What makes a truly great logo

This is Michael Beirut. I'm Michael Beirut. I'm a graphic designer. You might be familiar with his work. But interestingly, he thinks that logos are just kind of overrated. I am actually often very ambivalent about them. Let's back out a second. What is a logo? Basically, the face of a company. Some are beloved. Some, the swastika's a logo, and it's reviled, you know? They have to work at tiny sizes and huge. There are three specific types. The first type is the wordmark. The wordmark is the easiest one, and it's the one that we're all most familiar with. I mean, John Hancock's signature is kind of a wordmark. And it can look crisp, clean, and modern, like the new Google logo looks. It can look somehow that it has roots in a shared heritage, the way the Coca-Cola logo looks, you know? The second is pictorial. Pictorial logos often function as a kind of rebus, you know? It's a picture, and you say what's in the picture, and it sort of is identifying the name of the company, sometimes directly like Target, sometimes more indirectly like Lacoste. The third kind is kind of the holy grail, abstract iconography. It's everyone's favorite kind of category because it just seems almost like magic, you know? As a designer, people come to me, and they'll say, oh, I want something like the Nike Swoosh. They think that the Nike Swoosh was the Nike Swoosh the day it was drawn, but it was nothing the day it was drawn. The company that birthed Nike commissioned a design student named Carolyn to draw some ideas, and the Nike founders didn't really like them. They sort of said, oh, let's use that one. It wasn't like an overnight success. And then they started putting on the science of shoes. The shoes were good, and then the genius of Nike's marketing apparatus made us further associate that product not merely with performance athletic gear, but with the very idea of athletic achievement itself. And that's how, over a long time, a little mark means something big. That's exactly how religious symbols work. It's obviously not just anything inherent in these shapes, but it's about what those shapes have come to represent in the minds of the people who are looking at them. But there's a fourth type of logo that goes beyond these three types and can use elements of each of them, the logo system, a graphical framework that can have endless permutations. The first gigantically popular example of the logo system would be MTV, but Google's Daily Doodles are another great example of the logo system, a familiar mark that can also point to other ideas and issues. This approach all has to do with technological change. It used to be, if a company was doing a logo, there'd be this military operation by which it would be inscribed on all their equipment and on their airplanes and their retail facilities, and gold pins and couplings would be made for the executive suite and put on spittoons and ashtrays and the top of the skyscraper in which they dwell and on everyone's business card, right? Nowadays, none of that's as important as an email signature or your Twitter avatar or the little thing that sits next to your URL, and those things are much more ubiquitous and they can be changed at the drop of a hat. Beirut used this system approach for his Hillary Clinton logo. We wanted to have a mark reflect the electorate and reflect the issues. Those simple forms that comprise the H with the arrow in it are actually designed to hold not just two colors, say red and blue, but any colors you want. The use of logo systems seems to be continually on the upswing now, probably because it allows the brand using it to expand the conversation beyond its own name. The logo kind of reminds people that that's what our priority is today. But at the end of the day, regardless of the shape, style, or system, it might not matter what your logo is. It really is about thinking of these symbols as being empty vessels in a way, and then you pour the meaning into them. So what's this all add up to? Basically, those fights people get in about new logos are pretty misguided. They think they're judging a diving competition, but actually all these organizations are in swimming competitions. It's not what kind of splash you make when you hit the water, it's how long you keep your head above that water. Logos need to have a long life, not win points in a discussion. 12 years after the birth of that Nike logo, Nike came back to that graphic design student Carolyn with a gift. A Nike ring with her own trademark on it, the swoosh. Thank you very much, it's beautiful. And an undisclosed amount of Nike stock. Wow. In 1973 when it was designed, her pay was $35.