Dynamic Logos: All the Rage?

[This is a post of mine from a now-defunct blog, used here as a test post. ~ Ed. 08-20-2008]

In an article called “The new corporate logo: dynamic and changeable are all the rage,” Alice Rawsthorn of the International Herald Tribune discusses dynamic logos and the move away from rigid usage policy.

Google’s constantly changing logo is part of a broader trend toward what are called dynamic identities: corporate symbols that adopt different guises at different times or in different contexts, so you’re never sure exactly how they’ll look.

The latest is the new identity of Saks Fifth Avenue, the American department store chain. A 1973 Saks signature logo was revived — and refined — by the Pentagram design group, then sliced into 64 components that are arranged in different configurations on bags and boxes. “Fragmenting the logo gave it energy and bravura,” said Michael Bierut, the Pentagram partner who led the Saks project. “And now we can create numerous permutations of the logo.”

Dynamic identities fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that consistency is essential to an effective corporate identity. The more we see the same corporate symbol — or so the consistency camp argues — the more likely we’ll be to recognize and remember it. Companies adhered to this throughout the 20th century; and the designers of some of the most successful identities, such as Jan Tschichold at Penguin Books in the late 1940s, and Paul Rand as a consultant to IBM from the 1950s to the early 1990s, were renowned for their rigor.

It’s a quick, interesting piece about logo evolution, and worth reading if you have anything invested in your company’s visual identity, but I’ll save you the effort and tell you how it ends:

It’s easy to see why dynamic identities should strike a chord with today’s spoiled, impatient and — to give us some credit — visually savvy consumers, but there are instances where the old-fashioned approach works best. “MTV has a dynamic identity because they are dynamic, and I want them to be,” [graphic designer Bruce] Mau said. “But I don’t want my bank to be dynamic. I want them to be conservative and radically stable.”

In other words, nothing groundbreaking here after all. Companies like Google and MTV who strive for “hipness” can afford to change their logo daily if they like; [companies] with personas focused on stability, consistency, quality, industry anchoring… we can’t exactly go about putting holiday motifs on or cutting the thing up into jigsaw puzzle pieces.