What does our logo really say about us?
We are doing a lot of work at IRESS at the moment to get closer to our clients and users and understand what they really need from us. As a designer with responsibility for presenting IRESS in the best way possible, I am always mindful of how our clients perceive us through our brand. We have an ambition to be considered essential and desirable, but we can’t just say that to make it come true.
When you think of a great brand, you might initially think about how the brand looks — the logo, the icon, the typeface. But what you really recall, and probably what you’re really buying, is the emotional connection — how a particular brand makes you feel.
Take Nike as an example. The Nike identity started life in 1971. Just four simple letters in a standard font and a pretty basic drawing of the wing of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. Put together by a graphic design student at Portland State University, Nike execs didn’t love it, but they went with it anyway — it fit well on the side of a shoe and ‘identity’ wasn’t a priority. Six years later the Nike team separated the font from the swoosh, changed the four letters to uppercase and the logo hasn’t really changed since.
What has changed is the emotion Nike has poured into the four little letters and wing icon, and the connection this emotion has had with people who use the brand. Think you can run a marathon? Mo Farah says you can Just Do It. Think you can smash a winning forehand down the line? Just do it. Think you can put one in the back of the net from outside the box? If you’re wearing Nike, chances are you can just do it.
Nike aren’t winning because of their four letters and swoosh, Nike are winning because of the work they’ve done around the way they make people feel.
There’s a point in the lifecycle of a business where sometimes the visual identity of a business matters, and sometimes it doesn’t. When start-ups and early stage companies first launch, how they look is often secondary to what they do and how they do it. Just take a look at Apple’s first logo for proof of that.
Or they launch with a logo that gets the job done for the first few years but isn’t future-proofed. The recent Slack rebrand is a good example of this — the original hashtag identity looked great and did the job for the first few years, but last month Slack launched a new brand that will take them to their next stage. Read about that here> https://slackhq.com/say-hello-new-logo
It’s the same story for other successful start-ups, like Deliveroo and AirBNB. Evolving their identity has been an important step in helping them achieve their ambitions.
All of this brings me to IRESS. Our logo was designed in 1993 as a necessity — the business needed a logo and someone had to make one, quickly. It’s had a few tidy ups through the years, but it’s still very close to the original.
That in itself is not a problem. Coca-cola is still the same, so we don’t have to make changes for the sake of change. But IRESS is a digital business, seen largely on digital surfaces, like touch screens and computer log-ins. We operate in a much more competitive environment compared to 1993. Our brand today needs to stretch from large scale fixed assets, like lobby signs, to tiny, dynamic digital screens. And we’re a business chasing the lofty ambition of desirability, which we can only achieve if our clients and users connect emotionally with us.
So, when it comes to our identity, do we have what it takes? Does our identity help us connect emotionally with our clients and users? Can our identity be easily applied to all of our digital assets and still say ‘essential’ and ‘desirable’? Does our logo and identity help us express our unique values, internally and externally?
We think a lot about these questions as designers. But I’m interested in finding out what others think, and what our clients think. When a client looks at our logo do you think they see an essential, desirable partner? And if not, why not? Do our employees connect with our current identity? And if you were a designer at IRESS, what would you change?
