How Companies Can Create a Brand Identity With Text Alone

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For the third and final installment in our three-part series on logo design, we’re taking a look at the simplicity of the logotype — a brand identity that contains only text.

Logotypes, like those of Facebook or Etsy, play on two important facets of design — typography and color — to the exclusion of other elements. They can be elegant and even clever, or they can fall flat. We’ll take a look at how a few examples walk that line.

Our panel of experts includes UK logo designer Graham Smith, designer and logo design blogger Jacob Cass and Raj Abhyanker, CEO of Trademarkia, a firm specializing in trademarks and logos.

Read on for their advice, and designers, please share your own experiences and opinions in the comments section.

How to Handle Logotypes

Smith is a fan of “strong and well executed” logotypes.

“We see them all the time in the fashion and retail stores, as well as the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. The latter [are] the bolder and vibrant online variations of type-only logo designs that work to cut above all the visual noise one finds online. The Facebook logo brings a calm yet firm aesthetic.”

Smith pointed out that at the time Facebook’s logo was being designed, the trend was toward the “Web 2.0″ look of funky fonts and lots of transparency layers. But the young company “showed that a type-only logo in just one color needn’t be dull or useless.” He says that several of his clients have looked to the Facebook logo as guide for their own branding.

Cass shares his own “very generic” rule of thumb about logotypes: “If your company has a unique name, then you could get away with a logotype. But if you have a generic name, then you’re going to need something to identify the company by, which can be achieved by using a logo mark.”

He also says he enjoys seeing unique logotypes that incorporate interesting or “hidden” shapes into an otherwise simple logo. “I recently designed a logo for a company by the rather generic name of Redwave Systems. Rather than creating a mark for the business, I created a unique logotype by ‘hiding’ a wave in the logo.” A prominent example of a clever logo is the FedEx logo, which has an arrow between the E and X.

Abhyanker advises, however, that logotypes tend to be “less distinctive, more generic,” and many color and type combinations are common enough that they open the doors to potential trademark litigation.

“Ultimately,” Smith concludes, “it comes down to the brief, and what is needed visually to represent the client. If the brief and subsequent research leads you to a logotype as the best solution to represent the identity of a company, then that’s what you do.”

Chime In

We’d love to get your feedback in the comments. Designers, how would you have answered the questions we posed to the panel this week?

You can also take a look at the first post in the series, which focuses mainly on logo design for startups, and the second logo design post, which is all about spec work, contests, crowdsourcing and the dangerous allure of trendy logos.

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