Different Types of Logos
There are a number of different types of logo designs that can be used to represent a brands identity to the world and we are often surrounded by these in our day to day lives on products such as packaging in supermarkets, on our mobile devices and computers as well as roadside advertisements whenever we are travelling from one destination to another – it is safe to say that branding is everywhere.
I decided to take a deeper look into the different types of logos to give me an insight into what I could create when it comes to creating my personal brand and corporate brand for this IXD103 Brand Identity module.
Wordmark
A word-mark, often referred to as logotype, is a type of logo that communicates the brand name through the use of typography. This is often used in conjunction with a logo-mark, a good example of a logotype being paired with a logo-mark is Spotify where we recognise the company and its products when the logo-mark is displayed on its own but we also recognise the brand when the word-mark is displayed on its own. One of the most recognised word-marks we see today is Google, every time we open the Google search engine you will see the Google logotype displayed on screen, this varies as Google tend to modify their logo on their search engine dependant on certain holidays for example, Valentines day or Christmas.[1]
When it comes to creating a word-mark for a brand it is extremely important to choose the right typography to communicate your brand properly, an example of this would be if you are a brand that aims to provide futuristic products but your logotype uses an old-style serif typeface this probably wouldn’t communicate your brand correctly to its audience whereas a futuristic display typeface or a clean sans-serif typeface may represent that brands values and personality a little better.
I have included some examples of word-mark logos below.
Monogram
A monogram, often referred to as a letter-mark, is a type of logo that shares some similarities to a word-mark logo. Where a word-mark consists of the brands name in full form a letter-mark conveys the brands initial, this is commonly used when the name of the brand is extremely lengthy or contains multiple words. A monogram logo is often seen in clothing brands and clothing designs with one of the most famous monograms being Louis Vuitton where the ‘LV’ is displayed as a monogram on almost all of their products, this is the same with less luxurious clothing brand such as Calvin Klein where the initials of the brand ‘CK’ can be seen across their products. Monograms are not limited to the fashion industry though as they can be seen in other industries such as technology, space exploration and other industries with companies like NASA and IBM.[1]
Similar to a word-mark, a monogram utilises typography in order to communicate the brands identity so it is extremely important to use a suitable typeface that resonates the brands values and it’s personality. A good example of how typefaces fit with the brand is in Louis Vuitton’s monogram where they have opted to use a serif typeface to convey the message that they are a luxury brand selling luxury items to their customers, if they had chose to use a blackletter typeface this may not have conveyed the same message to their audience. Louis Vuitton’s logo is quite interesting as they utilise two different typefaces when the brand name and monogram are combined together, as mentioned before the monogram features a serif typeface but the brand name is displayed in a thin sans-serif typeface.
I have included a few examples of monogram logos below.
Logomark
A logo-mark, also known as a pictorial logo, is a type of logo that is displayed in a simple, symbolic graphic. While a letter-mark uses typography a logo-mark does not have to use typography, instead they use simple geometric shapes to create a simplified version of what their brand name is. A good example of a pictorial logo and possibly one of the most recognised logos in the world is Apple, where they display an Apple with a bite taken out of it in the simplest way possible. This is perfect for including the logo-mark across the brand and it’s products as it allows you to condense the brand image into a simple graphic without it jeopardising the recognition of the brand.[2]
Pictorial logos are often seen in conjunction with typography but it is important to ensure the brand is still recognisable when that typography is removed, a good example of this is in the Spotify logo as I mentioned previously. We still recognise the Spotify brand through its logo-mark even when the logo is displayed without the typography.
I have included some examples of pictorial logos below.
Mascot Logos
Another type of logo is a mascot logo which utilises the use of a mascot in order to represent the brand, this is typically an illustration of a fictional character. These types of logos are perfect for representing brands and companies that have their core values set as being welcoming and family friendly, children love mascots as they have a similar look to characters on children’s TV programs which allow the kids to connect and resonate with the brand. A good example of a mascot logo is KFC where they use Colonel Saunders as their mascot, another example is the mascot design for the company MailChimp which was designed and rendered by Jon Hicks.[1]
I have included some examples of mascot logos below.
Emblem Logos
Emblem logos are another type of logo that are often seen in Universities, Automotive companies and sports teams. An emblem logo is often displayed in the style of a badge or emblem, hence the name. This type of logo does have some similarities to other logo types such as logomarks, lettermarks and wordmarks but they are typically a combination between them all. A good example of emblem logos being used is throughout the automotive industry with companies such as Volkswagen and BMW where they use an emblem logo to represent their brand, this can be seen on all of their products, these logos are extremely bold and can portray the idea of being professional brand. Emblem logos are also seen a lot in sports teams like Manchester United and Hull City where their team logo is displayed as a crest on the shirt of every player in addition to other products they may sell at their stadiums.[1]
Starbuck’s logo is quite interesting as when the logo is displayed without the typography the logo would be considered as a pictorial logo but when the logo is displayed with the Starbucks Coffee around it, it could be considered as an emblem logo as it has similar characteristics to that of an emblem or badge.
I have included some examples of emblem logos below.
Combination Mark
A combination mark is another type of logo that combines all other logo types that I mentioned previously, these logos can be extremely creative and are often used to represent the brand in a fun and unique way. A good example of a combination mark is Burger King where they use a combination of logo types to create a logo that can be recognised as a burger, the designers were extremely creative as they used the company name ‘Burger King’ as the burger within the pictorial logo and built the logo around that to create the image of a burger in a simplistic way.
I have included some examples of combination marks below.
What Is A Brand?
A brand is how a company represents itself to its audience and how it conveys its values and personality through a variety of factors. The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, which is one of the largest companies in the world said “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”, I think this is a great way of describing what a brand is. Your brand must represent who you are and what you are about, this is why companies such as Amazon, Apple, Windows and hundreds of others are extremely successful is because they focus on their values as a company and focus on making an emotional connection to their audience whether that be through building trust or offering some sort of value or status symbol – which Apple seem to have mastered.
“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” – Jeff Bezos
Another quote from Alina Wheeler about branding is “Branding is about making an emotional connection.”, this is extremely important when it comes to creating, developing and building your brand as you have to be able to make an emotional connection with your audience in order to build trust with your customers. If people don’t trust your brand and what you believe in they are highly unlikely to make a positive emotional connection with your brand and become loyal customers and consumers of your products and/or services.
“Branding is about making an emotional connection.” – Alina Wheeler
Target Audiences
When it comes to creating your brand it is important to consider who your target audience is going to be, for example your brand may be a new vegan friendly cafe who offers fresh vegan food everyday, this brand is going to focus their efforts on attracting customers who are vegan and follow a vegan lifestyle as opposed to people who may eat meat on a daily basis. This is extremely important to make sure your brand becomes successful and sustainable as it will help your create products and services for a specific market and allow you to gain a loyal following. When it comes to defining a target audience there a variety of factors that need to be considered in relation to your brand and what products and services it may offer, these may included demographics like location, age, gender, social class and economic class. A good example of this would be how Lamborghini aim their products towards wealthy individuals who are able to afford their products without breaking the bank.
There are a couple different types of target audiences that you could consider when creating a brand, these are a primary target audience and a secondary target audience.
Primary & Secondary Target Audiences
A primary target audience is a group of individuals that your product is most tailored towards and that would hold the most interest and see the most value in your brands product or service. A secondary target audience is a different group of individuals who may discover the brand and build an emotional connection with it.[3] A good example of this would be how Disney markets their brand, their primary audience is children and people of the younger age group where they create characters that are tailored towards this audience but their secondary audience may be parents that are in a much older age bracket as they are being exposed to the product through their children having built an emotional connection with that brand.
Research Methods
Research is extremely important when creating a brand as it allows you to gain insight into gaps within the market you are planning on going into in addition to making sure the business idea doesn’t already exist and if it does exist then research will allow you to see where these companies are going wrong by seeing what their customers are saying about their products or services. There are a number of different research methods that you could use in order to identify problems within the market and tailor your brand to suit those needs, this could be through going out and conducting first-hand research, looking at competitor reviews of similar brands and companies, looking at social media comments about certain brands and companies as well as conducting online surveys to get opinions and responses to questions from real people.
First Hand Research
First hand research is when you go out and conduct research within the real world as opposed to online research techniques, an example of this would be if you are creating a new fast food brand you could go to different fast food restaurants like McDonalds, Burger King, KFC and see how they use branding to market their products, what sort of layout their sites have and the locations of their sites as well as how they market their products through advertisements.
Competitor Reviews
Competitor review research is where you look at existing brands and companies and look at reviews from people who use their products or services, this is a great way to identity specific gaps within the market you are going into as it allows you to see what companies are NOT doing as opposed to what they are doing. An example of this would be looking at the reviews of McDonalds and seeing what their customers are saying and then building your brand around fixing those problems.
Social Media
Social media is a great form a research to see what existing customers are saying about certain brands and companies, millions of people use social media everyday so its great for getting a variety of opinions from people who actually use these products. While this can be bias at times due to the increase in brand deals and sponsorships which favour the brand or company in order to build better brand reputation and brand awareness.
Online Surveys
Online surveys are where you create a survey and get a variety of responses to give you insight into certain problems within the market or even just basic generic information and demographics like age, gender and location. Online surveys are a great form of research but they can be quite slow and yield very little results in comparison to other forms of research.
Affinity Maps
Affinity maps, commonly referred to as affinity diagrams, are an effective way to order your research results into a more condensed format. Affinity diagrams are used to used to order and rank certain results from research into corresponding categories, this allows you to identity the root of each individual issue if you was using this method on your results from competitor research. Affinity maps are a similar idea to brainstorming but they allow you to identify certain problems and issues which you can proceed to find a solution.[4]
I have included an example of an affinity map below to illustrate the idea further.
User Personas
User personas are an extremely good way of identifying your target audience as well as identifying what you should be looking to offer with your brand, a user persona is essentially a fictional person that you create to give you an insight into what sort of customers will be looking to use your product or service. This is often done as a basic overview of their needs and wants from a certain product or service, what they’re frustrations are with a certain product in addition to generic demographic information like age, sex and location etc.[5] Personally I find this extremely useful when it comes to creating a product or brand as it allows you to really open your mind to potential problems that you may not have thought of initially.
I have included an example of a user persona below to illustrate what sort of content could be included.
Workshop Task – Create A User Persona
During our workshop we were tasked with creating a user persona for our modern banking brand that we will be creating for our IXD103 Brand Identity module. For my user persona I wanted to consider a few problems that have become common over the past couple of years, my user persona was interested in getting into cryptocurrencies but he was hesitant as he had heard of banks closing and freezing bank accounts due to a dislike against cryptocurrencies, this was one of his frustrations and his needs is that he would like a bank that is pro-crypto and crypto friendly. Another frustration of his was that he works unsociable hours and rarely has time to visit a bank branch so he needs a bank that is primarily based online and allows he access to everything he need through a digital device.
This allowed me some insight into what sort of services I could offer with my modern bank, especially with the target age group being 16-25 year olds I think the point of cryptocurrency is extremely important as it could be the future and a lot of that age group are extremely interested in it. Using this data I knew that my modern bank had to place a focus on a well-built digital application that is both secure and easy to use in addition to allowing cryptocurrency transactions and possibly even offering saving accounts that are primarily crypto based.
I have included my user persona below.
Empathy Maps
Empathy maps are a great way to identify potential problems within your the industry you are going into, these are often used in conjunction with user personas. An empathy map allows you to put yourself into a potential customers shoes and allows you to think like they would based on the information that your have from the user persona, this allows you some insight into how you could devlop a product or service further to solve their problems and suit their needs from the product that you intend to create.[6]
I have included an example of an empathy map below.
Workshop Task – Create An Empathy Map
During our workshop were were tasked with creating an empathy map from the user persona we had created previously, this allowed us to gain some sort of insight into how our fictional customers would think, what they would say, certain things they may hear and what they might see. For my empathy map I thought about what he would see and hear during his work day in a busy restaurant as he may over hear customer conversations about banking or cryptocurrency or other staff members talking about it. This also allowed me to think about what sort of pain points he may have with his current bank and what sort of services would be beneficial to him.
I have included an image of my empathy map below to illustrate the research I had conducted.
Brand Values
Brand values are possibly the most important part behind creating a brand, if a brand doesn’t have any values and doesn’t believe in anything then they will find it hard to develop and emotional connection with their audience. Values are the substance behind what the brand is about and what they stand for, this could be in the quality of the product or service is or how well they treat their customers, its good to make your brand have style and make it look good with an awesome logo design and brand guidelines but without any substance behind it the brand will more than likely not succeed – a brand must have substance as well as style.
Brand values can be represented as a pyramid with the functional connection being at the bottom, this is the functional use of what the brand offers and if it is beneficial to the customer. In the middle is the emotional connection, this could be the customer developing a love for the brand because they believe in what they stand for, for example supporting the planet by using recycled materials. At the top is the self-expressive benefits, this is the hardest one for a brand to control as it is really defined by the audience of the brand once it becomes more established and well-known.
BxP Value Proposition Map
Brand – The number-one indicator of value. Users develop emotional connections to brands that far outweigh alliance to features.
Experience – Reinforce brand perception by connecting your product’s utility with your users’ emotional reaction. Experience encompasses everything from onboarding to social media presence to customer service.
Product – Ironically the very last piece to your value proposition.
Tone Of Voice
Tone of voice is another important factor that needs to be consider when it comes to creating and developing a brand, this will be how the brand will communicate to its customers and should represent the personality of the brand. An example of this would be if you are creating a brand that is trying to build a reputation for being extremely professional then you may want to use professional language when it comes to copywriting and communicating with the brands audience, coming across as casual and using slang words may not be the best way to build a professional reputation.
Linguistic Registers
Frozen – This form is sometimes called the static register because it refers to historic language or communication that is intended to remain unchanged, like a constitution or prayer.
Formal – Used in professional, academic, or legal settings where communication is expected to be respectful, uninterrupted, and restrained. Slang is never used.
Consultative – Used often in conversation when they’re speaking with someone who has specialized knowledge or who is offering advice. Tone is respectful but may be more casual if the relationship is longstanding. Slang is sometimes used, people may pause or interrupt one another.
Casual – With friends, close acquaintances and co-workers, and family. It’s probably the one you think of when you consider how you talk with other people. Use of slang and vernacular grammar is all common, and people may also use expletives or off-color language in some settings.
Intimate – Non-public; intonation more important than wording or grammar; private vocabulary. Also includes non-verbal messages. This is most common among family members and close friends.
References & Sources
- 99designs. 2022. The 7 types of logos (and how to use them) – 99designs. [ONLINE] Available at: https://99designs.co.uk/blog/tips/types-of-logos/. [Accessed 27 January 2022].
- The Logo Creative | International Logo Design & Branding Studio. 2022. The Different Types Of Logo Design – Logos, Logo Designs. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.thelogocreative.co.uk/the-different-types-of-logo-design/. [Accessed 27 January 2022].
- Bizfluent. 2022. Primary vs. Secondary Target Market | Bizfluent. [ONLINE] Available at: https://bizfluent.com/facts-5551909-primary-vs-secondary-target-market.html. [Accessed 27 January 2022].
- study.com. 2022. No page title. [ONLINE] Available at: https://study.com/academy/lesson/affinity-diagrams-definition-examples.html. [Accessed 27 January 2022].
- Ideas. 2022. What Are User Personas and Why Are They Important? | Adobe XD Ideas. [ONLINE] Available at: https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/user-research/putting-personas-to-work-in-ux-design/. [Accessed 27 January 2022].
- WordPressBlog. 2022. What is an Empathy Map | Accenture. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/software-engineering-blog/what-is-an-empathy-map. [Accessed 27 January 2022].