When developing a new logo, it is very important to check if it will offend a particular subgroup or community. It does not have to be a big research but simple conversations with your target customers and associations you’re connected with.

A current example is the College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, VA) and its new logo design. The NCCA has ruled that its previous logo designed with 2 green and gold feathers plus the nickname Tribe violated their policy towards use of American Indian mascots, imagery, and names.

Although the college is able to retain its Tribe moniker, they introduced a new logo to avoid any penalties from NCAA. The new official logo will use its traditional shades of green and gold. In addition, they updated their well-known text-based logo - W&M monogram in four similar designs.

As a way to test its new logo, the logo committee created a Website specifically to get suggestions or feedback from the school community. More than 600 designs were reviewed before they finally ended up with the “W” and “M”.

Expectedly, the next target of the committee is to design a new mascot to go with the new official logo.

More details here.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Logo Design News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.