Below are what I consider examples of “Good Design” when it comes to logos and branding. The thing these all have in common is that they are relatively two dimentional, similar shape layout and they all use basic colours (usually white and a colour) but this gives versitility to how the logos can be used outside of a paper version on a letterhead or a leaflet.
As mentioned both logos are flat, but they both also have no text to name the brand. Is it required? Well for sake of an argument “No” but that is most likely because we are used to seeing these logos in most areas. Especially in urban areas like large towns and cities, but more widely avaliable is seeing these logos in movies, advertising campaigns (TV and online) and so on.
When looking at these two logos they suggest that the company is well-known, but also modern. The Starbucks coffee logo has some emotion to it too, though the imagry is a little bizarre with the character’s legs(?) being in an odd posistion (sure there is theory or debate about it somewhere) However with the more human qualities to the subject it is possible that it can create a sens of happiness from buying this specific company’s product(s).
The second logo is for Beats headphones, I could say pretty much the same thing as for the starbucks logo however the imagery is different. Personally I think that the logo looks like half of a headphone or even a music note, straight away the connection to what the product is used for is made. Unlike the Starbucks logo the colour used is different (being red instead) therefore potentially giving a different meaning through connotations of colour and so on, in this case I’d argue that the red could symbolize passion rather than the usual danger, simply because someone who is passionate about enjoying music (or sound quality) are likely going to want this product to continue their passion.
Mentioned some logos I consider good, so now for some that are bad.
Below are two more logos by two large companies; IBM and Google (Specifically Google Chrome). First of all the IBM logo, is similar to the two “good” examples with basic colours, two dimentions, etc but personally I think it looks pretty bad, having the characters made up of several pieces makes little sense to me other than to make the viewer look and try to work out what they are looking at. Again it’s a versitile logo but it isn’t visually appealing, somehow looks too complicated.
Secondly there is an older logo (icon?) for Google Chrome. I don’t like this logo at all, sure it looks okay, it conforms to the various colours associated with google, but it is too complicated and the use of creating the illusion of three-dimentional objects in a two-dimentional plain is pretty unappealing. It really does bring the “Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.” quote to logo design. Now the problem with my argument is that compaines have used three-dimentional logos in the past as a trend, company x did it and sold well so company y followed conventions and so on. However with the push into perhaps post-modern design the current trend suggest that customers prefer more basic imagery rather than something complex, times change and so does the overall perspective of the target audience(s).