My 2 year old son has recently been watching PIXAR movies. He can already recognize the beginning sequence with the lamp bounding across the screen and jumping on the “I”. He excitedly smiles and points at the TV because he knows he is about to watch one of his favorite movies.
We all recognize and are familiar with hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing images around us. As we all know, the most easily recognizable marketing image is typically the logo.
Many of us have run into some of these games that you guess the company based on only a portion of logo or wordmark. Take a stab at naming the company based on the portion of the logo seen below.
You may recognize several of the logos and you may also start to have ideas pop in your head for what the company behind the logo stands for. As we all know, the logo is only one aspect of the visual representation of the brand based on lots of research, data, and testing. But as illustrated above, logos can be a powerful representation. Even just a small part of the logo can be recognizable and bring up an emotional or thought provoking response.
Below are 16 logos of large state and internationally known higher ed institutions in the U.S. Try and take a guess as to what school these logos/wordmarks belong to. Does the small portion of some of the logos below bring up some kind of response? Is the response as strong as the responses from the corporate logos above? Can you describe some of the schools brand as well as you could for some of the corporate logos?
How many can you get right? Write your answers in a comment below, after a while I will let you know if you are right.
How does this help you, you ask? First, here are some questions to ask yourself about your current logo.
- Is your logo unique?
- Is your logo recognizable?
- Do you have identity and logo standards?
- Color?
- Font?
- Use in different scenarios?
- Size/shape/proportion?
- Does your logo bring up the appropriate response that you want it too?
- What emotions/thoughts does your logo bring out?
- What do internal and external audiences of your university/college think of the logo?
As mentioned earlier, the logo is only one aspect of the visual representation of a brand. If the logo doesn’t match the brand, your stakeholders may not be getting the full and correct visual and emotional response that is intended of the brand. In the end, having a “correct” visual and emotional response to an easily recognizable logo is one aspect that can help bring in like-minded stakeholders.
The corporate logo games above came from http://www.joeykatzen.com/alpha/#guess and http://www.bizzia.com/brandcurve/game-name-that-brand/
August 13, 2009 at 10:25 am
I did worse at that than I thought. In the first section I couldn’t get 1, 6, 11, 16, or 18.
The second section reminded me of those college football helmet quizzes. And I did even worse, only getting 7 of the 16.
It really is important to remember that the logo is just a portion of your visual identity. But that portion is obviously very important and people will connect with it and be passionate about it. If you wanted an example of passion, check out the comments from this post on the new University of Waterloo logo: http://bit.ly/fn6o4
August 13, 2009 at 11:55 am
for what it’s worth: potentially (by my count) seven of these marks are athletic specific marks. I see that as an apples to oranges comparison against the academic focused logo of, for example, a harvard.
I work at Notre Dame, for example and we have an Athletics mark (which you’ve pictured here), but also an an academic mark for the university at large: http://mark.nd.edu
By the way, I got all but #6 in the first set
August 13, 2009 at 12:06 pm
oak: You are correct, some of the logos are athletics logos as they are very distinctive. Many of the academic logos look extremely similar – a shield and academic wordmark. Thank you for pointing this out – if the athletics logos standout more the academic logos – it begs the question of where does that leave the academic brand? In many cases, the academics logo makes the academic portion of the school seem traditional and similar to others, while the athletics is unique and stands out from the crowd.