Copycat Logo?
Nike and Michael Jordan are sued for its “copycat” logo
A New-York based independent fashion brand —Faded Royalty— is suing Nike and Michael Jordan for using its logo without permission. Rocco Giordano, founder of Faded Royalty, is seeking a whopping $30M.
According to Nike, it was Cody Hudson, a Chicago-based creative director, who designed this irregular six-point star. He was inspired by motion graphics and it is a reimagining of the six-point star from the Chicago flag.
Judging if this logo is copycat or not asides, this story reminds me of 2020 Tokyo Olympic logo problem, and also a tweet from Spencer Chen.
The more it’s simple, the more it has a risk
As you may already know but all successful logos are simple. Why? Because it’s rememberable and easy to use in any size on any applications: from favicon to billboard advertising.
However, simple means that it has less elements and has ordinary ones such as circle, square, rectangle, etc. Let’s take a look at Apple Inc, logo.
The first logo of Apple Inc, depicts Isaac Newton sitting under a tree, an apple dropping above his head. It was designed in 1976 by Ronald Wayne, sometimes referred to as the third co-founder of Apple. Maybe, from the name of “Apple”, no one else could have designed it. It’s very unique. However, it’s very complicated. Hard to put it on smartphones.
Meanwhile, the current logo —a stylized bitten apple, which means “one byte”— is simple. Fortunately of its presence in the world, no one had tried to design similar logos, but if it’s not that famous, someone else could have designed similar logos from the name “Apple”, without knowing it.
Great logos are simple but it always have risks to resemble to other ones unexpectedly.
Identity of your logo
Logo —also we call visual identity— is used for identification. Therefore it’s better that your logo is quite unique and it doesn’t have any similarities to other ones, like unique numbers such as social security number. But more important thing is what is the identity of your logo. In other words, what it represents and stands for, to identify yourself.
Today, when brands reveal new logo, people who say “it looks like ___’s logo” gush out. But it’s useless to talk about that. Because it’s almost impossible to make a logo which doesn’t have any similarities to other ones. Instead, we should talk if the logo represents the brand’s identity, history, future, mind. That is more constructive.
