An interview with Bill Gardner (Podcast) đ
In this episode Arek Dvornechuck interviews Bill Gardner and we talk about how to generate logo design ideas.
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Check out his book âLogo Creed: The Mystery, Magic, And Method Behind Designing Great Logosâ
Table of Contents:
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1. Discovery & research
Arek Dvornechuck:
Whatâs up branding experts? â Arek here at Ebaqdesign. And welcome to On Branding Podcast â the only podcast where I interview branding experts to give you actionable tips on everything branding and beyond. In this episode I interview Bill Gardner and we talk about generating logo design ideas. And Bill establish himself as an influential figure in logo design space through his brand called Logo Lounge which is the worldâs largest logo design gallery, and book series. So every year Bill puts together logo design trends report surveying the logo landscape for over 20 years. And Bill still manages to work with clients under his own design firm Gardner Design. So he has released about 10 volumes of Logo Lounge book with extra four volumes; which are master series, and these books contain some of the examples of best logos from top designers, but bill also published a book about the process â the logo design process thatâs called Logo Creed (âLogo Creed: The Mystery, Magic, And Method Behind Designing Great Logosâ) and this is the book we are going to talk about today. So, Bill is an expert when it comes to logo design, and thatâs why I really wanted to have him on our podcast. Hello Bill, Thank you so much for taking the time to join us on our podcast!
Bill Gardner:
Excellent! Hey Arek, Iâm so glad to be joining you! This is going to be fun.
Arek Dvornechuck:
Sure! You review a huge amount of logos, new logos from top designers every year. But you also design logos and brand identities for your clients. I wanted to make this podcast practical for our listeners. So, we would love you to share with us some tips for how to come up with better logo design ideas; because you are so experienced. Whether it is for designers who just want to level up and be more creative, or for entrepreneurs who would like to just learn about the process in order to generate better ideas for their logo.
Bill Gardner:
Yeah! One of the things that is just really fortunate for me through Logo Lounge is having contacts with so many incredibly talented local designers around the world, and becoming friends, we have a lot of good conversation. And this is a topic that comes up very often and probably is one of the most asked questions about; how do you develop great logos. And I suspect you probably know George Bokhua â the designer, he was one of our jurors in logo land book 11, and he made the comment to me that⌠and I love the way he kind of developed this analogy. It was that as designers that itâs a little bit like fishing that if; everybody sets their hook to the same level and weâre kind of fishing in that same water towards the top of a lake, or the sea, or a pond, or whatever it is, weâre all going to catch about the same fish. But once you really get into a project, if you start diving deeper and deeper in that body of water, youâre going to go through a period there where you donât appear to see much of anything. But then, youâre going to get to the bottom and youâre going to start to see fish and things that youâve never seen before. And I think itâs this amazing analogy of; too many people are fishing in that same water where weâre all working with the same basic premises and ideas when we start to work on a logo, and itâs too easy for us to quit when we think that; hey! Weâve got a couple of fish, we can eat these. But if you really put that effort into it, youâre going to take that effort down to a level that other people havenât experienced before, and youâre going to start introducing ideas that theyâve not seen before. And of course, thatâs an analogy. But in reality, I think the premise of what George was saying, and you know this is repeated by other designers â is that too many of us stop too quickly. We donât take our investigation deeply enough and try and get into areas that others arenât in. So, if youâre looking at what everybody else is producing, and of course itâs valuable to do that. Because it gives you a good sense of where the market is, but you also have the peril of potentially creating exactly what everybody else is doing and that may not be bad for some clients. But in reality, it doesnât move the industry and what we do forward with branding.
Arek Dvornechuck:
You right, and this is awesome. So you mentioned, investigation is really important right? And this is actually one of my first questions because you know every logo design project should start with some kind of discovery and research, right? So, in your book, you talk quite a lot about discovery phase when it comes to you know researching the company and its history; if itâs a rebrand or its vision for the future, if itâs a startup and then defining the scope of work, and perhaps the brand personality, and the tone of voice that would be appropriate for that brand. And then conducting some competitive research, because the ultimate goal is to differentiate us, right? So, can you just talk a bit about the importance of discover and research prior to actually jumping right into sketch, generating log design concepts, sketching ideas and thinking about the aesthetics? So how important is that and what questions should we ask; either ourselves, if we are doing this in-house or just our clients if you are working with clients?
Bill Gardner:
Yeah, you know itâs a great question because I wouldnât enter into a project that I was not allowed to go into the discovery process first. How can you? If you think about it, itâs kind of like saying âI want to be a doctor, Iâm just going to go start cutting on somebodyâ, but you know nothing about what youâre cutting, or surgical procedures, or youâve never stooled as a doctor. And as designers, gosh! You know one of the great things is that we have that opportunity to learn new fields and new clients, every week we take on somebody different it seems like. And when you start working on what is going to represent that client, itâs impossible to do that unless you have this tremendous foundation in; who their clients are? Who they are? Whatâs their personality? How are they perceived in the market? Who are they selling to? How are they selling? Why are they selling? Whatâs the history of this particular entity? How did they get to where they got to? And thereâs all of this information which ultimately impacts the decision of the consumer on why theyâre going to build a brand affinity in the first place. And you know, I hate the fact that there are so many designers that are very facile, theyâre very ⌠they donât get into the discovery on the front end outside of some very, very basic questions. And you know, that that that is truly what makes the difference between an exceptional brand â And when Iâm saying Brand, Iâm certainly not meeting a logo, I mean that is a part of it. But what makes the difference between a tremendous brand and a failed brand is that entityâs ability to understand who itâs selling to and its consumers. So, when we start with a new client, certainly we meet with their stakeholders; those individuals that are going to ultimately have some say in this. But also imagine this. Your impression of yourself is probably not a real accurate impression to other people. The way I picture myself probably is about 20 years younger, but I realized that to other people, thatâs not what they picture. So, itâs also so critical to spend this time through survey work, or coming to understand what the outside influencers think of that particular client. I think it wasâŚIâm trying to recall who it was it made the comment that a brand isnât what we say we are, but a brand is what they say we are. And thatâs really so true. Maybe that was Jeff Bezos that made that comment, but that; how do we get to that point because if weâre just listening to our client, and we receive a brief from them telling us what to do, then it is a very jaded perspective of what weâre actually creating. The outcome of that discovery process really needs to be a design brief, or a document which serves as your guidelines and objectives; that is agreed upon by the client and by you. And I donât know how a designer can even get into a project without having that kind of a document because it does two really important things. One, it serves as your director, if you will, and gives you a set of elements that have to be achieved. But secondly, it protects you with your client. So that when it comes time to present to them, and you show them your work, and you state; it does this, and this, and this, and this, going down your brief â they canât deny it. You know, there may be some subjective opinion in there, but if they come back to you at that point and say âyes, but did you consider this?â Thatâs your opportunity to say âwell no, we didnât consider that. We didnât put that in the original design brief, but if you would like to put that in there, we can certainly go back and do some more design of course thatâs going to be at an additional fee if we want to include thatâ. So, thatâs why itâs important that both the client and the designer agree to this document before the work process starts.
Arek Dvornechuck:
Nice. So, itâs really important â just to sum up for designers or their entrepreneurs. So for both, itâs really important for designers to understand the company and understand the landscape and then combine it with your design skills to produce great work. And for entrepreneurs, you have to have an agreement; sometimes â like from my own experience, I have sometimes clients; they ask me hey what do you think about this logo and that logo. But I wasnât involved in the process, I donât know the company, I donât know the history, I donât know your objectives. I can just judge your logo design contest from the aesthetics point of view, but you really need to have that foundation, right?
Bill Gardner:
Yeah. You and I both, because I know youâre a very talented designer. Occasionally weâll see a new logo introduced for a company, and weâll look at it and kind of go âReally? Thatâs the best they could come up with?â But at the same time, we also recognize; sometimes weâll look at those and weâll go âman I know theyâre a much better designer than thatâ and we can almost read into it that the client probably directed them down this alley towards a solution that ultimately didnât please anybody. Or we look at a solution and we go âwowâ. I really hate that, but, I donât know what the design brief was. I donât know what they were told to do and as far as I know, they may well have you know surveyed their audience and found that this ugly design is the absolute thing that speaks best to them. So, you know, you make a great point that unless you know the objectives that a designer was designing to, itâs really, really hard for us to make a super critical judgment of their work.
Arek Dvornechuck:
Right. So you need to have some guidelines, you need to have some criteria. Otherwise itâs just going to be like; whoever got the more power here, whoever is the decision maker is just going to be like about some personal preferences, itâs not going to be objective, itâs going to be very subjective.
Bill Gardner:
I love the fact that you just use the word âobjectiveâ in there. Because you know, designers live in a very subjective world, and I try to press this point because we donât work for other designers, we work for clients that usually live in a highly objective world. And just as a differentiation of words, if youâre dealing with the any c-level position within a company; a CFO or a COO or a CEO, they are objective thinkers. And to them, if they brought in 12 accountants letâs say, and said âadd up this column of numbersâ all of those accountants should be able to come up with exactly the same sum, that is an objective problem. A subjective problem is as designers, if they brought in 12 designers, they could have all of them designing a solution that would represent that company and all of them may be just amazing solutions â just incredible solutions, they will be very different answers.
Arek Dvornechuck:
(Now we are going to take a quick break here, but we will be right back. Listen! My mission is to help people design iconic brands. So, whether youâre a business leader who wants to be more intentional with branding and all of its aspects or you are a creative who wants to attract powerful clients and truly be able to help them with branding, then you need to start with a discovery session and then develop a strategy that will inform all your creative work. And everything you need to learn how to do that, you can find in my online courses at ebaqdesign.com/shop; where I share with you my worksheets, case studies, video tutorials and other additional resources to help you feel safe and strong about your process. And now letâs get back to our conversation with Bill Garner.)
2. Discovery & research
Arek Dvornechuck:
So now I want to talk about different types of logos. Because in your book you say âDesigners and non-designers alike are guilty of using words such as; âLogoâ, âIconâ, âSymbolâ and âMarkâ interchangeablyâ. So as interchangeable synonyms, but they donât really mean the same right? So in your book you make this distinction, so can we just talk about whatâs the difference between different types of logos, and how to decide on which one we should choose for our project?
Bill Gardner:
Sure. Do you mean such as; whether itâs a word mark or a symbol?
Arek Dvornechuck:
Right. A monogram, pictorial mark, abstract mark and word mark.
Bill Gardner:
Right. Let me share just a little bit more â maybe deeper thinking on this for just a minute, and I know that this is something that youâre very familiar with because Iâm familiar with your work with archetypes. But Iâm going to talk for just a minute about brand personality, and how that affects your decision as to, if it is a crest or a monogram or a hard geometric conceptual symbol or what you have in there. There is a really wonderful individual whose name is Jennifer Aaler and Iâm going to spell that last name so if any of your listeners want to look it up they can. Itâs A-A-K-E-R. And the professor at the university of Sanford, and she is in marketing. But back in 1997, she basically did a really incredibly extensive study that says; you know much like people have personalities, brands have personalities as well. And she ended up breaking down branding into a total of five different dimensions. And just very quickly, Iâm going to say the dimensions are: âSincerityâ, âExcitementâ, âCompetenceâ, âSophisticationâ and âRuggednessâ. And for each of those different dimensions, there were a series of trait words associated with it. So, if it was sincerity, if a brand had a level of sincerity; words like âAuthenticâ, âOriginalâ, âFamilyâ, these are all words that have connotations of âSincerityâ associated with them. And no company is just purely any one of those personalities. As designers, by trying to break down your client into a couple of those personality groups, and saying maybe that a company is 60% sincerity and 20% confidence and 20% excitement, then we have the necessary things we need to be able to make the kind of determinants that you just suggested. So give an example here. When we talk about âSincerityâ, companies that rank very highly on sincerity might be Coca-Cola, Hallmark, Disney, Campbellâs, Pillsbury, and if I think about brands like those; letâs specifically think about Coca-Cola and its script. Think about the Disney logo, and how itâs handwritten. Think about Hallmark and that kind of scriptures. Now, this isnât to say that all sincere companies have a logo that is done in script. But in fact, the reason that thatâs in script is because that autograph â that signature, gives the impression of authenticity or of the word of the individual behind it. So, as designers we intuitively know many of these things. If I go all the way down to âRuggedâ and I say rugged is companies like Dodge Ram or Levi or Timberland or Caterpillar, these are all brands that have these relatively chunky letter forms as part of their brand of their work. And part of that is because that letter form being as weighty as it is, gives that an impression of more solidness. Coming back to Ruggedness, if we look at competent companies, they typically are going to be companies that have a mid-weight letter form. A lot of times their symbol that represents them if you think of UPS or FedEx or Maytag or Lexus, these are all companies to fit into competency very squarely, are going to be midway letter forms often if they have a logo, itâs going to be somewhat conceptual as opposed to literal. So, because we have these cues as designers that we recognize that help identify these types of personalities. If we can identify the personality of our client, then we can start to look at other clients that have that kind of personality and pick up on the tones that best represent that personality. Iâm not sure that I would use a monogram as you had just suggested, that was very light and full of great detail and frill. If I was working on a company that sits squarely in a highly Rugged category; it might be more perfect for somebody in Sincerity. If I were using an old world looking crest, I probably wouldnât attach that to a company in excitement, because excitement tends to fit with trait words that are about things that make you feel on edge, or make you feel a little bit uncomfortable, or get your blood pressure or your pulse rate up. So intuitively, we as designers know those different visuals that represent different cues for a company. Does that make sense?
Arek Dvornechuck:
Yes it does! Yes it does. So just to sum up, basically brand personality plays a huge role in determining what kind of the style you should go with, and type of your logo. So just to go over those different types of logos just for our listeners, so basically, based on your discovery and research you could determine whether you should go with monogram; so for example like IBM, CNN, if the name is long, or for some reason you might want to use the first letter. Like a letter form or initial or perhaps pictorial marks, it could be a pictorial mark like Apple or WWF logo; which is basically just like a literal representation â a visual representation of some things, or an animal. Yeah go ahead.
Bill Gardner:
So your suggestions, youâre making are all tremendous examples. The challenge that we have as designers is that â this is as valuable as I will tell you, using personality to help define a client is, its just one component of our brand of thinking. So you know, I mean as we both know there are so many different layers, complexities in considering; how to best identify a company. So when you start talking about is a monochrome, is it just a single letter that serves as a minimal device like caterpillars, letter âCâ to remind you that; okay itâs going to be a company that starts with the letter âCâ or if it is something like ABC or NBC or CBS where we actually use a series of letters that represent the company or UPS. You know, those are all really critical considerations that you have to make in there; am I going to work with the initials company or am I going to cast those aside and spell it out as united partial service and deal with a symbol that like the one that Lauren had originally designed that was so beautiful. But even that had an opportunity for UPS. And you know, these are all just â there are so many thousands of decisions that we have to make. And I think as designers we forget that with our experience and sage-ness that we tend to take a lot of these decisions for granted because we just naturally know how to do them. I donât know how much you know about me, but I actually put myself through school doing magic. And in magic there are any number of moves that you can do to make an object vanish or disappear, so I could hold a coin in my hand and make that coin vanish. But itâs a simple mechanical move that I go through, but I have to make it look very natural. And because Iâve done it so many times, I donât have to think about it when I do it, I can just make the coin vanish. But as a young designer, you know a young designer can become so caught up in the process that their decisions donât create a natural and an evident solution, and the more they learn, the more natural certain decisions come to them. Theyâre designing for a client that has some level of elegance associated with their â sophistication, they naturally might go to all capital letters in a Serif font that are broadly letter spaced. I mean, they donât have to think about that, they just know that that is one of those visual cues that we use to kind of symbolize elegance. So, the more experienced designers have, the easier it is for them to kind of naturally not have to ask every question thatâs out there.
Arek Dvornechuck:
Right. Yeah and I do know that youâre a magician as well because Iâve done⌠yeah and I think it yeah, Iâve listened to support like on the logo geek podcast for example you tell the story. So yeah, so for you guys who, but most of our listeners probably will know you because youâre pretty known in the industry, but for those young starting designers who donât know you yet, Bill is also a magician. So he uses this analogy just because you can make this three so you practice so many times to do the trick so it looks natural. And you use this analogy for designers who â because as designers we know our craft and if we do it all over and over and over and over again. Some things we just do unconsciously right. And itâs so natural for us but itâs also helpful, we sometimes need to like take a step back and just either write this down or just elaborate on that; like also explain it to the client why weâve made those decisions, where we go with this kind of style or why we decided on ongoing with this type of logo. Because some types of logos will work better for some; either for some brand names or some categories or⌠there are some factors, there are advantages and these disadvantages of age.
Bill Gardner:
Iâm really glad you said that, because you know itâs a situation where sometimes we; you and I become so comfortable because we already have that knowledge that we forget why weâve done it. And itâs important to remember why you know we do something. Because over a period of times things change, and if I vanish the coin exactly the same way every time, eventually somebodyâs going to catch on to what Iâm doing. So, itâs important for us to be aware that things change. You know, different audiences view different things in different ways especially over time. Otherwise you and I are designing logos that really look like they should have been designed 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago, itâs important that we too be very cognizant of those selections and decisions we make design wise, so that we donât find ourselves becoming dinosaurs.
3. Generating logo ideas
Arek Dvornechuck:
Right. Okay, so yeah thereâs a lot of things, thereâs a lot of different factors, but you go into details in your book, so yeah I really recommend for you guys to check out the book and there are many different considerations and the questions that you can ask your clients or questions you can ask yourself internally if youâre for a business leader. So now letâs just jump into like; so once we know once weâve done some research and Iâve done some discovery and made some decisions, and have this design brief, now we want to know how to generate better logo ideas. So where do we find inspiration, where to start? Because in your book you say âThere is nothing more dangerous than just having one ideaâ So basically you recommend to start off by generating tons of ideas and sketching a lot, sketching many different concepts and at the beginning you recommend to donât just stop yourself from charging them and just go for quantity, and then you go for quality and then you revise them maybe combine those ideas and so on. So, you shouldnât rely on some kind of a lightning strike of genius as you said. So you need to really sketch a lot and try different concepts and try different ideas and eventually you will narrow it down to some promising ideas and then you can execute them, right?
Bill Gardner:
I love the fact that you pulled that particular quote out, which is that âthereâs no idea as dangerous as the only idea you haveâ. Somebody shared that with me years ago but itâs so true. You know, when we only have one idea then itâs basically saying; you havenât worked very hard so far. So let me let me just say this in regards to I did generation. None of us, none of us live in a vacuum and our clients donât live in a vacuum, and the consumers donât live in a vacuum. Symbology and symbolism is continually shifting and changing. There are a whole series of elements that 10 years ago didnât exist, whether it would be the Wi-Fi symbol or the cloud symbol or a little hamburger that indicates more information on a website or all of these things. Symbology, itâs a very active dynamic; itâs continually shifting and changing. But one of my greatest beliefs is that as designers, we get somewhere quicker by standing on the shoulders of others, and that means you know taking a look at what other designers have done to give us some level of inspiration. Now, inspiration is very different than theft, and Iâm not talking about stealing at all. But for instance somebody becomes a member of Logo Lounge and Logo Lounge which has close to 350,000 logos that have been uploaded by the members. And it is a paid site, its $100 annually. But when you go on there, you are able to search through those logos in such a way that; for instance if you were designing a concept, and maybe the concept was âexcitementâ and you type in the word âExcitementâ then youâre going to get literally hundreds of logos associated with the word excitement so you can see how other designers have dealt with that, or maybe youâve decided that youâre going to design a logo and itâs going to be a fish. And you type in âFishâ and you may get you know 2500 fish logos that come up or you can start to limit that down to the very best of logos, so you only get 500 fish or something like that. But youâve got to be able to be aware of what other people have done because it is what the consumers are already aware of and responding to. Now again, not saying to take somebody elseâs ideas, but you know that â gosh before there was logo lines, there were plenty of logo books and there still are, and one of the reasons as designers would get them isnât necessarily to look at our artwork. Itâs to look at the work of others, and to look to them for influence and inspiration in how to show an idea that is fresh. Iâll end this comment with this; we work in a world of clichĂŠs and I hate to say that. But a clichĂŠ is that idea thatâs been used over and over and over so many times, but itâs called a clichĂŠ because it works. Itâs called a clichĂŠ because people understand it. Our objective as designers is to take an idea that may appear clichĂŠ and overused and⌠like George Bokhua said âTo fish so deep with that idea that we start to bring out new ways to demonstrate that ideaâ You know, it still may be a clichĂŠ but itâs going to be something that somebody looks at and goes âwow Iâve never seen anything like that beforeâ, itâs how good we are as designers, itâs the proof of you know our ability to take a clichĂŠ and present it in entirely fresh concepts so that nobody realizes itâs a clichĂŠ.
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