One.
The requirements for a genuinely excellent logo are great: it needs to be adaptable to a variety of contexts while making a clear and unambiguous statement. It needs to be fresh without seeming trendy or ephemeral. It needs to serve an organization for a long time. Plus, it needs to reference stylistically the brand strategy.
Given all of those requirements, particularly the need for a logo to be built on strategy, it is enough to ask a shop to come up with a single effective logo. What I tell my clients is that I will share with them stages in the design process and preliminary sketches or attempts. But I will not show them several design choices. If the single design that I end up proposing is unsatisfactory, I will go back and start again with a clean slate. Then I will come back with another single proposed design.
The main reason you never show multiple designs for a logo is that invariably the quality of the design solution will be judged by people who don’t have a great deal of experience doing so. New logos produce anxiety. Often a lot of anxiety. If you show multiple treatments to a committee you risk building on that anxiety. One person will like one design. Another will like the other. There will be talk about some compromise treatment. And then, your logo process will be seriously derailed.
One of the unfortunate realities of logo design is that it is extraordinarily precise. Generally a logo cannot suffer watering down or compromise without losing what it is all about. Other kinds of design are much more forgiving. That is why, if you want a logo that will truly serve your institutional needs, you don’t require that you see alternate designs.
You make a compelling case for a single design presentation. I would have to agree with all of your points, but wonder what others might say on the flip side? I think this is a very interesting topic, and one that doesn’t have much of an industry standard. How many is too many? When do you protect the client from themselves?
Excellent points about only showing one logo design. However, you also highlight perhaps the ultimate peril in higher education marketing in general and logo design in particular: committees. While we all understand the genesis of shared governance and inclusivity in academe (or at least the early intentions for it), getting buy-in from a committee for anything is nigh unto impossible. In the mid-1990s, The American University (DC) changed to American University. All they did was drop the “The,” and it caused a firestorm that rivaled GM dropping Oldsmobile or the introduction of New Coke. So while I agree that showing one design is prudent, an even better step is to identify one key sponsor with your client and have her or him engender buy-in from the committee. Needless to say, the higher you climb the institutional food chain, the easier your task will be.
I would like to comment to the creators of said logo designs, whether you present one or multiple options, and to make the plea that you consider the variety of mediums which may carry the logo. I have been in the promotional products industry for over twenty years and it never ceases to amaze me that institutions will create a logo which reproduces beautifully on paper, only to be impossible to convert to a hoodie, cap, t-shirt, coffee mug etc. Merchandising of a logo very often creates alternate revenue and thought to this should be applied at the inception of logo creation, not after the fact.
Wendy-thanks for the important and true reminder. I’ll make you a deal: we’ll produce an institutional logo suitable for a full range of merchandise applications and you use nothing but the official school logo on your merchandise. Revenue generation is important but it shouldn’t be done in ways that compromise the brand identity.
Mark
I agree with the show-them-the-one approach. Going back to the drawing board is almost always the better course of action than trying to negotiate between competing designs. The old show-them-three-designs, one-of-which-is-awful not only compromised the design process but insulted the client. Your reply to Wendy brushes on the topic of user-generated logos. How often have all of us had to deal with a department or program either trying to design their own logo or trying to appropriate the “real” logo and modify it for their purposes? A plague on clip art…