I’ve designed logos for 20 years and I’m here to tell you that you don’t need a witty logomark to stand out.

Radrad (@radrad)
2 min readJan 28, 2022

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A witty logo will not help your company.

Logo designers assume that a mark of a good designer is how much easter eggs they can hide behind a logo.

Logos need to be clear, not clever.

The hidden FedEx arrow is not the logo.

FedEx became a household brand not because of their logo.

FedEx got to where they are because they kept their promise of next day deliveries. They were consistent.

The brand made the logo and not the other way around.

Nobody has time to break your logo down.

A clever logo is a vanity project for the designer

As a designer, I know how it feels to be able to build in easter eggs into your work and reveal them to your clients. It makes you feel smart. It’s a means to an end.

A clever logo is a feature.

A clever logo will deter brand recall. (what’s the name of that company that had that hidden lion?)

Fortune 500 companies’ logo seldom sport clever easter eggs and there’s a reason, clever logos only add noise.

Consider Nike’s Swoosh, or Adidas’ trefoil, there’s nothing clever about those logos., they’re simple abstractions of the brand and yet when you see them you know who they belong to.

Make your logo identifiable

Your logo shouldn’t be ‘minimal’.

Instead, make sure your mark has these 3 things:

  1. works with 1 color
  2. the mark should have a strong silhouette
  3. It can work in tiny sizes as well as large sizes.

Conclusion

Your logomark identirfies your brand, your company, don’t let your logo communicate. Let it identify.

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Radrad (@radrad)
Radrad (@radrad)

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