LogoLounge posted up their design trends for 2012 and I’m a little blown away. There’s a ton of color in this group, which makes me think back to what I started as a designer because logos usually were 1 to 3 colors maximum if only for the sake of cutting costs in printing. Now that 4-color, digital printing is a norm, and many logos never make it off a website and onto a business cards, it seems natural that vibrant colors would be the norm.
How to Identify a Trend
As I review logos that are entered onto the LogoLounge site, three distinct categories start to emerge. The first and largest category is replete with trends that already have reached saturation. They may be well-rendered and serve their clients very well. Any would have been excellent candidates for trend reports in past years, but they just don’t move our field forward.
Leaders in the “done to death” category for this year include designs that include birds, dinosaurs, monsters, people as trees, transparent flip books (actually, flipping or stacked see-through pages of any kind), transparent lotus blossoms, fruit, and X’s (this final tribe where two crossed arrows or lines have words or icons in each of the four quadrants is so overdone that designers themselves have begun to parody it).
Another category is on the opposite side of the universe. Here, you might see two and maybe three logos that indicate a brewing trend with promise. But there’s no critical mass here yet, and certainly no guarantees that these will eventually grow into something bigger.
I really dig the abstraction of some of the examples shown. I think there should be more of that in logo design, and less deliberate image representation, but that’s just me. I’m still a huge fan of the FedEx logo redo back in the 90s, not only because of its cultural significance, but it’s disguised symbolism. When coming up with some sort of logo for Fresh Rag, I was mildly tempted to use some kind of paper imagery, but decided better of it.
What logo design trends would you like to see more of, and which would you like to die a slow painful death?
Props out to The Fox Is Black for the heads up on this one.
This post is one of my preferred one so far. I didn’t know there was something like logo trends, and these are very well illustrated here.
I’m not a logo designer but I surely appreciate when there is a clever and appealing one being chosen to illustrate and summarize the mission of a business or organization.
Keep up the excellent work
Michel
Thanks Michel. Logos aren’t my normal subject matter here, but being a designer, I have an affinity for well designed logo marks.