With yet another snowstorm here today, I thought I’d share this snowflake-inspired logo I designed last year. AMA Scientific is a national supplier of laboratory refrigerators and freezers. The logo’s ice-crystal mark is created from the company’s initials.

Related: For more snowflake-inspired logos, check out 10 Snowflake-Inspired Logos, posted on the blog Zeroside.

I do more thinking about brands, mine and my clients’, than I care to admit. As a result, I’m always interested in what others in the design and marketing fields have to say about branding, both as a concept and as a service. Here are a few thoughts generated by bits I’ve read over the past month that I found intriguing.

It’s not about the logo
A logo does not make a brand. While the reverse is also not the case, it is closer to being accurate, as the proper development of brand will build meaning for your logo over time.

On the lowest level, branding is confused with the creation of a logo. This is a perverse – yet surprisingly resilient – falsehood. An icon, monogram, or wordmark is in no way a brand—thinking so is akin to believing that a hood-ornament is a car. Yet, this is where a great number of brand projects start: “Yay! We’ve started our company! Let’s brand it with a logo!”
— Eric Karjaluoto, The most important question in branding

Positive Expression
In a world where people have (and use) more tools than ever with which to share their thoughts with the world, it is more important than ever to choose your words carefully. Your words, your thoughts, and the associated actions exist in a inter-related web that serves as your identity, and by extension, your brand’s identity. Blair Enns’ Seven Words You Can’t Say in Business Development reminds us of the Chinese saying that roughly translated says, “Watch your thoughts, they become your language. Watch your language, it becomes your deeds. Watch your deeds, they become your behavior.”

Expert? Really?
It seems there are far too many brands claiming expertise in their industry with little basis beyond membership. This unfortunate trend exists in the graphic design and marketing industries as much as anywhere else, and may indicate a mindset that allows this philosophy to permeate the work that these firms do for their clients. I’m reminded of another quote from Blair Enns:

“I hate the word ‘branding’ as a claim of expertise. An expert is someone who has a deeper knowledge of the subject than others trading in the area. I wonder if there’s even such thing as a branding expert. There are just too many people in it and very, very few that have meaningful knowledge that others do not. A designer claiming expertise in branding is like a fish claiming expertise in swimming. It’s not expertise; it’s the price of entry.”
— Blair Enns’ Win Without Pitching

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year already since I wrote about their last report (Logo design trends for 2007), but LogoLounge has again released their thought-provoking, mid-year report on trends in logo design. The report, written by Bill Gardner and published in the April issue of GD USA magazine, can be viewed in its entirety at gdusa.com.

The title, LogoLounge.com THE 2008 REPORT: MORE CLEAN and Less Green, reveals at least two of the “prevailing winds” identified at the start of this year’s report, working to shape the 15 trends identified within. “We saw less emphasis on sustainability or general “greenness” in logo design. There’s plenty of natural imagery but being “green” doesn’t seem all that unique anymore.”, Gardner writes. He also observes, “There’s an overall move toward cleanliness — in type, in line, in color — as if ideas are getting more and more succinct. It may be an indication of the degree of seriousness with which branding is now regarded.” Also speaking to the rise in simplicity within today’s designs, Gardner writes, “Less is more common: less calligraphy, less Photoshop tricks, less artificial highlights.”

Could these “winds” represent a societal backlash against the current trendiness of touting one’s “greenness”? Are we pushing back or pushing forward? Or, are we just getting past green? Similarly, could the desire for simplicity in design be an expression of our desire for simplicity in other parts of our complicated world? Or, are designers not an accurate mirror of the societies in which they work, making these question ill-conceived?

Regardless of the answers to the questions I’ve posed above, or of any outside influences that might be driving a move toward simplicity and away from the oft-overused software-generated effects, I, for one, am pleased to see it.

Deep questions aside for the moment, let’s get back to the matter at hand. Gardner identifies 15 trends within his report. He gives each of these trends a brief moniker, with some requiring a bit more explanation than others. For these explanations, the context, and the all-important visual examples of logos within each trend, I recommend reading the full report. Nevertheless, here they are in nitty-gritty list form:

1. Supernova
2. Fine Line
3. FoldOver
4. Global Expansion
5. Loops
6. Jawbreakers
7. Strobe
8. Nimbus
9. Stitch
10. Colorblind
11. Amoeba
12. Facets
13. Doodles
14. Flourish
15. Fibrous