possible without outlining it. Additionally, they probably had to work very carefully with the line weights of the "TV" letters because fine lines can often get lost on television more readily than they do in print.

As you can see, the fine-tuning considerations vary quite a bit based on the nature of the design as well as the intended usage.

Logo Delivery and Manual

When it's time to deliver the final logo to the client, you'll typically need to provide a range of files. These depend on the client's planned uses of the logo, but typically include: vector files (EPS and/or AI) for scaling to any size, files for print (TIFF and/or JPEG), files for the web (JPEG and/or GIF), and possibly others.

Additionally, it's wise to present your final logo in a few design mock-ups so the client can understand how the logo will look in its intended media. You might Photoshop it to a photo of a delivery truck, create some simple letterhead, or insert it in a sample web banner.

Finally, every good logo relies on consistency of presentation to make it memorable with consumers. For this reason, the logo designer typically supplies the client with a brand manual (also known as a standards manual, style manual, logo guide, or other similar name). The brand manual defines how the logo should (and should not) appear in various media. You should collaborate with your client often in the production of this document so you account for all of the planned uses of the logo and leave it flexible enough for other designers to use.

The manual may include diagrams of how much space to place around a logo, samples of colors that are acceptable to print the logo in, horizontal vs. vertical usage, where the tagline should sit, typefaces that should accompany the logo in written documents, and so on. It can be a brief document with lots of flexibility or hundreds of pages long with tons of rules, as is often the case for a multi-national corporation.

Many companies keep their brand manuals top secret so competitors don't learn trade secrets. But some brand manuals are available freely online for designers to peruse. Open source content management system company Joomla! provides all of the company's brand manual and logo information right on its website. Check it out here. It outlines the logo structure, tagline use, color palettes, and more, and should give you a good idea of what brand manuals typically contain, though of course they vary with every client and logo design.

Student Steven Graw considered some brand manual rules and fine-tuning needs when he completed a logo for fictitious company Fisher Investments. Explore his thought process and final design in this Quick Crit.

Now let's take another look at the RSL Communications project. Just imagine that you've finalized your logo, worked on your brand manual, and now...

Case Study, Part IV
A Sharp Turn in the Project

We received notice from the highest level in RSL Communications that the company had decided to go for a more traditional look (similar to the AT&T logo). It was decided that an old circle logo with two receivers we had developed early on was the one the client wanted—we had to discard the Mercury approach entirely.

The development stage and the line study of the "Circle" logo.

Now we had to develop and fine-tune a whole new logo. We found that we had to create several variations to correspond to different sizes, because lines cut across the image, and larger logos can handle more lines without getting smudgy. So a small logo had to be slightly different from a big one.

After a lot of tweaking, we arrived at the perfect combination of lines and colors and the client was very happy with the result. A brand manual, letterheads, business cards, and other stationery was produced.

I would have rather developed the Mercury logo—this one was a little too traditional for me—but I was pleased with the final result.

We were ready to pack it in, cash our checks, and go home. It had been a long, long process to arrive at what you see below. Of course, this logo design project was for a huge company, and we had a team of designers to work with. Many jobs need not be so complex or so long, and many are not. But you should never be careless. They don't call it corporate identity for nothing; it is, after all, the very identity of the company.

 

The Big Surprise

As a design firm we had conducted research to find competitive logos, but this research was for creative use, not as a legal search for visual availability. Part of the logo design process is just that—an early stage during which the client should discover what logos are taken, what people have already used, so that when the designer produces a sheaf of drafts, some can be put away immediately because they are already taken.

In major cities, you can find law offices that specialize in this search for logos and check their availability. But that is an expensive procedure and may only be necessary for companies of a certain size which plan to operate internationally.

Our client figured such a search wasn't necessary, and an unimaginable catastrophe was suddenly upon us: A Taiwanese company called Chungwa Telecom already had a logo almost identical to the one we had just created, a logo RSL Communications had already begun to use!

The lesson here: The (creative) human brain works in similar ways the world over. Our thought process had already taken place in a Taiwanese design office. The two logos developed in different parts of the world had too much in common to remain unchanged.

This little fellow above in the overalls has the logo printed on his chest. The Taiwanese design office already had a longer history than RSL and had developed a permanent corporate identity with the logo. Here are samples of Chungwa Telecom's identity at work.

The telephone cards of Chungwa Telecom of Taiwan, we found out, are considered collector's items.

It was soon clear that there was no chance of buying out the rights to use the logo.

So the only possible alternative was to go back to the drafting table and change the design enough to be different from the Chungwa company.

The logo would have to be redesigned, but we'd already started establishing equity. We couldn't harm what brand identification had already come to RSL Communications. We had to work within some pretty narrow guidelines.

After hours and hours of further work we found that each phone receiver suggested a circle—a perfect redesign of the logo was to use two globes. After hours of legal deliberation everyone's lawyers agreed that this would be different enough from Chungwa Telecom. At the same time we were able to maintain what equity we had built for RSL Communications.

The final logo of the RSL COM Telecommunication Company.

And that's how the story ended. Above is a detail of the brand manual, which stipulates in hundreds of detailed pages how the logo should and should not appear.

Wait, did I say the story ended? A good logo's story never truly ends. Logos are designed for longevity and consistency in the long term, and I'm happy to say that RSL Communication's logo was in use for many years until the company was dissolved.

RSL COM's logo was in place and effective for years. Logo designers leave a lasting impression on the marketplace.

Discussion Share your thoughts and opinions with other students at the Discussions board. Exercise Present a critical commentary on a well-known logo and finalize your own.