Microsoft is expected to unveil a new logo today. Over the past 26 years, the Microsoft logo has undergone roughly eight redesigns, but they’ve never deviated from the four-paned window. When the company introduced its new, simplified logo this spring, they positioned it as a radical departure from tradition—new font, new imagery, new color. In reality, says Kim, “the new logo is radical, but does not shed the past.” Furthermore, what works on a Microsoft Office box doesn’t necessarily work for the brand’s rapidly expanding line of products, like XBox and Surface. “Microsoft is showing a progressive vision that was missing in the company for years,” says Kim, and their logo should reflect that progressivity. By clinging to the past, Microsoft is projecting a muddled picture of its new direction.
For typeface geeks in the crowd, it looks like the Nets logo uses Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk Condensed. For the hip-hop-artist-gone-entrepreneurial-giant fans in the crowd, well, the creator included a composite rendering of the new branding being worn by none other than Nets co-owner Jay-Z himself. Consider it a conceptual preview of the massive wave of shameless brand-whoring and the Jay Pharoah SNL parodies thereof to come.
If you read one thing today, it should probably be this:
Let’s do a little experiment: Erase the logo from every single one of your brand identifiers—products, stationary, signage. Close your eyes, now reopen them. Is there anything left? Would consumers still recognize those items as belonging to your brand? Look at your packaging, your copy, your colors, your design, your font, your spacing. Do any of them convey your brand’s identity? Or without a logo are you adrift and bailing water?
Next let’s examine your website. Again, by eliminating the logo, you’ll embark on a fun (I promise) and instructive exercise that will relieve you of any stubborn logo-fixations that may still be nagging at you. It’s one that will force you into acknowledging the value that every single one of your communication elements plays in defining your brand’s identity. Okay, still hiding the brand logo, eyeball your copy, your graphics, whether your pages are spare or dense-looking. Do all these things convey what your brand represents? Does your brand have a personality anymore, or is it standing shyly and stiffly against the wall, hoping no one notices it now looks (I hate to tell you) like every other brand out there?
