Corporate Identity, Brand Creation

Corporate Identity, mark, or logo is the backbone to product recognition for any company, corporation or product. Having a recognizable logo for your company that is easily reproducable will ensure that your product, whether it is a service or tangible will be in the minds of your potential market populace. Pride In Work will work with our customers to produce an effective, appealing mark. We will discuss with our customers all foreseeable uses for their mark and design one that will be effective in all of the applications needed. Starting with business cards, to letterhead, to invoices, to all advertising brochures we will design, deliver to printer and follow through to completion for our customers. We will even oversee other applications whether it is textiles, signage, novelties or internet.

With the advent of technology more complex logo designs are becoming easily reproducable. Following are some of the basic thought processes used in new design and reproduction.

Droplets
Droplets relate fluidity, change, and encompassing. Two or more droplets caught in the act of merging, symbolize a union: The Cingular logo is a wonderful example.

Simplicity
Over the past few years, there has been a return to geometric simplicity in major corporate logos. Many mixed with the simple twist of visual phrase. This may be an homage to the 1970s and the days of classic logo design? Maybe there are fewer designers out there with the hand skills necessary to craft more illustrative marks and rely on computers more.

History
Design has a reoccuring cycle of 30 years and a lot of logos are going back to the full circle or oval especially those appealing to the youth market. Boutiques shops. This design moves into the less-contrived vortex or spiral shapes found in nature, not in a computer program. There is a mix of chaos and hard geometry in these marks that suggests order and freedom at the same time. WHich with computer technology it is easy these days to cant the oval.

Totems
Animals continue to be used to help companies quickly develop equity in their identities by reflecting the particular positive attributes of an animal back onto the company. Although this is a tactic used more by small- to mid-sized companies, there are a few Fortune 500 companies that rely on it, too, such as Pacific Life's whale or John Deere's deer, recently rehoofed by Landor Design.
In an effort to make a company's identity more friendly and approachable, many a wordmark has been turned into a face or a little person.

Shadows
Be they hard or gentle, shadows continue to give logos a sense of place. Sometimes shadows are used beneath a mark to give it a greater iconic presence: A logo that defies gravity must have supernatural powers of some sort. Other logos have used the shadow because, really, they had no baseline and the shadow tethers them to reality. Illustrator Guy Billout's work has provided another, more skewed influence: His delightful way of twisting the natural phenomenon of the shadow into performing contrary feats has inspired a number of designers to misshape shadows or set them off on strange trajectories.

Transparency
Let's face it: The old rule that dictated that any really well-designed logo had to (A) be reproducible in only one color, and (B) that color had to be solid, not screened, is gone.

Green
It's a trend that is a breath of fresh air in an industry awash with red, white and blue. Public utilities have also picked up on this trend. But if it is overplayed, corporate green will soon become obsolete.

Punctuation
At one time, those punctuation marks at the top of the keyboard were reserved for expressing profanity. Today, they are all smileys. There is an entire shorthand language out there, created by youthful internet users, that is increasingly understood by the public at large.

The 'DotComs' almost played out this trend all by themselves: Every logo had an "@" in it. But as long as there are punctuation variations to explore, these marks will probably continue to be pounded out, even for logos that aren't for copywriters.

Labels
These are usually innocent little marks that are often simple silhouettes of innocuous objects. Inside the object, a name will be reversed out in a very legible font. These marks are often associated with hipper entities: The picture says what they do and the word says who they are. There's not much room for affectations — just a quick, painless dose of honesty.

Photo icons
These can be extremely well-done or extremely over-done. With the ongoing advances of our computers and technology it is getting more cost efficient and easy to go this 4-color route. A simple is isolated on a white background, and the name of the company is run beneath it. The approach is decidedly more elegant when the visual is supported with a twist of phrase, or when the phrase is supplied with a somehow unexpected visual.

Slinky
This is an effect that is one generation past the swoop: The curvilinear form often appearing above the name is very reminiscent of the fun of a Spirograph, and perhaps these accurate but flowing forms suggest the feeling of accomplishment and continuity that two plastic gears, four pins and a ballpoint pen can provide. This thought is even carried through screensavers and music players visuals.

Wire
Felix Sockwell is the master of the technique today, and others have achieved success with it as well. Just using a line to illustrate the logo. Usually very creative but delicate and not for every use.