If home is our first place, and work is our second place, then mobile screens have definitely become our third place. Smart phone use has increased from 21 percent in 2010 to more than 63 percent today, and with 83 percent of all Americans online regularly, that percentage of mobile users is bound to keep edging up.
The fact that so many people now view the world through a window the size of a business card has spelled an inevitable change in logo design. Designers continue to push back and evolve the meaning of “simple.”
That logos have to be scalable has always been understood. Designs have become more and more flat. Designers and audiences alike need an escape from all things digital. By bringing back what is human-made, we gain a sense of control over the digital tide that threatens to overtake us.
Designers have responded to the mobile screen’s harsh requisites in a variety of ways, many of which are detailed in this year’s Trend Report. Typographic solutions, which can be absorbed immediately with no symbolic interpretation, are ever more important.
Designers also have found ingenious creative workarounds, such as introducing long shadows to very flat designs, suggesting that dimension is still there. Logo designs may be reduced to line work (see the “Geo Wires” trend below), but now every facet of the design is visible. These designs are simpler, but now somehow more complex. In other designs, like this year’s “Pompons,” solutions are less reliant on exact, specific shapes, instead communicating with energy and emotion.
As with all things, it’s about balance. Perceptive designers will always be able learn from watching the pendulum as it swings between people’s wants and needs, and technology’s gifts and demands. As Proctor & Gamble’s global marketing and brand building officer Marc Pritchard said, “Creativity without insight is worthless.” Today, insight means learning how to move design forward by turning digital limitations into communication advantages.
We also saw plenty of:
Mountains, both representing geographic entities as well as a metaphor for achieving great heights or reaching a summit of success.
Acorns a plenty, as a return to nature and the promise of potential and greatness from an auspicious beginning. Skeumorphic design is so yesterday. Unfortunately designers are breaking the surface tension by letting long shadows creep onto the faces of their work. So if we’re living in flat world, what’s casting the shadow?
The 2014 Trend Report
At the writing of this report there are more than 212,000 logo on the LogoLounge website, submitted from designers all over the world. Proof that the product of this industry is part of a healthy evolutionary cycle.
Perhaps the greatest value of these reports is to enable designers to map out the trajectory of specific styles, concepts, techniques and solutions. Once a chain of design evolution is identified, it is much simpler to forecast and design the next step in the sequence. These resources and the trends identified here, combined with your unique interpretation and ingenuity, may fuel the beginning of a truly exceptional logo.
Special thanks to some of the world’s best identity designers for their generous suggestions that helped enhance this report, including Brian Miller, Brian Wiens, Adam Anderson, Stephan Smith, Ty Wilkins, Alen Pavlovic, Brett Stiles, Valera Namzov, Jeron Ames, Denis Ulyanov, Sherwin Schwartzrock, and others.
Mono Crest
Let's start this year's report with the spawn of the most prolific trend we identified in last year's report. Last year we identified “Line Craft” using the same single weight stroke throughout and this year the movement has invaded with a vengeance. We identified at least five strains of mono including the most ubiquitous “Mono Script,” “Mono Icons” and this year's “Mono Crest.”
The non-scalable single line weight gained serious use as the go-to for icon designers, and the simplicity can also be seen where it carries forward into illustration work. Certainly there is a refinement here, but it allows designers to embrace the rich language they've used for years in crests without tonality or color.
Letter Stacks
Lowly hyphens should abandon hope and designers should be admonished as they lose care for the need to break words between consonants. The solution for a stubborn name that's too long to behave is to parse it into a stack of segments and box them up. Presto, you have a compact solution that suddenly stands out on a T-shirt's logo ghetto.
Typographically, the font is less important but obviously these are seldom lower case. Either way, this solution is not a true puzzle but it chides viewers enough to actively draw them into the discovery process.
Hand Type
It should be no surprise that the use of "hand drawn" type has migrated from the printed page and illustration world to the small and powerful logo. So much so that designers are both revolted and enamored with the mechanization and inundation of these crude digital fonts and abundant template solutions. This last year's explosion to near critical saturation had been building slowly but with recently blown floodgates, we have to question how much enchanting handcrafted messaging a consumer can take.
The promise is the same as the book Hand Job released in 2007, which offered designers and consumers alike a refreshing respite from the churn of digital type.
Dazzle
Two centuries ago when Firman Didot crafted his modern serif font of the same name, it became the signature text to usher in the age of enlightenment in literature. Magnify those misprinted letters and you have a typographic solution that is intriguing and legible in its incompleteness.
Designers take particular pride in removing 40 percent of the letterform, which at a distance and to aged eyes appears missing already. This is closely related to similar solutions where thick and thin strokes alike are dissected from serif letterforms to create compact visuals ready for consumer interpretation.
Flat Facets
Another equally prolific line of trends over the last few years has been the facet. This year's report identified four emerging strains, including “Facet Fields,” “Crystals,” “Type Facets” and “Flat Facets,” which we'll expound on here.
Facets first came about with an attempt to create three-dimensional objects from a series of intersecting planes. The greatest value of these marks come from telling the story of recognizing worth in a worthless stone then, making it perceptible by finely honing the surfaces until it takes on the qualities of a priceless gem.
Geo Wires
Looking more like a gem cutters instruction manual, this is where facets and mono line trends first intersect by mapping out the cleavage of a rare substance. Canting the shape to create depth, the viewer instinctively knows these lines incase an unknown substance of extreme value.
By using a wireframe solution these marks convey a level of precision, whether geometrically symmetrical or resembling an oddly shaped element of deeper symbolism.
Links
Proof that hotdogs can be made out of anything and that anything can be made out of hotdogs. Welcome a variety of solutions that live and die by using a series of straight and quarter-round transparent links. Though not the first use of this technique, it would be fair to ascribe credit to this project as a seminal influence for this trend.
Credit designers that have examined these building blocks and created their own spin on how to reassemble with a degree of originality. Consumers can almost imagine a real life version of these logos with functional pivot points.
Motion Lines
Everything designers know about demonstrating action they learned from Stan Lee. Logo motion has gone old school with the influence of icons for apps and user interface. If something rings, just add vibration lines.
Identity designers have had no larger influencing factor than the plethora of icons, most of which were created for digital media. Many of these icon systems were built with a common mono-line as a signature to identify other icons from the same set. It's not surprising to find designers of these sets are also creators of logos.
Reviewed by Ismail Fahmi
on
July 25, 2020
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