I am always fascinated by album covers, billboards and product logos. Since I’m a designer, I tend to think about design, but more often than not, I love the way a logo looks and appreciate the thought process that went in its making. Then when I find myself using a particular brand for more than six months, I become even more interested in its logo. After all, it’s on my stuff all the time and I have to look at it everyday. The logo is like an old friend now. Its meaning has changed and grown with me. Its role has changed from commercial to art.

A few days ago, while listening to my favorite local radio station (Calgary’s Q-105), a song was playing that was promoting a concert at a downtown club called “The Palomino”. The art director of this organization must be brilliant, because the logo really stands out and communicates with you as if you were looking into its eyes. It’s friendly but powerful—perfect for this bar/concert venue.

The first time I remember seeing the logo was on their website . I think I spent an hour just looking at it and reading what their mission statement was.

I then proceeded to buy tickets to see two of my favorite bands: Rev Theory

As the emphasis is shifting from products to technology, the logos are becoming more simple. When we use a product, we don’t want to be distracted with glittery objects or fancy fonts. The logos need to be subtle, they need to represent the product in a simple and clear way. The design should be recognizable even when it is shrunken down to the size of a thumbnail.

We have seen some great examples on how designers are removing the decorative elements of logos and focusing on simplicity and readability. In this article, you can see logos that have been designed as art pieces and how they were re-appropriated as commercial ones.

Cheese or bread?

Ketchup or mustard?

Pepsi or Coca-Cola?

Or how about the classic question: “Wanna go see a movie?”

The logo of these companies, who are very well known for their products, have become as famous as the product itself. In fact, many people take their products because of the logo.

One way to look at logos is that they are signs of a company’s brand. A sign is a symbol that represents something else, like a stop sign. It can represent something physical like a building or it can represent psychological things, like feelings. And sometimes it can represent both things at once. Logos are visual and verbal signs that represent a company’s brand. They tell you what kind of company it is and what they sell.

When logos get to be popular enough, they become art. This means that people enjoy looking at them and think they’re interesting and beautiful even though they are not trying to sell anything. The logos don’t need to communicate the same thing anymore; now they just need to look good.

In the process, logos are also transformed into art. “The logo is the seed of an object or a service,” says Massimo Vignelli, a designer who worked on many of New York’s subway maps and was a co-founder of the firm Vignelli Associates. “It becomes a brand. The brand is the tree.”

Over time, that tree grows and spreads its branches into all sorts of products, from coffee mugs to advertising campaigns to ties to websites to television commercials. The logo becomes less like a tree and more like a family — an ever-growing clan of logos with their own quirks, features, and histories.

The result is that logos are everywhere. We see them in public spaces, we encounter them in private spaces — our phones, our homes — and they’re embedded in the software we use every day. They’re even woven into the clothes we wear and printed onto the bodies of our pets…

Logos used to be a way of distinguishing one company’s products from another’s. Now they’re everywhere. At first glance, it seems like a trend toward the banal. After all, the more ubiquitous a logo is, the less effective it is in its primary function: to get a consumer to buy something. But this trend toward ubiquity can also be seen as a shift in how logos are perceived and employed.

And these days, logos have more work to do than ever before. They’re not just about marketing anymore; they’re about branding, which has come to play a much larger role in corporate strategy. For example, take Apple’s decision to remove its computer keyboards’ iconic command key labels (eject disc, undo, copy) and replace them with the words “command” and “control.” This change was not made for aesthetic reasons but because it was part of a branding strategy. Instead of saying “command,” their new name for this key is “command.”

Seen in this light, logos are no longer just marketing material but part of our cultural infrastructure—an increasingly important part of how we communicate and express ourselves. And as part of that infrastructure, they’re all becoming what art historian Benjamin Buchloh calls “visual markers of social

Logos are everywhere. They’re a constant in our lives. We see them on TV, on the internet, on billboards, and on every single product we buy. We can’t escape them. But do we ever really think about them? I mean really think about them – past the subconscious level?

Logos are created by professionals for commercial purposes. There is no denying that. They’re intended to make a connection in our minds between the product and the brand that produces it. And they are incredibly successful at doing that.

When you think of McDonald’s you immediately think of their logo: two overlapping golden arches. It’s become so popular that it’s been used as a symbol of globalisation. That alone should tell you how successful they were at creating it and ensuring its wide spread use. No matter what country you’re in, if you see those two arches, you know exactly who made that product and you can associate with them accordingly**.*

When I was in college, I started dating a girl whose parents had just divorced. She lived on the same floor as me, so one day I went to her room to hang out and try to cheer her up. One of the first things I noticed when I walked in was a large print on the wall above her bed. It was a copy of the logo for Bonne Bell lip gloss, and it framed a picture of my girlfriend from high school.

Tiffany was an attractive, popular girl in high school –- the type who had been voted “Most Likely to Succeed” in our sophomore yearbook. Not surprisingly, she was also promiscuous in high school, something that I had been aware of but that I tried not to think about when we first started dating. But this Bonne Bell logo opened up old wounds.

She explained that she had gone on a trip with some friends after graduating from high school, and one of them had bought this Bonne Bell lip gloss at the airport. This friend had also drawn over the heart with a marker so that it read “Bonne Boyfriend.” That’s what she thought of me: Bonne Boyfriend. And that’s why she’d hung it above her bed at college.

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