Logo Design Revisited. Introduction

y very first Design Lab article, published almost two years ago, tried to present the ins and outs of logo design as comprehensively as I could grasp them myself at that time.  Further explorations kept convincing me in the importance of this genre, for Web design as well as for design in general.  So in other articles, I described logo design stages in the Quiotix and Books of Russia projects, as well as in my own studio site design.

With its utterly generalized system of spatial, coloristic, and semantic relations, logo composition is an ideal laboratory for studying the laws of design.  I would even say that you can only master creating complex compositions by learning to collocate, collide and harmonize parts of a simple logo - and I would support this, before all, by my own experience.  The process of my design education is best demonstrated through the milestones of logo projects.

I must admit that now I don't feel particularly complacent about the sample logo that was the core of my early article.  The process of learning design, just as any other art, never ends; moreover, it sometimes corrects or even negates itself.  From today's viewpoint, I can see many serious faults in that early design.  Luckily, one of the recent projects of my studio gives me an opportunity to analyze the deficiencies of this particular logo and show how they could be amended. So, I'm eager to let my readers learn what I have recently discovered, first by showing what was good in the old logo and then what was bad.

Besides the self-refutation part, this article also tells the story of two more logos I recently created.  They are interesting in that they are intended to form a hierarchical design system, one logo belonging to a company and the other to its major product.  This project was very interesting, as it revealed some principles of creating coordinated systems of design elements within a common corporate style.