Why No One Remembers Your Logo (and How to Fix It)

Have you ever had trouble getting people to notice your business or even to care about it at all? Now there are several reasons why this could be happening, but one of the most common is that your visual brand doesn't set you apart from My senior creative Thanks. So we're gonna go through some of the most iconic logos that there are, Tim, and I appreciate you being here. But first I wanna ask you, what do all of those brands do really well to have logos that win?

It's really only two things when it comes down to it. Okay. A a really great logo. It has to convey meaning or feel. Like it ha you have to be able to see it. uh that that it it feels like something, you know. And the reason is because our our brain is constantly scanning everything, you know, and and our unconscious brain is scanning and making decisions uh about everything that we see. And if a logo isn't visually

showing the meaning, then our brain isn't catching that meaning. And so there has to be intentionality about How do the shapes convey the meaning of the brand? Like everything comes into play. Colors and uh lines and typography and spacing, all that stuff means something. And so it has to convey meaning in some way. The second thing is that it has to be a recognizable shape.

You know, like and that's it. It just has to be recognizable.'Cause you have to it has to be able to be uh unique from the crowd. Like there are millions and millions of brands out in the world and logos out in the world. And if your logo looks like somebody else's logo

then you're never gonna you're never gonna make the mental connection that you're hoping the logo is gonna do. And I I think about it like this as a as a character illustrator, one of the things that tells you if it's a good character is if you can look at the silhouette and you know who the character is.

And so you think about any famous character like Mickey Mouse or Homer Simpson or anything like that, you could look at the silhouette and be like, that's Mickey Mouse. That's that's Homer Simpson. That means it's probably a pretty memorable character. You know, and same thing with the logo. You need to be able to look at it quickly and say, Oh yeah, I know exactly who that is. But if you if you don't create a unique shape.

for the logo you're never gonna get that and you're trying to stand out in a crowd of millions of logos we see five thousand brands a day and you have to stand out against five thousand a day So you We see five thousand brands a day, really? Yeah, but I know it sounds it sounds insane, but that's a real stat. We see five thousand brands a day.

Wow. And so that's how many logos, that's how many things we're seeing just as as we're going out in the world. It's insane. I mean, when you're driving down the road, you're seeing all the brands of the cars, you're seeing billboards, you're seeing buildings, like and they all have branding, you know? Yeah. Your logo has to be

memorable out of those five thousand. Okay. So it should probably be pretty unique, you know. Yeah. I think I understand be unique, right? It's gotta stand out from the five thousand But convey meaning. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Um so if if I were to say that our brand needs to convey moving quickly.

What kinds of things would convey moving quickly? If you take a line and slant it forward, it's gonna convey moving quickly. Okay. If you if you if you draw a lot of uh a lot of little lines behind a character that's slanting forward, that's gonna convey speed, right? If you want to convey trust, you can't do it. It should probably be a lot of ninety degree angles, very straight up and down, very tall, because we trust things that look like that. It looks stable.

Even colors play a role into this, like purple indicates royalty. Uh red indicates love. Okay, so those are the things that uh the great brands or the great uh logos have. Yeah. What are the most common mistakes people make? Like how do you screw this up? Yeah. Well actually you can even take those two things I said and just flip'em and and and go the opposite way and that's what people do wrong. Okay. So what what I mean is

Uh you talk about being unique, right? Yeah. One thing I see all the time, and this is whether whether you're a leader of a business or you're the designer, I see it all the time that uh people will design logos uh that just look cool.

And and that that's the whole point. And what they end up doing a lot of times is they'll go in places like Pinterest or they'll go on Dribble, which is a place where you just look at great design work. Okay. And they'll just copy something cool that they see. Okay. But there's nothing unique about it. And it's gonna look like everybody else because because you're just copying what everybody else does.

Also with just looking cool, you're not conveying any meaning because you're saying this looks cool. But there's not any tensionality around what lines am I choosing, what shapes am I choosing, what colors, what typography, kerning, leading, all that kind of stuff. isn't being put into play. And so I see it all the time. For instance

How often do you see a logo that has two arrows crisscrossing and then words in the negative space and on the left and right it says established on one side and then a date on the other side? I have seen that. Have you seen that before? Yeah. Uh aesthetically it's pretty. Yeah. But I am not going to see that logo and connect it to any one brand because thousands of brands do that exact same thing. Yeah. And you're you're defeating the whole purpose.

If you're doing that. It might look cool but you're not gonna be memorable. And the whole point is to show up the same way over and over again. And so then when people see you eventually and see that logo split second, they know exactly who that is. That's not going to happen if you're copying other people's logos. Yeah. And so uh so that's that's the biggest thing I see people do all the time is you're just copying something else.

Or they're not thinking about any kind of meaning and making any intentional choices. They're just saying, This looks cool and they're just going off of gut, man, that's cool. You know. But they hadn't really they hadn't really put themselves into it at all. So it it doesn't it doesn't really reflect anything about who they are. Yeah, not at all. Yeah.

Let's talk a little bit about some of the logos that have just crushed over over the years, right? And and I know, you know, several come to mind. I think one of the most popular ones of course is is Nike, the swoosh, right? Break that down for me. Why why has that worked? That that's such a good one because okay, well when when we're talking about we're talking about conveying meaning, right? Right. So uh Nike, if they were to ask themselves

What do we want people to expect when they interact with our brand? What would they want people to say? Probably uh Fast and winning. It's it's probably the things, right? Like that's probably what you want with Nike, right? And so uh what that logo does, you talk about a shape that conveys meaning. That shape is conveying Uh fast and winning. Because

The you got the the swoop in the logo, right? Which is movement and then it just speeds up and goes to that really fine point on the right side, right? That is movement and speed going up the the fast movement like that. And w when it comes to winning, I know that that that uh logo originally was designed based off of like the wing of Nike, uh, the goddess of victory in uh Greek mythology. Yeah. And so it's such a simple shape and um You know, they they also kinda have the um

Uh the advantage I'd say of that logo was created in the early seventies. Okay and so you don't have the the millions and millions and millions of logos you got now. There was definitely a lot then. But do something really simple and uh that conveys the meaning. And then now they have decades of brand equity and decades of wrapping.

speed and winning around that logo to that now when you see that logo that meaning is so incorporated with it so associated with it. Yeah. That they're able to really, um to really take take advantage of that, you know. And what's funny about that logo, Phil Knight, he famously didn't like that logo at the beginning and he said And didn't pay much for it. He didn't. I think it was like thirty five bucks or something like that, you know.

She has been taken care of since then. But that's why it's so good is it conveys meaning and it's also a pretty unique shape. I've never seen a logo that looks like that, like exactly like that. And people have might have tried to copy since then and certain elements of it, but it was very unique when it came out and it conveyed a lot of meaning winning and victory.

Or a victory in a in uh speed. That's cool. Yeah. How about another one? How about FedEx? That's a logo we see a lot of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That one's pretty fascinating too. Um and it's it's famous for a reason. Uh very intentional and and very well done. But we'll ask the same question. If the FedEx people were saying, what do we want people to expect when they interact with our brand, what would they say? They'd probably say, Speed and efficiency. Speed and efficiency. Yeah.

Reliability, trust, like you know, the we're gonna get the package on time. Exactly. Okay. And so let's take a look at their logo then. You talk about trust and reliability, right? The the fact that the the F and the E Tall, very stable, you know, like those look like really strong fonts, right? Right. And at the same time, those lowercase letters are pretty low to the ground and when something's moving fast it gets lower to the ground, right? And so it has that for speed, right?

And uh and you look at the the kerning and the kerning is just the space between letters. Oh, yeah. And so you got wide kerning or very tight kerning. It has super tight kerning. Like the letters are touching each other. Okay. And so that also indicates uh movement and speed. There's a little bit of tension when you look at it because the lines are touching and you kinda don't want them to touch because it has that tension.

But you also have tension when there's speed and movement and everything, right? So it has the tension. And then you famously got the arrow in the negative space. We were talking before about the unconscious brain and what it picks up, right? Unconscious brain is always taking in information that our logical brain doesn't know it's picking up. So the fact that they have an arrow

in there, in the in the negative space. Right. Normally someone has to tell you the arrow is there, but it's just an unconscious thing they did. And clearly the error is about momentum and speed and efficiency and all that stuff. Yeah. So that that logo is so well thought out about what it's trying to say, to where when you see the logo, you just kind of feel

speed and efficiency and that's what you want. People might not consciously say speed and efficiency, but you definitely feel it when you see that logo. And they very intentional. They did a great job at that. Let's let's do one more. Amazon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well break that one down for us. Yeah. So I'm guessing they probably want their logo to look happy.

Uh so what do they do? They chose a a font that's very curvy and very bouncy looking, which is very happy and playful, you know. Uh they also don't use a capital A. which shows, you know, their customer first approach humility, right? Like they're they're doing that with it.

You obviously have this smile that's underneath it which also conveys happiness. But you know what I find so fascinating about that logo is you could pretty much get anything with Amazon, right? Yeah. Did you ever notice that the arrow goes from A to Z?

Somehow I knew that, but I didn't notice it at first. And so there's so much thought in that logo and what they're trying to convey. Uh and it was very intentional. But that's not what I mean at the beginning about the mistakes. Like if if the uh if the person creating the logo is intentional about what are we trying to say, what do we want people to expect?

How can we do that with typography and shapes and color and lines and all that kind of stuff, you know? Just some intentionality, just thinking through it. Yeah. Yeah.

So those are three of like the biggest brands in the world, right? But a lot of folks uh that that watch entree leadership, they're running an H VAC company or a construction company. And a lot of them are multi million dollar companies. They're not messing around.

But also they're not Amazon. They're they're maybe a business just in their community there or in their part of the state. Uh how do how does this translate when I don't know, when you're running a a small construction company or something that's really just a um I don't wanna say just because I you know, we we love Main Street businesses, but it's different. Yeah. Well it is different but the same rules apply. Whether your business of one or two thousand or twenty thousand.

the same rules apply. And and I'll I'll give you a really good example of this. Um we we were using a plumber before and uh and the plumber uh not great and so we said, you know what, forget this. We gotta find somebody else, right? And so In anytime we run into a problem and we need some help, there's always a first brand that comes to mind.

The first brand that comes to mind is going to be the one that's been the most consistent and the one that you can look at them and kind of understand what they're about, right? And so the first brand that came to mind was this uh this uh plumber called Hiller Plumbing, you know. Yeah.

I see their logo everywhere. Like I see it everywhere. That big yellow happy face. The big yellow happy face. And even the red uh type next to it, that's that's very tall, very bold, but very curvy and everything, right? Yeah. You put those two things together and it looks It looks strong and it looks happy. It looks reliable and it looks friendly, right? Like that's what it looks like.

And I see this van going around the community all the time. It's the same van, the same logo. I see that logo on people's shirts. I see that logo when I go to football games. And it's the same logo showing up the same way every time. And so since they've shown up the same way and since it looks friendly and reliable, Hiller, first brand that came to mind in a split second. I'm like, I need a plumber. You know, look them up and then went with them. What's interesting to me about that is

You're saying you needed a plumber, and that came to mind. That Hiller came to mind because of the brand, because of the logo, not because of word of mouth. It was literally just the branding and the logo that did it. It did. N nobody told me about Hiller plumbing. I just saw it all the time, you know? Yeah. And uh and since I saw it show up the same way every time.

Uh and and I kinda understood what they're about with that big smiley face. You can't miss that big smiley face. You know, before we talked about conveying meaning and being unique and memorable. Right. That big smiley face is pretty memorable. Right.

And so when I see it on vans and shirts and everything, it just gets imprinted in my mind. Right. And so then when I finally have a problem of plumbing, that's the first one I called. Yeah. I called them. They did a great job. And now that's who I use. Yeah. You know? And it the logo just It's powerful. It really is powerful.'Cause you can the the logo logos are so interesting because

They they're like writing a headline. Writing a headline is one of the hardest things to do in copywriting because you're trying to take a lot of meaning and put it in the fewest amount of words possible. It's the same with the logo. You're trying to take a lot of meaning and put it in the smallest shape possible. The reason you're trying to do that is so you have something simple that can be imprinted in people's brains.

And you want it imprint print in people's brains, not for today, but for tomorrow when they actually have a problem. Yeah. You know, when they have a problem, you want to be the first one that comes to mind. Yeah. And if you did a good job of creating a great logo and had it just this show up the same way all the time. Yeah.

You'll be the first that people think of. You're being printed in their brain. And that's what you're trying to do. Yep, that's cool. Thanks a ton for being here. Yeah, no problem. This is super helpful. Oh, good. Appreciate it. All right. Glad to be here. Can shape how people see and remember your But here's the thing. Branding. Your business. Thanks for watching. See you next time.