21st Century Cave Paintings
The year is 12,000 BC and Ogg is doing pretty well for himself. He inhabits a small village in what is today modern Iran, and his biggest worries are eating and not being eaten. He’s about to set off for the morning to bring home a deer from out in the hills.
Ogg has a big, pointy stick. Ogg is pretty strong. Ogg’s probably going to have a bunch of children someday, and the line of Ogg will be triumphant and go on to own many modern conveniences.
Ogg’s village is also the last one in the valley that hasn’t figured out rudimentary cave markings. If they had, someone would have noted that the last hunting party didn’t find deer, but did find wolves.
Ogg’s about to have totally rotten afternoon.
Iconography has been an important asset for humanity since the dawn of organized cultures — our first settlements used cave paintings to illustrate concepts in a way that would be identifiable by absolutely everyone.
Even a child can understand the visual cues for ‘shelter’, ‘food’, and ‘people’.
Humanity advanced. Our methods of communicating concepts stayed just about the same.
Even a child can understand the visual cues for ‘sports’, ‘phone’, and ‘food’.
Iconography is an incredibly powerful tool for explaining concepts that are rooted deeply in the way humans learn. We are hard-wired to associate images with ideas; creating a logo to represent a cause is marketing rooted in prehistoric human development.
Primal
The first cave paintings were simple icons to represent basic human needs. ‘Food’ was a painting of a deer. ‘Hunt’ was a stick figure with a spear or a bow. The forms were simple to understand and easy to replicate. They conveyed vital ideas at a glace.
As shown above, symbolism has become more intricate, but the form has stayed the same. Simple icons with graceful curves — the regal arc on the Nike logo and the friendly McDonald’s ‘M’. The logos are bold and singular ideas.
Apple has become synonymous with innovation built from form-and-function. Their original 1976 icon attempted to express this spirit of innovation literally, with a drawing of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple. If that was too subtle, Newton was framed by a quote explaining how clever Newton was.
“We are a clever company of clever people with a clever product, please acknowledge our cleverness.”
The moment a logo becomes too complicated to communicate a concept on a primal level, the logo loses its power. An ideal logo is a universal signifier, even for people who don’t use the product. It can be, in a pinch, drawn with some accuracy by a five-year-old.
When a concept has 130,000 years of proven effectiveness, you can trust that it works.
The next hurdle: iconographic meaning isn’t consistent across borders. A company or concept hoping to scale past a localized market needs a logo that can translate across any and all borders.
‘Peace signs’ have very different cultural contexts in Asia vs. the North America, and a very different cultural context in English and former Commonwealth countries. Invoking the number four in China — dialectically similar to the word ‘death’ in Mandarin — would make a logo unfit for public use.
This seems like an abstract worry until it isn’t. Google’s entry into the Chinese market was met with confusion, as Google assumed their product had already achieved universal name and iconographic recognition.
It hadn’t.
This was followed by mockery when Google attempted to localize their name and logo for Chinese audiences: the phonetically similar but totally strange Gu Ge. This led to a field day for their Chinese competitors, and eventually ended with Google reverting back to being Google China.
A Banner to Fight For
As iconography evolved in culture, it became a signifier of group identity. Specifically, it was the thing you stitched onto a flag before you went out to beat upon another group standing under a different flag. It gave an icon to rally behind.
A company is a set of ideals and operations carried about by a group of people working toward a common goal, and every action the company does is animated by shared ideology. The logo you choose has to be in agreement with the culture of the company. People will devote years of their lives to the idea of the company and its goal, and the logo needs to be worthy of all of those hours. If you invest in a false symbolism that you don’t personally believe in, you’re going to be regretful for the life of your creation.
It’s not unusual for the new breed of company founders to get tattoos of their logos. Icons must mean something to the people that it represents to have any power.
Perception
If you’ve raised your army and given them a flag to fight under, it would be helpful if that flag didn’t lead to people pointing and laughing at you. Iconography that’s inconsistent with your mission is going bring about people questioning their ability to trust that you know what you’re doing.
For most businesses, you’ve got a wide amount of leeway to work within. A decade of Silicon Valley culture redefining 21st-century iconography has pushed the norms into a very playful space, wrapped in primary colors and overt enthusiasm.
But that thinking also reflects an understanding of what the audience needs and wants: the future is supposed to be bright and hopeful. There’s no upside to conservatism, whether for a bakery or an omnivorous internet-of-things scheme.
This ceases to be true when people depend on your service to ensure that they not die.
When you’re operating in industries that involve people’s fundamental safety — health, security, finance — the logo needs to be assured and confident. Nobody wants to be anywhere near a ‘quirky’ hospital or an ‘playful’ bank. People are putting their lives in your hands, and your responsibility is massive.
Have as much actionable intelligence about your target market as possible before committing to a logo that will represent what you’re putting so much of your life into.
