I hope our logo is okay….
Have you ever wondered what the thought process behind making a logo is? What do designers think of? What steps do they go through to ensure it fits the prompt?
I did too, so I picked up a book about it! Let’s talk all about logos and how simple choices aren’t really that simple.
This month, I am plugging the St. Louis Area Foodbank. To get more information, or to find out how to donate your time/money/food, visit their website: https://stlfoodbank.org/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
I’m not a graphic designer, and I suspect that’s pretty clear to anyone who’s ever seen a graphic I’ve created. At best I get the job done through the same sort of mechanism that can drive a room full of monkeys typing into infinity to recreate a really good college essay – you know, good enough to get an A, but not something anyone’s ever going to read again – but all too often, when I try to create something visual, I just really suck at it.
It’s good to know your limitations.
But it’s also good to have a library card, and I often take a detour on my way to or from work to stop at the St. Louis Public Library and pick up books on all sorts of different topics. This month, I picked up some books on logo design and I learned a lot about just how limited my limitations truly are.
But I also learned a thing or two about logo design, including how designers actually think when it comes to creating a logo, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today, because the reality is that this is the sort of thing that not just anyone can do, and yet I’d be willing to bet we all know of a situation where a multimillion dollar organization decided to save itself some money by having someone’s niece or nephew who’s a little more artistically inclined go into a tool like Canva and whip something up.
And that’s assuming that person isn’t just having generative AI create it and claiming credit for it.
But you know what? I learned from reading my book that meaningful logo design is as thoughtful and methodical as conducting research – in fact, designers even spend time doing studies of their own, though the word has an entirely different meaning when you’re creating art.
But we can study – in that more conventional sense of the word – what they do and learn what makes good logo design work, and also when it’s time to call in the professionals!
I’m Sean in St Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So pretty much everything I have to say is going to come from this book, and you can see I’ve marked a whole bunch of pages because I found so many interesting insights to discuss. The book, by the way, is called The Elements of Logo Design by Alex W. White, and he’s not only an established author of these sorts of books, but also an accomplished professional designer and a professor who was most recently Chairman of the graduate program in Design Management at the Shintaro Akatsu School of Design and the University of Bridgeport.
One of the reasons I decided to give it a read was because it’s extremely visual but also has text accompanying each image to help you to understand the purpose of what you’re looking at and how it applies to his broader arguments. It’s both a book about design philosophy and instruction, and as a novice trying to pick up some skills, I appreciate that!
And I’ll begin with something the author talks about in the introduction to the book, that a logo isn’t just a word mark or an image mark you use to brand your business, but a very intentional way you present that business to the world.
So what a lot of these types of books will do is just show you a bunch of examples of what the author considers good logos and pick apart why they’re good. I always find that interesting, but also sort of tedious because I’m not a designer and I really can’t tell the difference between a good logo and a mediocre one most of the time.
What White presents is a philosophy of design that isn’t random and doesn’t happen by accident – it’s structured, sensible, methodical and based on many different stages of creative exercises that put limitations on the designer so that creativity itself can be born in the process.
White is adamantly opposed to designers who just create a bunch of alternatives and put them in front of clients with no real sensibility of philosophy behind their design, and on his website, there’s a quote from him that says,
“The opposite of really good is not bad, mediocre or even dreadful. The opposite of really good is random.”
But in the introduction to the book, White has some strong words as well for those who commission logos.
“Most clients start out wanting fresh, innovative and noticeable design, then dilute it during multiple group meetings, until the result is common, expected and frustrating for everyone at the table.”
White then goes on to issue this challenge:
“Pick a magazine and pull out all the ads, then arrange them in order of ‘most visible’ to ‘most banal.’ Where is the demarcation between ‘pretty good’ and ‘ordinary’? About 10-20 percent in from the end. Why do the other 80-90 percent stink – and by stink, I mean they are invisible? Is it the bad choice of an ad agency? Much more likely, it is the misguided involvement of too many people, which ends up making the message less visible, less potent and less useful.”
So, how do you get around this challenge? Alex W. White’s got a simple solution.
“Hire the best, challenge them to do the best, and don’t get in their way.”
Great advice. And hey, it pertains to research professionals too!
So, if you’re going to hire the best, what is the process you should expect to see them utilize as a designer? White says that good designers need to think of marketing messages as being like insects buzzing around, demanding attention while being blocked by weary individuals who’ve put up netting. Getting attention means finding ways to get through that netting and then to dazzle people so they’ll stop and look instead of just swatting the message away.
Believe it or not, getting attention – or what print advertising people traditionally refer to as “stopping power” – isn’t about being shocking, nor is it about being bold or brightly colored, nor is it about having an easy-to-digest message, nor is it about trying to be mysterious and cool so people will want to know more.
Those are all strategies that can work under the right circumstances, but White argues that getting people to notice your design is not an artistic choice – it’s a logical one influenced by five factors:
- Relationships between elements of the design
- Contrast and similarity to communicate separation under a harmonious whole
- Hierarchy to suggest the order in which elements should be perceived
- Structure to provide anatomy to the design
- And Color to add clarity, communicate distinction and draw attention to specific areas of the design
I could stop right there and spend the rest of the video talking about each of these factors, but that’s just chapter one of the book! White goes on to talk about the three basic tools used to create a design. They’re very simple:
- Type
- Image
- And Space
Type is, of course, the words that we use. The good thing about words is that they generally have a clear meaning to a literate viewer. But the bad thing about words is that they are harder for us to process visually – the more words you use and the longer or less familiar those words are, the more difficult it is for the person seeing the design to parse it.
Images, on the other hand, are far more quickly absorbed and understood by those who see them, but they also tend to have a more subjective meaning. Show someone a picture of a cow and it’s not immediately clear what you’re communicating. Milk? Dairy products like cheese or butter? Ice cream? Beef? Wholesome farm life values? Tranquility? Eat more chicken? Any of these could be valid interpretations of the meaning of the photo, and thus designers tend to use pictures to attract attention and words to explain what the pictures mean.
So far, so good, right? The problem is that there’s this third element that’s far more difficult to master, and that’s space, which White explains is the absence of content. Space is easier for us to understand with words because we know that letters need to have space between them. We also know that typefaces which minimize the space within those letter forms – like the empty space inside the letter “D” or the empty space between lines in the letters “E” and “H” – are more difficult to read that those that allow each letter to show the contrast between its form and its empty space.
Images, too, must make use of space. Sometimes this means selecting images that have empty space as part of their composition, and other times this means framing the pictures within the boundaries of a larger section of empty space or adding empty space on top of them so the images fade into the background.
White also explains that images do not need to be simple – in fact, there is utility in making them complicated enough to keep the viewer’s attention. One example he offers is the Unilever logo, which includes an ornate blue and white letter U that’s made up of an arrangement of 24 symbols that each have a precise meaning. From far away, it’s simply a fancy-looking letter. But up close, it has great meaning and it’s worthy of studying for awhile to try to interpret its various facets.
So let’s now talk about logos specifically, which of course reflect a mastery of the elements of design and help to communicate a rich set of values, capabilities, philosophies and ideals in a single marriage of text, image and space.
White is quick to point out that a brand is not a logo and a logo is not a brand. Branding involves building far more connection to a consumer than any logo can ever accomplish, but a logo isn’t just window-dressing; it’s truly a visual representation of what the brand’s identity ought to mean to someone who’s interacting with it.
So, for example, a brand that’s trying to portray security and trust would probably not be well-served by a logo that’s playful and cartoonish, but that design might be perfect for a brand that’s offering something fun. Likewise, a logo for a brand that’s attempting to build a charismatic personal connection with an individual wouldn’t be well-served by something that’s corporate and sterile; it needs to have some sort of quality that makes it stand out and distinguish itself from other brands like it.
Coca-Cola, Apple and Nike are three of the examples White provides – each of them is distinctive, difficult to copy without looking like a knockoff, and so visually stimulating that they can be viewed as icons rather than words.
And before you point out that Coca-Cola’s brand logo is made up of words, remember that people often are reading it at different angles and the stylized script and red and white are what they recognize, not the words themselves. The best logos are so recognizable that they can be understood even if their brand name can’t be read, a point White illustrates by showing a bunch of blurred logos that are still instantly recognizable.
Towards the end of the book, White delivers on the promise of showing how to build a logo properly, and it once again comes down to striking the right balance between image, type and space. Interestingly, White demonstrates that you can’t just assign each of these tools a third of the design and go from there; you really need to prioritize which one or two you want to make central to the design and let whatever remains play a more minor role.
White argues that with balanced approaches off the table, you really have six choices:
- Prioritize image
- Prioritize type
- Prioritize space
- Prioritize image and type
- Prioritize image and space
- Prioritize type and space
This is tremendously useful, because it helps to narrow down the range of choices available for a design. And it leads to what I think is the most valuable takeaway from all of the practical advice in this book:
Good logo design isn’t about trial and error until you create something that appeases a room full of executives. It’s about using the three basic tools and five logical elements of design to create something that’s memorable, distinctive, creative and enduring.
It’s not something you can do by accident, and it’s not something you can entrust to a piece of software or a cut and paste process if you want it to succeed. You might be able to get acceptable results from someone who has a good artistic eye or some creative ability, and you might even get lucky and be able to cobble something great together on your own if you can apply your understanding and knowledge of your brand to your finished concept.
But if you really want to create a logo that endures and becomes something that helps you to stand out in the eyes of consumers?
It’s probably best to call in the design professionals, tell them what you are hoping to achieve with a well-thought out brief and then trust them to come up with something brilliant.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See Ya Next Time!
PLUG
This month I’m plugging the St. Louis Area Foodbank, which is a not-for-profit organization that gathers and distributes food to over 500 food pantries, homeless shelters, soup kitchens and community program partners in the Greater St. Louis Area. This is a time of year when people are fighting not just the cold, but also the hunger that comes with higher heating bills, and supporting a food bank is a great way to have a powerful impact on your local community.
Over 40 million people in America struggle with food security and rely on government programs and charitable services to put food on their tables. Food banks are also facing more hardship than ever before due to operational strains from late 2025 due to the government shutdown and increased demand for assistance. They need us to step up and be donors and volunteers, and I encourage you to, at the very least, donate a few bucks today to help out.
While I always recommend supporting local food banks if you can, the St. Louis Area Foodbank is also a great choice because they provide so much support to so many organizations and are extremely transparent about how they utilize their funds. They have a perfect score on CharityNavigator and are an accredited charity with the Better Business Bureau and a partner with the United Way and Feeding America.
You can learn more at http://stlfoodbank.org/
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