If you don't think some of these logos are "successful logos", fine. But
where are the products/companies/organizations with large multi-colored
logos with lots of word plastered all over them?
Most of your objections were petty, uninformed, and/or irrelevant. However:
I included the other encyclopedias' logos not necessarily because I
thought they were good, but because they are our competition. I'm sure
Britannica's logo is the way it is because it has been that way for a
long time. Grolier's logo isn't just the word Grolier, but it has a
swashed R and is in a particular font. Technially, that makes it a
logotype, but the idea of usage is the same.
Coca-cola's logo is written in a variety of scripts, but even though it
is monolingual it is BusinessWeek's #1 global brand. See
http://bwnt.businessweek.com/brand/2003/index.asp
As for Atari, Infogrames recently purchased the Atari brand and changed
their name to Atari. See
http://www.atari.com/. They probably did that
because the Atari brand name and logo are still well known long after
the demise of the original company. Truly a sign of a successful logo.
See also
http://images.google.com/images?q=atari+shirt&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&…
The USPS logo is a stylized eagle, the traditional symbol of both the
U.S. and the postal service.
And I wanted to include the Nike swoosh, but on Nike's web site the logo
was only embedded in flash animations.
Finally, Eric has indicated that this conversation should take place at
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:Paullusmagnus-logo_(small).png
so this will be my last post to the list on this issue.
- David
Gareth Owen wrote:
David Friedland
<david=nvvn158Aj1ReoWH0uzbU5w(a)public.gmane.org> writes:
What makes these logos successful is they are all
simple, memorable, and can
work in a variety of environments
Frankly, bollocks. By and large, these aren't succesful logos, they're the
logos of succesful things (I exclude the DNC, for obvious reasons).
Thats a Very Big Difference.
What the hell is memorable about Encarta's three blue ellipses?
Or Britannica's thistle which is
i) Too detailed and therefore hard to scale (c.f. O'Reilly Camel)
ii) Symbolic of thorns and difficulty
iii) Already the symbol of something else, namely Scotland.
Grolier's "simple logo" is the word "Grolier". Memorable, but
only usuable in
exactly the same environments as the word "Wikipedia."
(c.f. Microsoft, Sourceforge)
The X Window logo is simple and memorable, but the X Consortium aren't exactly
setting the business world on fire with their success, are they?
Atari are bankrupt;
"Coca-Cola" is monolingual and written in an ugly script (as is Walt Disney);
These are both brands whose success is founded firmly on the product: New Coke
had the same script, but for some reasong people didn't buy it.
The UN logo is illegible if small
(and they're going the way of the X consortium)
I don't even know what the USPS logo is supposed to be, and only recognise it
as Lance Armstrong's shirt design;
Planned Parenthood looks like Dogbert's Brown Ring Of Quality
The Mozilla logo is unused outside its development community.
MIT logo is ugly, Stanford's make them look like a forestry service.
The Playboy bunny is nice, though. As is the Nike swoosh (which you omitted).
But neither of those firms prospered because they had a nice logo.
They prospered because guys like expensive training shoes and pictures of
naked women.
And not necesarily in that order.
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