# Logo Terms every designer needs to know

Channel: Flux Academy
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkvv5nz7RK4
Duration: 18 min
Language: English
Words: 2798
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/Pkvv5nz7RK4

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[0:00] hi designer friends as some of you might know we have a new brand design course out now and what way to help you understand whether this course is good for you then just give you a sneak preview so i want to give you access to this video which is part of the course for free here on youtube this is just one of more than 50 videos in-depth videos that we have in the course for you if you want to learn more there's a link below this video enjoy this video with matt if you want to succeed anywhere you need to learn the language knowing the terms helps you

[0:35] evaluate and interpret what you're looking at and knowing the options allows you to recommend the best solution for your project so in this lesson we're going to consider more than 20 logo descriptors in eight categories with examples of each don't worry i'm not just going to read from the dictionary but we're going to get to grips with the terminology and this will help you fill your clients with confidence and devise the best approach for each assignment so logos or logos if you're greek this greek word simply means word and the first type of logos i want to talk about is simply words logo types or word marks i prefer the term word mark and this is where a logo is simply

[1:19] presented with characters from whichever language we're speaking in like the ibm logo or ted or dyson who make vacuum cleaners and hand dryers and such or tate which is a group of art galleries in the united kingdom like the famous tate modern tate britain and this is a good example how you can get really creative with word marks and word marks are great solutions particularly for short brand names when you can really customize the type and still have an element of legibility to it whilst bringing in a lot of personality difficult to do word marks well with lots with long brand names although there are exceptions of course to every rule next

[2:05] i want to talk about symbols sometimes people call these logo marks or brand marks like nike british rail pbs target i'm gonna categorize a lot of the examples we saw in the last lesson sometimes people also call symbols icons i prefer to reserve the term icon for user interface design so an icon is something which guides the user and gives them a little bit of information say if you if you're navigating an app or a website and if you put a symbol and a word mark together you have a combination mark so with some of the examples we've just seen target present their word mark underneath their symbol for their combination mark with pbs the word mark is to the right of the

[2:48] symbol british rail the same arrangement fountain again they present it underneath the symbol combination marks are sometimes also called signatures and sometimes people use the word signature for the whole lockup when companies have a logo and a tagline in an approved arrangement that can be called a signature but i prefer the term combination mark because it's descriptive it's a combination of things together and i prefer to use that the next type is emblems like isle of new york by milton glaser this volvo emblem they do sometimes use the word mock separately but the way it's presented here is an emblem ikea being another example and a

[3:34] famous example of emblems or a famous category is the coat of arms the historic tradition where a lot of elements are brought together like in the city of manchester which is the nearest big city to where i'm sat right now and we have lots of elements here which are representative of things from the area like the ship canal the lancashire rose the bees of industry elements that all connect to some element of history and tradition and this sort of emblem style following the coat of arms has been picked up in a lot of areas for example in football crests like manchester united possibly the most famous brand to come from manchester really

[4:14] leans on the manchester court of arms in fact they used to just display the manchester court of arms on their shirts like a lot of clubs from cities so this could be called a crest or also a badge in england we call our football crests badges the terminology that fans use also sometimes they're called shields but really a shield should only be used as a descriptor for something that is a shield shape sometimes it's used a lit a little bit uh generically say all the clubs in certain sports have shields but it needs to be a shield shape like cadillac or the national football league in the united states or warner brothers which was recently

[4:58] redesigned by pentagram this is an emblem and a shield another type of emblem is the roundel which is round and this could be any sort of emblem or logo which is presented within a circular design like manchester city let's have parody we've shown manchester united just no bias and again they're pulling elements from the crest they actually have a shield in the middle of a round of which is a bit strange not really necessary either bmw is a roundel also next i want to talk about letter forms so a single letter form is a common choice for representing a brand because it's reads like a mnemonic device where you see the letter and then

[5:47] you read the rest of the name because it's the first sound and it also becomes a really useful symbol for appearing in small spaces like social media avatars or or printed in small areas mcdonald's now just use the m as their official corporate logo although of course you do see the full word marker emblem presented in in some places and on all the restaurants and such tesla have their t we mentioned the high line in the last lesson which uses this h and with letter forms you can get creative and design something custom which becomes distinctive for that brand rather than just presenting you know something from a common proprietary font we need to be

[6:31] a little bit more distinctive than that another form or within this category is the monogram now sometimes people refer to single letter forms as monograms but i prefer not to do that let me show you some examples and then i'll give my definition louis vuitton the luxury fashion house new york yankees their capping signature or cnn where each letter is presented one after another but the two ends share a stem so they're combined into one form so a monogram one form i think it needs to be a combination of a number two or more letter forms or graphemes into a single form in some way they're overlapping or they're combined to make one thing that's a monogram if they're presented

[7:18] separately i like the term cipher which comes from royal cipher now we see these a lot in uk because they're on all the post boxes now if i zoom into this one can you see the gr v1 in the middle that's george the sixth this is an old postbox now we more often see this er for elizabeth ii and here's one a little bit clearer and this is a royal cipher this combination we see here with the the crown the e2r elizabeth regina so this is a cipher and sometimes also people refer to letter forms monograms or ciphers as letter marks that's another term but i prefer to use letter firm

[8:04] monogram cipher and try to make a distinction there and it's worth saying there is no international society of branding that makes official rulings on the terms we should use and gosh i don't even know what terms they use in other language languages i'm only going to speak for english today but because there's no official ruling on these things these are just terms that have grown up through usage and corporate identities are a relatively new field really in terms of human history and language and these aren't scientific terms these are terms that have gained their meaning through repeated usage so you need to be familiar with other people's language

[8:47] but trying to develop a constant a consistent system for yourself is a really helpful thing okay a little bit of a disclaimer there over some ciphers that we see british telecom mit press this is a famous uh logo designed by muriel cooper in 1962 and if you can't see it the first three stems are the m then the next one is the i the ascender is the t and then the descender with the final stem together are the p so it reads mitp for mit press and they're also supposed to look like i believe like the spines of books or the way they picked out in a library because it's

[9:29] a press a publisher from the university and this is a logo that has really stood up the power of of modernism it's timeless even though it's what 60 years old so very cool other famous ciphers would be like npr the bbc things like that where the initials are presented separately okay pictorial is the next type of symbol i want to talk about and this is where something is uh represented we have a representation or illustration of something physical or something literal like an apple or a crocodile for lacos or a monkey that delivers the post so these are examples of pictorial marks sometimes these can also be characters or

[10:19] mascots not necessarily but for logos now when i think of a mascot i think of an adult dressed up in a costume to entertain entertain children like a sports mascot like if we look in the nfl rowdy from the dallas cowboys or the cincinnati bengals have a bengal tiger who apparently is named who day culturally i don't quite understand that one anyone from cincinnati fill me in on that but mascots can also be something that uh come into logo designs for example my five-year-old son knows the michelin man the tire manufacturer or the colonel who's been brought back into the fold with kfc and made part of the logo even with disney who have a word mark for their main

[11:07] corporate logo and it's a distinctive word mark but the mascot mickey mouse who represents disney has become part of our identity design in fact if we just have the shape of the mickey mouse ears might be used as a mask and outline we think of disney the whole organization not just mickey mouse as a as a character or a cartoon next there are abstract symbols so these are different from pictorial in that they are not representative of maybe something physical they could be abstract geometric shapes or some other sort of abstraction like the chase bank logo or the mitsubishi logo logos that have endured for a long time hsbc the bank abstract logos are often also

[11:54] symbolic not necessarily always or need to be but that often kick-starts your process like the six connections logo i showed you where the person in the center has six connections around them and that then can then test the late out so everybody has six connections multiplying spotify where their three lines within the symbol represent audio waves we can't see audio but here we have a visual representation of it or pepsi with their globe which i think the white is all supposed to be a smile the smile within a globe i'm not sure how successful this logo you're looking at is one of the most expensive rebrands of all time you can be the judge of

[12:40] how worth it that was so that's abstract symbols the final type of logo that i want to introduce to you is dynamic logos and these are logos that can change in different contexts like the london underground now let's categorize this first of all this is a emblem and it's also a roundel you're good you're doing well and this changes because if you're in a particular station like white chapel the name of the station is presented in place of the brand name within the logo emblem there's some more examples here wembley park camden town so it changes dynamically another well-known example is the philadelphia museum of art and this looks like a pretty run-of-the-will mill run of the mill

[13:31] word mark do you even have that expression where you're from there's a lot of mills around here in the north of england and it's pretty meh it's not very distinctive but what they did is they actually made a dynamic logo by which the a can change and it can be represented by even artworks in the museum and they designed actually hundreds of these a's so when the logo is presented on screens on signage and in different places in print it can always change and be dynamic and represent the dynamic nature of the museum and the range of exhibits that they have so it's a really good solution an appropriate solution i should say for this client another

[14:19] one from the office of pentagon this time from michael bay routes team is the mit media lab and we have a very solid modernist logo here typical michael beiru influenced by his mentor massimo vignelli if you don't know these people look them up you need to know about these guys and it's it's fine it's what it is it does the job but the really interesting thing about this logo is it's part of a whole dynamic system so the symbol is built on this grid and you can see this grid of squares here by which the the symbol is composed but they use this grid to make a whole

[14:56] suite and there's actually dozens of these logos there's just a few shown here for different departments different ideas different initiatives within the university or within the the media lab so every time one of these is presented it still looks like mit media lab because it's drawn on the same grid and because the type is typeset in the same way it looks like it all belongs but it's dynamic and it can be different and can be used for all these different initiatives a clever solution the last thing i want to talk about is alternates so you they have all these types of logos but sometimes within one identity we will need alternate logos

[15:37] to be flexible for certain applications an example of this liverpool football club have this very detailed crest and this is still their official emblem but it's not presented on the shirts on the shirts they simply have the live a bird and the letters lfc underneath their initials a cipher and this is a simplified but official alternate version of the logo and a lot of clubs do this the full emblem was on the shirts until recently but this makes a more pleasing uh aesthetic look it makes a stronger impact as the bird is larger rather than a very detailed crest which wouldn't be as visible at a distance and it wouldn't make the same graphical impact we

[16:30] can also see some more logos on this shirt let me just test you for a minute we have the nike swoosh which is a abstract symbol and we have standard chartered logo which is a combination mark and we have some custom type for the word mark and the symbol is a monogram might take a little bit to decipher but that is an s c very cool so in summary learn the language and speak the language because this will help you work with others and develop your own visual literacy consider which type of logo would best serve the brand as part of your overall identity design scheme

[17:15] hopefully considering these options will help you learn help you make sense of logos and help you consider what's best for your client alright designers i hope you found this video helpful as i said this is just the tip of the iceberg from what's inside this full branding course that we have click the link below this video to learn more and hope to see you in the course

[17:53] you

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