Eras, beliefs, technology and trends change and design is a big part of that. Stay still for too long and you get left behind.
Blogs and design sites are an excellent way of keeping up to date and are a super source of inspiration for designers. These sites give us the latest design information, news and examples of work to get our creative juices flowing. Last week I came across a list for trends in logo design for 2009. Apparently this year the trends are: Psychedelic Pop, a cocktail of colourful, overlapping blobby shapes; Arabesque, which uses patterns from Middle Eastern calligraphy and a trend for eye-watering techno colour with complex shapes named 80’s Geometry Lesson.
Great, so this is what designers should be following in order to create fresh, successful brands, right? Wrong. Any professional designer worth their salt will know to veer away from defined trends. First things first, well-executed logos do not follow a trend. They should echo the unique personality of the company they are representing and each branding project should be approached with an open mind, and with the client’s best interests first. Any design that relies solely on trend for its aesthetic is deemed for the design dustbin in the not too distant future. Sometimes these trends are relevant to the brand and the Museum of London has used the Psychedelic Pop trend relatively successfully.
Let’s look at last year’s logo trends. Top on the list were Organic 3D Marbles like Barclaycard or Xerox’s latest effort. Bigger yet were the plethora of reproduction nightmare “Web 2.0” logos in all their shining glory, reflections, shadows, gradients, acid colours, rounded fonts, bells and indeed whistles. Brilliant for Skype, but inappropriate for the new Packard Bell logo. It will be interesting to see how the logo transfers to their products.
The brands that have irrelevantly used last years trends are already showing their age even before they have been fully implemented. They are nothing more than throwaway design with no long-term vision, a disaster for clients and a financial flop. They also incur the client continuous additional costs, as they are often difficult to implement. Maybe it’s because technology has enabled every Tom, Dick and Harry with the correct software to have a bash at branding and these superficial designers rely on trends to follow as they lack the important groundwork most trained designers acquire. All the gear and no idea.
Design is a service at the end of the day and everybody should receive value for money. A good brand should pay for itself over time. Well-executed identities remain timeless and memorable with just the need for a refresh or a nip and tuck over their lifespan. Although, not all logos produced today show a laxidasial attitude to good design. Many future classics are being created and they seem to be the ones that favour fundamental beliefs and an aversion to current trends.
Those beliefs are visible in many of the well-considered identities that are as fresh today as they were when they were created years ago. Apple, Chanel, FedEx, Pirelli, CocaCola…I would even personally be the first to chain myself to the railings of the V&A museum in protest if they rebranded my favourite logo of theirs. Designed in 1989 by design hero, the late Alan Fletcher, its simplicity, intelligence, elegance and practicality for implementation onto any surface, any size is first class. It looks great on screen, in print, in the environment and will do so for many more years to come.
More and more, we question whether the traditional principals and constraints of identity design are still relevant today – such as do all logos need to be reproducible in black even if full colour is available digitally and most work is on screen but I think they do. Simply because if you start with a solid, meaningful brand it can be built on for different applications. Feel free to swish, twirl, whizz the thing across the screen if it forms an essential part of the overall brand. But at least start with a base of integrity.
Keep it relevant. Keep it fresh. Keep it personal to the client.
(And well done me for not mentioning the Olympic logo…oops!)