Can You Design the Worst Logo?

Ian Paget: I came across you guys through a challenge posted online. I normally ignore logo challenges, but this one was different. Rather than seeking the best logo, you’ve been looking for the worst. And I’ve not seen a project like this before, so I thought I’d get you guys on to discover more about this. So as a starting question, what is the, How Low Can Your Logo project, all about?

Colin Pinegar: Yeah. How Low Can Your Logo is a contest to essentially see who can make the worst logo for a fictional company. We called SMORTS, which stands for Simple Marketing Online Responsive Tech Solutions. So we made up this ridiculous corporation and are asking people to essentially just have at it and design as terrible a logo as possible for them.

Helen Rice: Yeah. And what better way than to crowdsource a bad logo.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Crowdsourcing a bad logo. Ironic really, isn’t it?

So why are you guys doing this? Because it seems like a really big thing that you put together and you’ve obviously invested a lot of time. So I can imagine that there’s a number of reasons, but I’d love to find out a little bit more about what they are.

Colin Pinegar: Okay. Well I think one of the reasons, you already kind of touched on it, is that we spend our all our days trying to design the best logo and think of things from that aesthetic viewpoint when I’m sometimes a good creative exercise might be to start with something ugly. I mean we’ve all seen ugly logos out there, but it also takes a bit of skill and a bit of talent to create an ugly logo. I found that out when trying to create my own entry and then comparing it to the ones I’ve seen other designers and people submit. Just like how, I mean there’s still good ideas embedded within an ugly logo. And so I think it’s turned out to be kind of this absurd art experiment, but also like, I don’t know, just like cool creative exercise for designers to take the other route and enter the logo creation process from kind of the back door, I guess you could say.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Well, I know the moment that I heard about this, my first reaction was, oh that’s a bit silly. And then the moment I started to think about it, it’s like actually, what would make a really bad logo and it turned into quite an interesting thought exercise for basically thinking about what makes something really good and then flipping it over.

Before we go into what makes a bad logo and what makes a good logo, are there any other reasons for doing this? Because I can see that you’ve got sponsors on board, you’ve got some incredible judges on board as well. I mean Michael Bierut for starters, you’ve got Armin Vit involved. Is there other benefits to it? I know it’s fascinating to find out what makes a really bad logo, but is it for press purposes or to attract opportunities, kind of like this this podcast now, is that the reason for that? Is there some strategy behind releasing a challenge like this?

Helen Rice: Yeah, I think like a lot of things that Fuzzco does, we follow our interests and everything doesn’t necessarily have a solid purpose. The purpose almost reveals itself as we create the thing and push it into the world. And in this case, with the interesting time that we’re living through with the coronavirus, it almost has given people an outlet for distraction and a way to sort of let themselves go in a very healthy environment.

Ian Paget: Yeah. It is really just a bit of fun and a piece of art and it’s one of the first challenges around logo design I’ve seen where you don’t really need to worry too much about what you’re doing because the whole point of the exercise is to create something that’s quite bad, so that’s a really nice way to look at it. Something I would love to find out how you went about getting huge name judges, were they already people that you was in contact with and you could just get in touch and pull them on or how did you go about getting so many fairly high profile judges to get involved in I guess a project that could be deemed as not that serious?

Helen Rice: We actually put this contest on 10 years ago in 2010. And at the time, our panel of judges included, I can’t remember everybody, but Jessica Hische and Armin Vit were part of that panel. And when we decided to reprise the contest this year, we decided to reach out to them again. We love working with them in the past and Jessica actually, when we approached them, we asked, who else do you think might be interested in judging? And Jessica mentioned that Michael would be fun to approach, which I was very excited about because I’ve always loved him. He’s such a design idol.

So yeah, we reached out to a handful of people whose work we loved or whose perspective we loved and everybody was really excited about it. And we’ve got some amazing sponsors as well who’ve donated some of their goods, which you’ll see on the prize page. But yeah, we feel very lucky in having such an enthusiastic response to the contest.

Ian Paget: And I can see Colin, you obviously had a lot of fun when it came around to building the website because the website is also, it’s bad but it’s good. You found a nice balance between the two. I know I found some nice little Easter eggs in there, like the burger.

Colin Pinegar: Yeah, the hamburger menu.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about the website as well?

Colin Pinegar: Yeah, I think we wanted the website to be kind of the first exercise in this sort of towing the line between bad, but good. And obviously a lot of thought went into it and then a lot of thought went into kind of how to make it a little bit harder to use or a little bit, I feel like it’s kind of rife with cliches as well as like bad UI moments, but hopefully users find it all to be kind of fun and like you said, there’s a lot of little Easter eggs hidden throughout. I think my favourite is probably the creative brief is like a keynote. It just downloads a keynote presentation, which is just like terrible user experience. But the keynote has a lot of fun jokes in it and stuff. So we wanted just to be thoughtful about how bad it could be. And I think it turned out to be really fun.

Helen Rice: One of my favourite ideas that went into the website was the button that moves and that’s hard to click, the button that takes…

Colin Pinegar: Yeah, it obscures the type and just kind of moves around.

Helen Rice: And then there was a really genius idea that Colin had, we tried to embody SMORTS and the client Chauncey Peppertooth, and we created this Pinterest board. And if you go there, you’ll notice that there were two boards actually created for logo inspiration. Almost like they forgot that they had started one and they started another one and the one just has the, the Nike swoosh, which…

Ian Paget: I know going through the website, there’s points where I’ve seen stuff that’s really bad and it’s like, oh, I known clients do that. It’s all so cliche, if you’re a graphic designer, it’s just so funny to go through and I think only graphic designers would get it. I think you’ve done that really well and based on the goal of doing something a little bit fun during the current global situation, it’s just a lighthearted bit of fun that graphic designers will enjoy and, and find fun and something that we don’t need to take too seriously. So I think what you’ve done is you clearly achieved that goal.

Colin Pinegar: Thank you.

Ian Paget: I think it’d be worth going into what makes a bad logo. So I don’t know how we can go about doing this, whether we do break it down into what makes a good logo and the reverse of that. But you’ve had quite a lot of entries so far and you’ve obviously put a lot of thought into this yourself. So what would you say makes a bad logo?

Colin Pinegar: Well, I feel like every day I’m surprised by a new entry and just how bad the logos can get. Actually, I listened to an episode of your podcast about what makes a logo effective or what makes a logo good or successful. And I feel like the easy answer is just to know the rules and then break all of them in the most extreme way possible. Complexity I think is a big element of a lot of the entries. We’re seeing a lot of terrible, terrible colour combinations and of course typography. And then there’s a lot of, I think maybe 10 or 11 people have submitted kind of SMORTS with that gradient square, like the old gap logo. People are trying to reference known bad logos.

But yeah, I think the long answer would be that it’s all kind of relative, even looking at reputable designers now, a lot or are leaning towards logos that could maybe 10 years ago have fallen into an ugly logo bin but I feel like depending on the space that the logo is for or the depending on, I loved how you mentioned the Guns N’ Roses logo in your podcasts on successful logos because for a tech company or for a food brand like that, that logo would be terrible. But it really worked for Guns N’ Roses because you only see it on tee shirts and album covers. So it was successful in its own way. And so I think one thing I like about this site is that it’s giving bad logos a space to be successful I guess in a way. It’s creating this weird space where we’re asking to make a good logo, but the way you do that is making it bad. Which is kind of ironic.

Ian Paget: The one thing I found quite interesting with that particular episode you mentioned, I went through eight principles that I thought made a successful logo. And I’ve had people in… someone shared this in the logo community and we’ve had quite a few people posting their ideas, that they quickly put together, and there’s a few I look at them and think it’s bad, but it’s still scalable, so it’s still ticking some of the boxes as to what would make something successful, but they’re still bad. So it’d be really interesting to see what Michael and Jessica and all the other judges ultimately pick as the worst logo. Will they pick the actual worst or where they pick something that’s a little bit fun or how did it go 10 years ago? Was actually the worst possible logo there that ended up being picked by the judges or was there some something more to it? Was there something good about that ugly as well?

Helen Rice: There was nothing good about that. I believe we did a combination of popular votes and then the judges picked from a certain selection of those voted most popular. Yeah. And the logo, it was actually pretty distasteful in a lot of different ways.

Colin Pinegar: Yeah. You’ll notice we do not show the old logo on the site. We have like a broken image.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I saw that.

Colin Pinegar: For that very reason it was not… no, we didn’t want to reference it at all. It actually made us change kind of the judging structure for this contest I think. And we’ve been heavily filtering out any inappropriate or distasteful logos this time.

Helen Rice: Yeah. And I’m very encouraged to see so many logos that are bad but that someone really was thoughtful about and there’s a lot of them where I feel like people were exploring trends in design where in some cases they might, like aspects of the logos that might be considered good, but the way that they were used or just applied in some way makes them obviously bad. It’s really interesting seeing how similar, how we’ve all kind of decided what bad is in a way.

Ian Paget: Very much so. Well I really do look forward to seeing what ends up game being picked and just for fun, I don’t know if you guys have already thought about this, but you should do tee shirts and merchandise that people can buy and maybe it can go to some charity or something. I think that’d be fun to do because it would be a funny joke that only graphic designers would get.

Helen Rice: We actually have totes on the way. They’re going to be dropped off later this week.

Ian Paget: It’s really exciting. So we’ve briefly spoken about what makes a bad logo. And I think for listeners, pretty much everyone that’s listening are graphic designers and they should hopefully be able to recognise something that’s ugly as hell. And I know you’ve already referenced that episode, which does run through characteristics, but I’d love to hear it from someone else’s perspective. What do you feel makes a logo good?

Colin Pinegar: Yeah that’s a good question. I think I agree with probably all of the points you made on that episode. But I think what I like, and maybe I’ve learned this by looking at the, How Low Can You Logo submissions, but one thing I really have enjoyed and something I’ve noticed about the logos that I like, which are always surprisingly hard to recall. I think I live in a world where I’m maybe too pessimistic about the design that I see. You know, I don’t know if that happens to other designers as well, but I think that, and you did mention this a little on that episode, but the idea of within the logo I think is maybe the most powerful element to me.

I feel like, because we referenced this earlier, but like the idea of crowdsourcing and the idea of just the internet, you see logos constantly and people designing logos constantly. I feel like in a way almost everything’s been done, but there are times where, if you can get that idea and execute it well, I think that that can create the best type of logo. Just the concept around the logo I think is really important.

Helen Rice: I think so much of what makes a logo good to me is kind of thinking about or understanding where it’s going to live. So I’m personally drawn to very minimal aesthetic beautiful typefaces that are applied to whatever product or service that they belong to in a way that elevates and not clutters that experience. But then again, to riff on what Colin said, any logo where there is some underlying concept that is beautifully embodied in the design is also really rises above.

Ian Paget: Of those eight principles. I said the absolute key one, and Colin, you or both you referenced it, is execution. That’s the key thing because you can have a really great idea and you can pick the most appropriate typeface for the project and you can make all these amazing choices that make the recipe to something that could be really good, but if it’s just not put together and not executed well, it’s the one thing that turns something that could have been very good to something that’s deemed as bad.

I think it’d be fun to spend the rest of the time we have going through some process stuff because every agency, every designer approaches branding projects in a different way. And I always like to hear that stuff. And I know listeners do too, just because it’s hearing a different perspective on, on the process always. You always get something out of it. So would you mind running through, how would you guys typically work on a branding project when a client comes to you?

Helen Rice: Oh sure. Yeah. So we have our initial calls with clients and I think on those calls, we start immediately diving into what is they want to do and kind of offering value in kind of helping them steer the ideas and what we’re going to work on together. So a lot of the early work is determining what the project is. And then once we firm up that list of deliverables, we move into design, we bring together the project team that’s going to work best for that specific project.

Ian Paget: So Helen, are you focused more on lead generation and getting in prospects and the sales side of it or do you have a team that’s doing that for you?

Helen Rice: That is Josh mainly. And then our partner in Seattle, Ann, does a lot of that work as well. The director of the New York office, Carly, is also a part of those meetings. It’s a united front. We, depending on what the project is, different folks will take over those conversations. So it’s very much distributed amongst the team.

Ian Paget: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So I guess you pull the team together and obviously Colin, you’re responsible for the graphic design side of things.

Colin Pinegar: Yeah.

Ian Paget: So I guess you do all the sales side and then once it’s all gone ahead and kicked off it then gets passed over to the appropriate team?

Helen Rice: Most of the time what happens is the team that sold the project will stick around and work on it, because there was so much that we learned in those initial conversations, we carry that knowledge and kind of enthusiasm for the project forward into the work. And so I’ll stick around or Josh will stick around or whoever sold the project will stick around as creative director or account director just to make sure everything’s moving along.

Ian Paget: So do you have separate account managers? Because I’ve worked with agencies where they would be the sales team, then they would pass over to an account manager. The account manager would run the project, but then they would work with graphic designers, developers, whoever, they pull all that stuff together. Do you run that same general model?

Helen Rice: We don’t. We’re pretty small. The whole company is about 15 people. And what we like to do is we want the smaller teams where the directors, the people leading the projects and the people selling the projects stick around throughout the life of the project. And so it really helps us create consistency for the client as well as I think the best work comes from a consistent team. So yeah, it’s very much the same people who you get introduced to on day one are likely going to be there on the last day.

Ian Paget: And then I guess once you’ve got that, then how does that process run? So the project kicks off, what happens then?

Colin Pinegar: So first we will have a kickoff with the client. Typically, it’s pretty short. We’ve had a chance already to read the brief. We ask them whatever questions we might have and kind of get their story from their perspective, which is always helpful to hear. And then typically we start out like the first thing we show the client, the first work we show after the kickoff, we kind of go back, get to work and we start out by just showing concept sketches. Usually it is literally just pencil on paper trying to kind of think through as many ideas or hooks for the identity that we can and sketch them down on a paper, put them in a Google slides deck and explain them in words. And then that’s what we present to the client.

Helen Rice: Yeah, it’s important to us to kind of really focus on the concept first without any hint of design. So we really keep, the sketch and actual pencil sketch is very important because it doesn’t distract from the concept. There’s no colours to look at, there’s no line weight to think about. And so really it’s what is the concept that’s going to be best in the logo. And then we do sketch, we do kind of mess around with how that logo may be constructed in a very vague way. And then once that concept’s selected, we go into high fidelity mocks.

Ian Paget: It’s interesting sharing sketches. I personally don’t have the confidence to share a sketch. I’d prefer to put it together so that the client can visualise it. I don’t know if you would be willing to, but would you be willing to share an example that I can put it in the show notes?

Helen Rice: Yeah. Totally.

Colin Pinegar: Sure.

Ian Paget: I think that’d be really cool because it’d be good to see the type of thing that you guys are sharing and yeah, it’s useful because like I said, not many people work in this way that I’m aware of, so it’d be good to see how you are actually approaching that side of things.

Colin Pinegar: Yeah, and I think it requires a lot of explanation to the client. We have to really almost sell them on the idea of seeing something so low fidelity. But I feel like it’s produced some good work. I’ve, I really loved sketching and being able to just kind of come up with ideas without having to chase the entire, or think of the entire aesthetic, lay it out aesthetically before showing the client just because I feel like I can cover more ground and also, I don’t know, I just think better with my hand so maybe it’s not for everyone, but I feel like I really have really loved the sketch process.

Helen Rice: It’s also for us to be collaborative with the client and really bring them along in the process to feel like we’re giving them a chance to have a voice in the process versus taking time out to go away and then coming back with something that is going to be a big surprise to them. We’re really taking them with us on the journey.

Colin Pinegar: Yeah, that’s a good point too. It gives us an opportunity to bring them in sooner than we would have had we kind of fleshed them out further.

Ian Paget: How many sketches are you showing?

Colin Pinegar: It varies by project, but I think a lot of times we’ll internally come up with like, I don’t know, a couple dozen ideas and then narrow it down. We don’t want to be overwhelming, but sometimes we’ll show as much as 10 or more I think. Any that we think are good or that could be something the client is interested in.

Ian Paget: And then I guess at that stage you mentioned about not really needing to worry too much about the aesthetics. Are you selling us, trying to present some kind of story or all of the general idea behind what you’re putting together?

Colin Pinegar: Exactly. Yeah, we’ll think of the conceptual basis of the identity and how that might play out aesthetically, but usually just trying to convey the story of the new identity or just what kind of approach we might take to designing the entire system.

Helen Rice: Yeah. Often we’ll have our favourites and try to defend and steer.

Ian Paget: Yeah, I understand. Yeah. I do that a lot myself. I think it’s doing your job properly when you do present multiple options to steer in one direction, I think that’s important to do.

Helen Rice: Absolutely.

Ian Paget: Okay, so you present the sketches. What happens at that point? Is it just a case of them picking one and you proceed and you vectorise the artwork?

Colin Pinegar: No, a lot of times it’ll be, after they pick the concept because very little aesthetics were taken in to consideration, we will then kind of explore further, as far as what type of aesthetic leanings they have. We should say we also show examples of other work. Sometimes it’s our work, sometimes it’s mood board type slides just to help understand where they want to fit within their space or within the entire aesthetic spectrum. And then based on those selections from the mood board and the concept they’ve chosen from the sketch, we can then kind of piece things together and execute the concept that was shown on the sketch in the aesthetic direction that we’ve kind of collaboratively decided upon.

Ian Paget: And then I guess at that point it is a case of finalising it. The clients proceed with one of the options and then you go from there?

Colin Pinegar: Yeah, exactly. I think sometimes after the sketch round, we still will have two or three rounds of revisions of course trying to land it as early as possible. But yeah, just client involvement I think plays a big part in the process the whole way through and getting their feedback is kind of integral to getting the identity system right.

Helen Rice: Yeah. And we always like to show, if we’re creating a logo, we always like to show that logo in context. So mocking it up on applications like collateral and a website homepage and if there’s a product involved, mocking that up to a certain degree just so you get a sense of how that logo lives in different places.

Ian Paget: Amazing. Now I don’t know if you guys are okay for time. Are you okay if I ask one last quick question and then I’ll wrap up the interview.

Helen Rice: Sure.

Ian Paget: Okay. So I’m looking on your website. One big thing I noticed looking through your blogs, you these annual company retreats, and I know this is a question that’s not related to design, but I just thought this is really cool that an agency does this. So what’s the idea behind these annual company retreats? It sounds incredible.

Helen Rice: Again, we’re just such a tight knit group and we all really enjoy each other and yeah it’s just so nice to get because we do work on different coasts and in different cities. It’s nice to get everybody together at least once a year and have just free time just to hang out and really get to know each other. I think that time gives us all edge, a chance to kind of more better empathise with people on the team. There’s some people that not everyone works with every day and so it’s just fun.

Ian Paget: Yeah, it sounds like a really cool way to pull the whole team together because like I said, prior to this interview, I wasn’t familiar so much with how you guys work, but to know that a lot of the team are all in different places. I know myself the importance of that friendship and that bond is so important. The difference between working with someone that you’ve only ever met online versus someone that you’ve had a drink and lunch and you spent some time speaking to it makes a massive difference. So I can appreciate that. That’s great for morale, but also just general day to day communication and collaboration between the team.

Helen Rice: Yeah, Exactly.

Colin Pinegar:
Yeah. They’re so much fun.

Ian Paget: Yeah, it sounds amazing. I think that’s a good point to wrap up the interview. So Helen and Colin, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Helen Rice: Thanks for having us. That was fun.

Colin Pinegar: Yeah, it’s been great. Thanks a lot.