Logo design refinement. Both reviled and revered. It is, however, a necessity in today’s ever evolving and widening scope of brand applications, each with their own set of limitations, rules, and best practices. Designing a brand identity that works just as well on buildings, business cards, and social media can be a challenge, and nearly half of the brand applications graphic designers must consider didn’t even exist 25 years ago. It is because of this that we have seen nearly every major brand undergo some sort of refinement to their visual brand identity over the past 5-10 years. Typically these refinements are unnoticeable to the average consumer that isn’t subscribed to AdAge, however, the ones that do get noticed are most often simplifying and flattening the brand marks to an occasionally dramatic degree. Sometimes these logo design refinements work outstandingly well by drawing from their own logo design history, and sometimes they strip the soul right out of what helped give that brand their unique identity in the first place.
For us the decision to refine our logo began almost as soon as I output the final files after a whirlwind branding effort almost exactly ten years ago today. Our logo had already been designed with many of today’s modern applications in mind, so for us our logo update was really more about refining the ever increasing number of things about the brand mark that had come to irk me after having lived with it for so long. With our ten year anniversary taking shape this year it seemed like the perfect time to refine and reinvigorate our logo to make it better reflect the business we’ve become. I also designed a ten year version of the new logo which we will use throughout 2023, then we will fully transition to the new brand mark in 2024.
It’s exciting to see something I’ve wanted to do for so long finally come to fruition, and we all look forward to phasing out the old and bringing in the new over the course of 2023. It feels like just one more piece of the foundation that will make the next ten years even more successful than the past ten.
By Daniel Rizer
01/05/2022