The sales and marketing gurus of the world know this only too well, and it is this reason that virtually all products and trademarks have distinctive visual 'brands' called logos to make them appear more recognizable and well-known. A logo is more than the name of a product; a logo is a graphical icon that symbolizes the essence of the product it represents. A good logo is familiar immediately. For example, a few years back some people in suits decided that it would be a good idea to flash product logos for a fraction of a second during movies; you could be watching Darth Vader and all of a sudden the Coca Cola logo would appear on the screen briefly, so briefly that you wouldn't even consciously realize that you had seen it. But, according to theory, you would suddenly decide that a cold Coke would taste mighty good right about now and you would stand up to get one, reaching into your pocket for some hard-earned money. Eventually this idea was scrapped because some other people in suits declared that this was brainwashing and therefore evil and wrong. Frankly, I think that advertisers manage to brainwash us just the same, but that's just my opinion.
The key to designing a good logo is fairly simple: ask yourself, what is the product that I am trying to represent? What sort of people does it appeal to? What features or characteristics does it have that I can play with, that I can use to my advantage?
I've been receiving a lot of e-mails from my loyal fans (all three of them) saying "You're the graphics / images editor, how about showing us some of your graphics and images?" I've been planning on waiting until I do my big article on Bryce 3D, but what the heck. Let's take a look at a couple of my logos.
The company that I work for markets a service called instaPoll™, which allows users to give and take interactive polls online. When I was asked to design a logo for instaPoll, I immediately realized that there was a characteristic I could play with: when a user wants to vote, they click on an HTML radio button in their web browser. I created an inset 'radio button' graphic and arrow cursor in Photoshop, then added some beveled text. The result? A trademarked logo.
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