Logo Design Blog

Governor Jim Doyle of the State of Wisconsin announced a new logo for the state. He said the new logo was part of an effort to build a unifying competitive brand and business strategy for the state. Doyle first announced this initiative a year ago when he asked his Department of Tourism to explore the attributes that differentiate Wisconsin from its competitors.

The new logo depicts a slightly customized font for “Wisconsin” and a slightly abstract tag line”Live like you mean it”. On top of the name is a silhouette of a man in an upside down position supposedly doing a cartwheel.

“No matter how people come in contact with Wisconsin, they’ll know precisely what we stand for in this state,” Doyle said. “We are a place where the people are fiercely proud, hard working, loyal and have fun with life; and where the culture fuels creativity and embraces original thinking.” I am not sure how these attributes are depicted by the new logo. I don’t see any connections to culture or original thinking. In fact on some online blogs have said that the tag line was ripped off from ‘Bacardi,’ which also uses ‘Live Like You Mean It.’

$50,000 of tax payers money was used for the new logo design and associated brand language. I am not sure what to say to that. Here we have people paying us $147 and getting awesome logo designs!

This year, Logo Design Works proudly celebrates it’s 10 year Anniversary! Started in 1998/99 as a two man passionate about design, garage based company, Logo Design Works has become a leading online logo design service firm.

Even though the name and the domain were not formalized till 2002, Logo Design Works’ CEO, Mallesh Bonigala had started a design/branding company in 1998 along with a friend to provide local small companies an affordable graphic design service.

Logo design became a huge part of the projects that the company, then called Design Works, was undertaking. By 2000 a few more partners joined the company and the team decided to go online.
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Companies that are blessed with having strong and iconic symbols such as the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Maytag repairman, or the Michelin man can actively manage and use the symbols to super charge their brand.

Such iconic logo symbols give a personality to the brand and help tell a story effectively. For example, the Pillsbury Doughboy is quite upbeat with a sense of humor and signals freshness and superb quality. The Maytag repairman is relaxed and confident, and symbolizes the reliability of Maytag. The Michelin man is strong and positive and means safety.

Iconic logo symbols can have a life of their own. It is usually much easier to make a connection with a logo symbol rather than a product. Budweiser’s Frank and Louie lizard characters has such a following that customers would go to their website to check out the ads. They would also buy custom t-shirt designs and toys from their website. These characters were strongly linked to Budweiser because they were marketed so well in their ads.

When considering a log design for your company, you need to try and work our a brand strategy first. What would be your identity, how would you want to be related to etc, are questions you need to ask yourself. The answers to these questions would then help you decide weather you want to go for iconic logo symbols or for a logo design that is more illustrative in nature.

I was reading Seth Godin’s book entitled “small is the new big” and came across an interesting perspective about how benchmarking can weaken your business performance. Here’s an excerpt:

“…benchmarking against the universe actually encourages us to be mediocre, to be average, to just do what everyone else is doing. The folks who invented the Mini (or the Hummer, for that matter) didn’t benchmark their way to the cutting edge. Comparisons to other cars would never have brought about these fashionable exceptions. What really works is not having every little thing be up to the usual standards – what works is everything is being good enough, and one or two elements of a product or service being amazing.”
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