Graphic Design Lesson - A History of Logo Design

A logo is a sign, symbol, trademark or badge which conveys the identity or ownership of a product, company, campaign or concept in as memorable a way as possible.

A logo can be used in many different forms, sizes and contexts. For example, the logo for a hotel could be printed on a letterhead or menu, embroidered onto a napkin or jacket, embossed on metal cutlery or illuminated as a huge neon sign on the side of the building.

A logo should be simple so that it retains its clarity of design in different contexts. If it is too complicated, its details may be lost when it is reduced in scale. Also, a simple logo design is faster to read, easier to remember and consequently more instantly identifiable.

The 'I Love New York' logo by Milton Glaser, one of the most reproduced logos ever, illustrates most of these basic qualities.

A logo should convey an immediate and memorable identity and must connect with its target audience in a positive manner.

The Ancient Egyptians are known to have branded domestic animals with hieroglyphs to mark their ownership.

The Ancient Romans and Greeks marked their pottery to identify the manufacturer.

The great faiths of the world have all adopted symbols for ease of recognition.

From the 12th century onwards through medieval times, heraldic designs (coats of arms) were used to identify the status and property of the nobility.

In general, however, the most common early logos were trademarks signifying the origin or quality of a craftsman's product. Hallmarks, which testify to the quality of precious metals, are a good example of this practice.

At the start of the 20th century with the introduction of colour printing and the birth of the advertising industry, logo designs tended to use a vocabulary of national, nautical, heraldic, and agricultural images. The public readily understood the meaning of these symbols. National and heraldic symbols (crowns, flags and coats of arms) meant dignity and status while nautical and agricultural symbols (seascapes, life buoys, wheat stalks and farm animals) represented purity and freshness.

Unlike today, there was no concept of targeted advertising and designers freely used all these images to advertise any product. Ironically cigarettes, before their association with ill health, used the full vocabulary of symbols to make their merchandise more appealing.

Over the last century, our lifestyles gradually became more complex. Conversely, the design of logos became simpler for ease and speed of recognition in a faster world. The evolution of the Shell Logo throughout the 20th century clearly demonstrates this effect. In fact, the art of logo design illustrates the design concept "Less is More" better than any other graphic form.

Logos, as we know them today, are intelligent graphic images that are carefully designed to impart their concepts, both consciously and sub-consciously, for immediate recognition by a specific target audience.

LESSON PLAN DEVELOPING CREATIVE IDEAS FOR GRAPHIC DESIGNS A graphic design is a creative arrangement of image and type that communicates a visual concept with a clarity and economy of means. There are tried and trusted techniques that you can use to increase your creativity in the search for a solution to any graphic design. In this lesson we use the symbols below to demonstrate a range of composition techniques that will help you to create and develop ideas for your graphics. Click on each symbol to see how it is developed into a creative idea for a graphic design. Once you have studied our examples you can find other symbols in our Graphic Design Resources that you may print and use to create your own graphic ideas. EXAMPLES




How to Create Ideas	Designing a Logotype	The Art of Typography
Image Resources	Evaluating Your Designs	History of Logos