What Brands Get Wrong About Logos

William Golden's CBS Logo

On the 16th of November, 1951, the CBS eye pictograph first appeared as an on air logo. A year later William Golden, then the CBS art director suggested to CBS president Frank Stanton that they try out some other logo ideas. Stanton reminded Golden of the advertising adage, “Just when you are beginning to get bored by what you have done is probably the time it is beginning to be noticed by your audience.” The CBS eye stayed.

When I was at the Seattle design firm Team Design (which later became Methodologie, then merged with Digital Kitchen,) we had an in-house branding specialist during the “empty container name” period of the mid 90’s. He drummed home over and over again that what a logo looks like is not the important part. (Needless to say, visual designers hate hearing that.) What is important about a logo is that it is applied consistently and with strict guidelines. A visually powerful logo that is applied haphazardly will always lose out to a mediocre logo that follows rock-solid, rigorously adhered to brand guidelines.

I thought of both of those stories last week as Slack rolled out its logo mark redesign. I’m not going to comment much on what it looks like since I wasn’t in all the client meetings and critique sessions and I have no idea what their creative brief looked like. I’m sure the team did a great job within the constraints they were handed. I do think the new mark is much stronger when paired with its new logotype (and by comparison, the old mark is weaker with its logotype) than when it is on its own, which brings me to a general critique of tech logos. On a spectrum of consumer recognition and market penetration, Nike, Starbucks, and a few other giant international firms can get away with just using a mark. Billy Bob’s Muffler & Tire Hut can’t. Most tech firms are much closer to the Billy Bob’s end of the spectrum than they would like to think, and while sure, the app icon is going to use just the brand mark, you shouldn’t make that the way you represent your brand on other materials until you have a ton of market recognition.

And that is my biggest concern with the new Slack logo. There shouldn’t be a new Slack logo. Someone got bored, or a charismatic new hire who had the ear of the decision makers wanted to shake things up, and all the visual brand recognition they had built up got thrown away. It probably was time for a refresh of the brand guidelines. They have grown a lot over the last 6 years of their existence, of course a lot of inconsistent usage has crept in. Doubling down on clean, consistent usage, and maybe some tweaks and refinement to their old logo, would have helped their brand grow far more than a shiny new logo.