When logos go bad

A look at logos from the wrong side of town

Of course, it’s in our best interest to emphasize the value of effective logo design. After all, that’s our business. However, that doesn’t change the fact that creating a decent logotype takes an certain ‘eye’ – the ability to see symbols and visual metaphors and wrestle them into a design that expresses those metaphors to the majority of people who view the logo.

Unfortunately, these visual metaphors can get mixed up, and what you think your logo represents is quite different from what other people see. The logo at left is a classic example. I should point out that this logo made the rounds of the Internet a few years back (and was the subject of a lot of cheap jokes and voted by many to be the “worst logo ever”) and was subsequently removed from the center’s promotional material.
I don’t know the genesis of the design, but it’s a pretty safe bet that the effort was a result of either a) an internal attempt to visually ‘metaphorize’ (is that a real word? If not, it is now) what the center did, or b) the result of a sales job by a designer who lacked the skills (and foresight) to tackle such a project. In any case, the logo did not accomplish the task and was the source of great mirth and tacky jokes before being changed to a text only version (at what I would imagine was fairly significant expense and hassle).

Easy to miss. Expensive to fix

And they’re not alone. Another logo that made the Internet rounds was the design for the Instituto de Estudos Orientais, the center for oriental studies at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil (right). Supposed to be a serene image of an oriental styled house in front of a sunset (rising sun), the logo seems to suggest something else entirely. The mark was the winning entry in a typical logo contest. Once again, the visual ‘metaphor’ is obviously not what was intended (to put it mildly). And once again, after the University realized (with what I suspect was horror) what the Internet ‘communities’ were saying about their newly announced logo, it started to disappear from public view (the web page for the center is now ‘under construction’). And again, probably at great expense and hassle.

Sexy time visual metaphors

For reasons that are beyond me, dental logos seem to fall prey to these mangled visual metaphors – with their little symbolic ’stick figures’ (officially referred to as ‘pictograms’) getting caught in what appear to be compromising positions (left). Once again, the logo is likely the result of an internal branding attempt, more than likely a staff member who can’t see what I (and half the Internet) see. To them, I’d guess it looks just like what they intended – a caring dentist doting over a patient (and to prove my point even further – while I think the dentist logo looks somewhat sexual, my wife Sue thinks it looks like one guy “beating the crap out of another”). And while the logo atright is supposed to represent jazz classes (for kids even), if you squint at the logo you’ll see an image that’s more at home in front of a licensed establishment that refers to itself as “adult entertainment”. Oh, we know it’s supposed to be a couple of male and female dancers in mid-swirl, but that’s not what it looks like. Those damn pictograms again.

Lessons to learn?

If there’s a lesson in all this, it is as follows – just because your company owns some of the same logo software that professional designers utilize does not mean that you can crank out the same types of logos that they (we) do. That also goes for them online ‘do it yourself logo generators’ (glorified clip-art generators really) and logo templates. Your nifty do It yourself logo may not suggest what you think it does. No doubt the designers of all these logos started out with only the best intentions, but somehow, somewhere, went seriously off the tracks and the mangled visual metaphors weren’t caught until the logo was in wide circulation. They knew exactly what they wanted to depict, and in their minds-eye, probably accomplished the task admiringly. They know what they want to see. Trouble is, most people who are viewing logos for the first time have no preconceived notions about what it is they’re supposed to be seeing – and they’ll interpret the logo into an image that they can recognize (see our blog article about the so-called Obama Missile Defense Crescent logo flap for a very real example of this). And once someone has seen an alternate interpretation of your logo – especially if it’s racy – they will find it next to impossible to ‘unsee’ the naughty version.

Street cred equals more logo badness

We’d be remiss in our duties when penning a bad logos feature if we didn’t at least address one of my all-time faves, this gem for Hip Hip for HIV. Oh sure, the idea behind the design was awesome. A charity hip hop concert held in Dallas, featuring local hip hop and R & B acts, sponsored by a local radio station and promising city luminaries and celebrities. The purpose of the concert was to educate the young about HIV realities, and boasted a really cool idea – ‘testing for tickets’ – where anyone who submitted to an AIDs test received free admission to the show. Like any charity gig worth it’s salt, Hip Hop for HIV needed a logo, so let’s take a looksee – phallic hip hop microphone forming the letter ‘I’ in hip? Check. Squeeze in an AIDS awareness ribbon? Check. Teeny weeny silhouette of the Dallas city skyline. Check. Let people know it’s annual? Check. Now, we need some street cred using yer typical gangsta rap violence imagery, which is cool, because any designer worth their salt knows the best way to brand something to do with AIDS and HIV is to surround the logo with Dexteresque, Friday-The-13th-ish, blood-spatter and gore. It’s the only way…

It’s all in the way you look at it

And as we draw our ‘when logo go bad’ feature to a close (heh, get it? Draw to a close) we’ll leave you with this beauty. A while back, London design outfit FHD announced with some pride that they would be reponsible for the logo design and rebranding of the UK’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC) – a division of the UK Treasury. The main self-proclaimed thrust (heh, heh, he said thrust) of the OGC is “improving value for money by driving up standards and capability in procurement”. All very lofty stuff and requiring, one assumes, a similarly lofty logo. Alas, when the logo was presented to OGC staff, it didn’t take them long to realize that there was more to the simple text design than originally met the eye. The design had already been printed on a variety of promotional items, heralding the design’s large scale release, when OCG staffers saw the hidden randy graphic in the logo (hint: tilt your head to the left to view the design). Amazingly, even after ‘discovering’ the ahm, enthusiastic character hidden in the logo, the OGC rolled out the logo anyway, promising UK teenagers fits of laughter for years to come.