[ocaml-biz] logo connotations

[Brandon J. Van Every]

William D. Neumann wrote:
> Now I'm not saying
> that Camel Rock is the right image for the logo (while the
> idea of a rock formation might promote
> safety and stability, it also tends to project a ponderous,
> slow image as well), just that familiarity
> with a given object is so much less important than the looks
> of the logo and the qualities it projects.

To cut to the chase, there's a severe "WTF?  What the hell is up with
that?" factor looking at a Camel Rock logo.  "Uuuh, you've got a rock
which looks sorta like a camel.  Um, yeah."  Nevermind that the subject
artwork isn't logoizeable anyways.  You're not going to get the
characteristics of that rock down to 0.5" x 0.5", it's going to look
like a weird lump of nothing.

Camel Rock would make a good *postcard* for an OCaml convention.  Or
wall art.

> > ? ?high level, high performance, robust, pragmatic
>
> Well, you seem to be discussing a slogan or pitch for OCaml,
> which is pretty much an orthogonal
> problem to the design of a logo.

Not really.  Logos *can* carry connotation.  They don't have to be
completely arbitrary symbols that are drilled into people only by
repetition.  Even if they don't carry much connotation, you need to
decide what your branding is, so that you don't create a logo that
gratuitously interferes with your branding.

> I've been doing a lot of
> looking at logos lately, and really, quite a
> few of them have zero (or close to zero) connection to the
> products or companies they represent.

And a lot of logos suck.  If the logo doesn't make some kind of
connection to the product, it is failing to do a big part of its job.

> For example, the following logos say very little about the
> products they represent:
>
> Apple,

Apple's logo said *enormous* things about their corporate culture back
when the 'rainbow' logo was first produced.  The rainbow was the symbol
of the San Francisco gay counterculture.  I doubt the logo had the
connotation of 'faggy' to people, but it certainly said "iconoclastic,
non-conformist, upstart, fun, not stodgy."  If you were more
knowledgeable about the bay area counterculture, you might have even had
the association of "revolutionary."

> IBM,

Well when you've been at it as long as IBM, you can do whatever
impersonal vague thing you like.  I do think that the logo communicates
"solid, no nonsense."

> Dell,

Again, "corporate, solid, no nonsense."

> the O'Reilly Perl Camel,

They've had a long time to build up a repetitive brand identity.  It
isn't so much that Perl has a camel, it's that all O'Reilly books have a
detailed rendering of an animal on them.  This is all just geek history.
Probably all got started with the GNU Hurd.

> NBC's peacock

"colorful, showy, ostentatious" while still being "corporate, solid, no
nonsense"

> (while it once had significance back when
> color TV was in it's infancy, it no longer has any meaning
> but a historical one),

I disagree.  It simply doesn't have as compelling a meaning as it once
did.  Same with Apple.  Apple's latest logos communicate "slick, kewl,
graphic designery, industrial designery, fashionable."

[rest of logo examples snipped]

The connotations of logos are extant in many cases.  Particularly with
the more compelling logos, i.e. Apple.  I am wondering if you're just
not a verbal thinker, so you don't see a reason to attach descriptive
words to logos?


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.