If You're Searching For How-To Information, Please Stop Reading Now.

In addition, if you anticipate your reaction to reviewing these trends is to dismiss every one of them as yesterday's news, you also may as well walk away right now.

There's plenty to be learned here, but you need to be looking for the right thing. After a decade of studying logos from around the world—32,000 alone for this report—I can say with absolute confidence that the true benefit of studying logo design trends is that they invariably identify trajectories. Any would have been excellent candidates for trend reports in past years, but they just don't move our field forward.

Leaders in the "done to death" category for this year include designs that include birds, dinosaurs, monsters, people as trees, transparent flip books (actually, flipping or stacked see-through pages of any kind), transparent lotus blossoms, fruit, and X's (this final tribe where two crossed arrows or lines have words or icons in each of the four quadrants is so overdone that designers themselves have begun to parody it).

Another category is on the opposite side of the universe. But there's no critical mass here yet, and certainly no guarantees that these will eventually grow into something bigger.

Some Examples From This Year's Study

Twixt – These contain odd little interlinks between points that suggest connectivity.

Angle bombs – These contain highly angled geometric shapes, oftentimes triangles, and are usually chaotic and without symmetry, like an explosion of sharp pieces from a central explosion.

Leaf amalgams – Leaves used to build cars, people, other leaves, whatever.

Copy – These designs use minute words as a graphic component, but the words could never be read. It is texture, not text.

Penumbra – Think of a halo of layered and colored light circles that are not quite centered on each other.

Monoliths – Squares or rectangles that are in perspective and that appear to be drifting.

The third category reveals the solid trends for the year. That is not the truth anymore: The internet's global visual community can cause the very same idea to pop up in very different places simultaneously, quite unrelated to each other.

Other Design Drivers

What is it?
There has begun to be a real sense of confusion about the cognizant differences between logos, favicons, app buttons, and icons. Some are classic, some are contemporary.

A clearer choice
There is so much use of transparency in logo design today that color choices, by necessity, are becoming lighter. Where areas of a design overlap, the new resulting color needs to be readable, not just mud. As designers' involvement in icon design grows, the influence of illustration on designers grows. So style saturation has also started to affect logo design as well.

Mirror, mirror
A more positive affect of the tightened relationship between logo design and illustration: When unique styles emerge in one field, they quickly bounce to the other.

The 2012 Trend Report

At this writing, there are nearly 175,000 logos on the LogoLounge site. Each design represents hundreds if not thousands of hours of thought and struggle on behalf of designers around the world. So thank you to all of the designers who have contributed to the Trend Reports over the past decade.

Icon Clusters

Both icons and logos are used as a pictorial solution reduced to their bare essence to convey a message, but there has always been a fine line between them in that icons are purposely anonymous whereas logos could not be more personalized (or should be, at least).

But as symbols, icons are so ubiquitous that it's probably on natural that they would eventually start to jump the track from the world of giving directions into the world of corporate representation. The question is: How do you send a message with an icon that you are something much more?

The solution: Merge multiple icons together with transparent linkage. This is managed in the same way you might express a thought by linking several words into a phrase, except with this technique, designers are using icons as if spelling out a rebus.

Transparent Links

Demonstrating strength in numbers by constructing a logo from multiple elements is a long-standing formula. Linking these elements together in a transparent chain-like fashion is new, however. Whether elements are joined in a circle or a linear band is irrelevant as the concept is the same: Diversity finds a common bond and creates synergy from a stronger union. Color is used to demonstrate variety in these samples, and proof of connectivity is demonstrated by tonal shift where elements overlap.

Though nothing is new about the use of transparencies, the increasing use of this technique is now at critical mass.

Watercolor

Potato Chip

Anyone who has ever wolfed his way through a stack of Pringles chips can relate to this shape, better known to the geometry world as a hyperbolic paraboloid. To categorize the appearance of this shape in the world of identity, we'll call it a potato chip as the form of each instance tends to vary a bit, much like the chips in a bag. Flattened out, most of these shapes would look like a circle or an ellipse, but with a gentle twist they occupy a unique three-dimensional space.

The shift to a greater use of surface gradient to define shape is critical to the success of these images: If viewed with just a flat tone, they would appear as the twisted loop of an infinity sign.

Anaglyphs

This technique was originally developed by a Frenchman to create dimensional stereoscopic imagery in the 1850s. Today, modern iterations of this effect overprint divergent imagery and make one or the other visible depending on the color of lens selected for viewing.

Messaging from these marks creates a dichotomy of choice. Because this is a novel and interactive technique, it commands a response which ensures a few additional milliseconds of attention while the consumer deciphers her options.

Selective Focus

Digital and technical advancements now allow almost anyone with a camera or the most basic apps and software to create dramatic imagery through field of focus contortions. No surprise to see this effect translate to the field of identity design.

The subtle misty qualities of these logos can create an entrancing effect as the soft edges of the mark seem to vanish into the surface. This sharp versus fuzzy look is a perfect example of the design industry emulating effects from other visual sectors of the consumer's life.

Apps

Mobile devices and the visual language of apps may well have the single largest impact on how we design identity over the next decade. We are entering a period where the lines of differentiation between logos, icons, symbols, favicons, and app buttons are completely blurred. These elements have always been visual cousins, but the results of their inbreeding is creating some new strains of solutions that don't fit with conventional branding models.

Are these app buttons or are these logos? If a mark is to primarily live on the menu of a mobile device, do you design a logo and place it on a button or is it best to integrate the two from inception?

Tessellation

Followers of these reports will see similarities between these logos and Bucky logos and Pixel logos from the previous two years. Often the individual components share a common color palette that creates the effect of overlaps and transparency.

Mosaic-like patterns range from highly complex to very simple solutions, created from a small number of elements. Aside from their striking beauty, these logos convey the concept of strength in numbers; combining elements creates a sum greater than the parts.

Cousin Series

Last year's report noted the profusion of logo series designs. This year finds the continued proliferation but with the variation occurring in the surface or technique used to draft the logo. All members are still in the same family, but the variations make the units less like siblings and more like cousins.

Variants used on these series may be for trivial variety, or they may be part of a precise matrix to help code or convey specific information. This can create longevity for a program designed to build equity as consumers gain familiarity with it, yet change with the vagrancies of style through modification of surface and technique.