What Makes a Logo “Good”?

Design, like any artistic field, is incredibly subjective. So when it comes to creating a brand logo, it’s impossible to design something that will be aesthetically pleasing in the eyes of every single person who will ever see it.

It is possible, however, to create a logo that is objectively successful.

How’s that?

Well, unlike an oil painting or a beautifully-composed piece of music, which are created to be appreciated for their artistic value, logos are created for a specific strategic purpose: to be a singular, concise visual representation of the larger brand to which it belongs. Thus, if a logo succeeds in fulfilling that purpose, it is an effective logo, regardless of the various personal preferences and biases people may have regarding its shape, color, size, or structure.

With these truths in mind, we paired research, strategy, and our artistic talents to create an objectively effective logo for one of our most recent clients: Trammell Crow Company, a real estate development, investment, and property management company that has been a subsidiary of CBRE Group since 2006.

They came to us for help in branding their newest development project, The Bakersfield Commons, which is slated to open in 2020. This master-planned mixed-use property will eventually make its home at the population center of Bakersfield, California, which is home to the fastest growing millennial population in the United States, and it will bring multifamily apartments, retail, restaurants, a hospital, and a multitude of other offerings to the city in one convenient and accessible location.

In the initial stages of our partnership, we worked alongside the client to identify three key strategic imperatives that would be pivotal to the success of the logo, the larger visual system, and the brand as a whole.

Here are the essential considerations that we identified:

1. Whatever we designed had to be “of-Bakersfield.”

Our clients were straight with us from the beginning, and they told us that the look they were looking for a logo that felt native to Bakersfield’s desert landscape and conservative culture. At the same time, the logo needed to feel somewhat refined and polished.

That made sense to us: they were bringing a brand new, state-of-the-art multi-use property to a city that’s long yearned for a more refined cultural presence . We agreed that the brand’s visual identity should, like the project itself, represent the city’s evolution, which had made The Bakersfield Commons a viable project.

We executed this imperative in the juxtaposition of the fonts utilized in our wordmark. To pay homage to Bakersfield’s history, we presented the city’s name in a script font that exudes that essential sense of grittiness. We knew that pairing this font with a more elegant (but still friendly) sans serif would accomplish the overall effect we were going for.

2. Our color palette also needed to feel native to the region.

Bakersfield is a desert city in central California. So as much as we love bright, saturated colors like turquoise, chartreuse, and magenta, it was obvious to us that they just wouldn’t work for this project. Instead, we drew our inspiration from the topography of the region, landing on a palette that included muted, earthy oranges, browns, and greens that could naturally be found in Bakersfield. This would ensure the development’s smooth transition into the daily lives of Bakersfield’s residents. The blue hues in our palette, while not necessarily native to Bakersfield’s desert landscape, serve as a visual promise of the refreshment and rejuvenation the Commons’ lush landscaping and intelligent design will provide.

3. We needed to emphasize the “centrality” of the development.

Bakersfield lies at the center of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, three of the most popular tourist destinations on the west coast. Similarly, The Bakersfield Commons will lie at the center of the city, and it will be the central meeting point where everyone in Bakersfield comes together to lead rich, fulfilling lives.

To convey this centrality, and that The Commons is “the place to be in Bakersfield,” we created the brand’s logo after the now-iconic geomarker symbol. This memorable image can be used in a number of creative ways in future campaigns, and, eventually, it will be recognizable to stand alone as a visual representation of The Bakersfield Commons.

To fully illustrate the potential of the concept, we created a variety of comps to show our clients how this logo could work in a wide variety of mediums.

As you can see, the logo we created is effective because it executes on all of the key strategic imperatives we identified before beginning our design work. Even if a viewer is not a fan of the specific colors or fonts utilized within the logo, the logo does succeed as a concise visual representation of the Bakersfield Commons brand, and that’s as close to a hole in one as you can hope for when designing a logo.

To get a more comprehensive view of the larger brand we created for The Bakersfield Commons, head to our Instagram, where we’ve posted a condensed case study for the project.

Here’s another article we wrote for UpWork: The 5 Most Important Things to Consider When Creating Your Logo.