Logos, icons and change
The world is awash with brands and logos. Most of them are adequate–they get the job done but aren’t terribly memorable. Some are ugly as sin, some are downright incomprehensible, and some aren’t much more than clip art or the result of a typeface chosen at random from the default set in Windows XP. But sometimes logos and brandmarks become more than just a pictogram–they actually become icons. That is, they become instantly recognizable, and in many cases they endure for years and years; they become timeless.
Obviously in some cases (even amongst the logos I’ve posted above) there are periodic updates here and there–the “BMW” typeface has changed over the years, for example, and the Apple logo used to be in rainbow colors (and, interestingly, the IBM logo used to be solid), but these logos have never been radically altered from their original forms.
Sometimes, though, companies unintentionally (and sometimes very intentionally) wreck their longstanding corporate identity when they modify their logos, and I can’t quite figure out why.
