A Masterclass in Logo Design Theory

Ian Paget: I could imagine that most of the audience will be aware of the answer to this question, but I think in terms of opening up the conversation, can you explain, what is the purpose of corporate identity?

Michael Shumate: The purpose of corporate identity is to clearly and quickly identify whose product, service, or whatever else you're talking about. It is not to be cool. It is not to be different. Although novelty is great. I'm not knocking novelty but if you use that as your prime criteria and forget about the fact that you have to identify somebody's company clearly and people have to be able to recognise it and it has to be able to be reproduced equally well in a myriad of different media and situations, then you've missed the boat.

Ian Paget: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. That's exactly the way that I see it. Because there's a lot of graphic designers out there that think that ... Or not just logo designers. There's a lot of people that are that think that logo design is just a pretty picture, but there's a whole functional side of it and you want to make sure that you communicate all these different things. I'd love to go into that in more detail. But there was something in your book that I've not previously heard of. But you spoke about the principle of blowout. What is that?

Michael Shumate: Well, it's an acronym that I coined to help me remember what I'd consider to be seven deadly sins of logo design. If you stop and think about a tire, how many holes does it take in a tire before you're going to have a blowout? Just one. How many holes does it take in a balloon before the balloon is destroyed? Just one.

It only takes one and these are things that I see over and over again quite often in what are supposed to be design annuals promoting good design. And yet because they are different and somehow are breaking boundaries, people think that that somehow has made them good. And they're not because they don't work as corporate identities.

They won't work on signage or they won't work in printing without having to incur extra costs. Or they won't work when seen at a distance, which of course is always the case with signage. They won't work when it's small. And you can't just militate and say, "You can't use this logo any smaller than three quarters of an inch," because that just doesn't work. There are too many places where it has to be smaller.

From finance, or just if you're sponsoring an event, you cannot demand that your logo's going to be a certain size. So there are just too many instances of that. Now, you can expect that a client wouldn't understand those things, but it's really shameful that a designer doesn't understand those things.

Because clients trust a designer, at least initially, and then they come to find out, "You know what, our logo doesn't work in this situation or it doesn't work in that situation." Or, "Why is it costing us so much more?" Or, "Why do we have to always have printed vinyl on our vehicles and have to replace them every three years because printed vinyl doesn't last as long as cut vinyl?" All of those different kinds of things come into play.

Ian Paget: So what does blowout stand for? And can you expand on what these seven deadly sins are?

Michael Shumate: I certainly can. Like I said, I use that to help me remember what they are. The first one, B in blowout, is for has to be able to work in solid black. Too many identity designers think that's passé, think that it has no place in today's world of the web 2.0 look and all that stuff, but it absolutely does.

What it really does is help you get a solid design before you go and add whistles and bells to it. You can always embellish a good design. And if you look at the company that first gave us that look and feel, it was Apple. And we've all seen the transparent jelly Apple and the transparent glass Apple and the transparent plastic looking Apple. But you go to their website and what do you see? The solid black Apple. And not only that, it's only 19 pixels high. You try doing that with a design that's all whistles and bells and you just have what I call pixel mush. So that's B for the blowout.

The second letter L is for lack of mass. Sometimes people think it's very elegant to have a very thinly sculpted logo. And it can look very elegant and in other areas of graphic design it can be very effective, but not for logo design because without a certain amount of mass you cannot see it at a distance.

It does not reproduce when it's small. Even on the web if it is very thin lines, you get the situation where a single pixel is neither the logo colour nor the background colour. It's somewhere in between because of what we call anti-aliasing. And so again, you get pixel mush. So that's lack of mass.

Number three is obscure contrast. We've got to have excellent contrast for legibility. At the beginning of the book I go over some of the basic principles that all designers should know. I expect some designers will want to skip thinking, "I already know the basic stuff." But they really need to review those things because contrast is, I think, one of the most important principles of design. If you don't have contrast, you don't have legibility.

If you don't have legibility, people cannot identify what you've designed so what's the purpose? And legibility really comes down to value. How much value between light and dark difference there is between the element and its background. So bad contrast is a really difficult thing and it's a deadly sin. There's two kinds of contrast-

Ian Paget: Can I just interrupt on that? Sorry. In the book, you've actually shown this amazingly well because you've put the colours all in black and white and you can see instances where you've used certain colours and certain backgrounds. And I've been a graphic designer for 15 years and I always base it on what I see in front of me.

But actually seeing it the way that you've shown it with this nice diagram, it's explained it so much better. So I can imagine that there's a lot of graphic designers out there that don't know contrast to the degree that you've explained it in that book. I've not seen it anywhere else quite like that so it's good.

Michael Shumate: Well, thank you. When I started in graphic design, there were no computers. You had manual skills and you had visual skills. And now we are teaching computers. And I'm totally into computers. I'm not dissing computers one little bit. I'm totally into computers, but the length of graphic design programs hasn't increased.

So if it was a three year program before, it's a three year program now. And they have to take time to teach Photoshop and InDesign and Illustrator and basic typography because now designers are the typesetters. They don't send it out to typesetters like they did when I began in the industry. So all of that time comes out of their design instruction. Unfortunately, a lot of these basic principles are what is missing in modern design education.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I agree. And you've explained it really well in your book. So I'll let you carry on. Sorry for interrupting. So you got to C, contrast.

Michael Shumate: Yeah. Well it actually stands for O for blowout. Obscure contrast. And I had to kind of monkey with the words just to get the acronym to work. But because acronyms are helpful, I wanted a good acronym.

W stands for wayward parts or things that are out of harmony. That means either they don't fit with the kind of company that it is, you've got shapes that are not compatible, or you have shapes that don't agree with themselves. All curves and then one straight line. If it's done deliberately it can be a wonderful accent, but if it's done without recognising that you have a wayward part, it's just clumsy design. So wayward parts is number four.

Number five is overlapping. Now, 100 years ago you had these engraved logos that people had on their stationery and they'd have a lot of overlapped type and so on. And yet, over that last 100 years people have learned that overlapping does not help any design. It makes it more difficult for the eye to parse, to decipher. It makes it just harder to read and of course that's going against the very bedrock principle of what an identity is supposed to do is provide instant recognition.

So overlapping, it may not kill an identity, but it never helps one. So overlapping of elements usually is an attempt on the designer to overcome a really lacklustre design and try to figure out how something can work. So overlapping is number five.

Number six is unrefined shapes. Best example I can think of is the former Intel logo where it had the I-N-T and then the E was dropped down, and then it joined up with the L at normal level. And it just didn't work. It was kind of a clumsy design. They have since gone away from that and gotten a new logo.

All sorts of unrefined shapes are coming along. And again, this can happen more often if you're concerned more with colour and gradients and all sorts of whistles and bells in your design before you come up with solid design. Like I said, you can always embellish a flat design, but taking this thing that's all whistles and bells, you may find there's no substance to it.

And then the last of the seven deadly sins is tiny elements and thin lines. And this is again, for reasons I already mentioned, where you don't have enough pixels for the line to be a solid of what it's supposed to be. Whatever colour it's supposed to be. Or the background.

Another thing that happens is in printing, thin lines will either drop off or more commonly, they will fill in when reversed. And to say you can never reverse a logo is pretty limiting. It's like telling a person you can't drive this car on weekdays, you can only drive it on the weekend. But it's a great car otherwise.

So that's the seven things. It has to work in solid black, lack of mass, obscure contrast, wayward parts, overlapping elements, unrefined shapes, tiny elements and thin lines. Those are the seven deadly sins and that altogether is what blowout stands for.

Ian Paget: I love that. I think that's amazing because there's a lot of principles of good logo design that's been spoke about. I've done episodes on it previously. But I think what you've been able to identify is a system that can be used to effectively evaluate logo designs. Because you can be very specific. You can ask those seven questions, does this work? And if any of them fail, it pops. I love that blowout. It's not going to work effectively if one of these pieces doesn't work. Amazing. I'm going to be referencing that myself. I love the word blowout so that you can bring them back to your mind. Brilliant. Really good.

Michael Shumate: Thank you.

Ian Paget: You're welcome. So we've got these seven deadly sins. What's left to work with?

Michael Shumate: And that's the natural thing. I taught graphic design for 25 years and my students after I'd explain the seven deadly sins, they'd all get terribly dejected and, "What's left? There's nothing left we can do." That's so far from the truth. That's like saying here are the 12 notes of the octave. This is where you will write your music. And they go, "Only 12 notes? How can I possibly write the music I want with only 12 notes?" Well, all of the music of the western world has been written with those 12 notes. We have not had to invent new notes.

Now, you go to eastern cultures and they do have other notes in between, but in the western world of music we have not run out of music with those 12 notes. So just saying that there are rules and there's this terribly juvenile desire to break all the rules. I don't even want to learn them, I just want to break them. That's just unfortunately very adolescent. There are rules and ... I actually don't like to use the term rule. I like to use the term principles. There are principles that you cannot violate without incurring a tremendous negative reward.

And the negative reward in the case of identity design is it doesn't work. And it's going to be replaced. And the clients who got the logo from you in the first place are most likely not going to come back to you to get a new logo if you gave them a logo that didn't work in the first place. So it's one of those things. But there are so many other things that we can do.

For that purpose I explained ... I don't know if you want to get into this, but how you can brainstorm and actually come up with more and better concepts with yourself by understanding how many different components there are in identity design and then understanding how many different concepts there are. Of all the different logos you've ever seen, and some of us have seen millions of logos no doubt, there are only four different concepts. And when you understand that it is a wonderfully liberating thing. It lets you see, "Oh yeah. That's one of this kind of logos. And that's one of those kind of logos." And it's just really liberating.

Did you want to talk about that now?

Ian Paget: Oh yeah. I'd love to. I think that would be really good to go into. There's been a number of things that you've brought up that I do want to ask about, but I think since you brought up that topic, brainstorming, let's go through that. How would you go about brainstorming ideas for logo design?

Michael Shumate: Well, first thing is to recognise that there are four different components possible in identity design. Three of which are actually useful. The fourth one is only really good for consumer products like Gillette and Armstrong and some of those other kind of companies like that, that basically it's just picking a font and writing the company name in it.

That is the lowest form of design value added and it doesn't work for all companies. In fact, it doesn't work for most companies, which is why we have logos that have been designed. But the next step up is to take the word or the signature and add some unique design element to it. Famous examples would be Microsoft. There are all sorts of great identities that are word marks. What I call word marks. Now, some people use the term logo type. I think that's a very confusing term. I don't use it because it confuses people. Is it a logo or is it type? So I use the term word mark to mean it's just typographic, but it has some unique design element.

The Dell logo with the E that has been turned to an isometric angle. You have Sanyo where the N has the tapering slashes in it. All sorts of things like that where it has a unique design element to it. That becomes a word mark. Not just a signature because it's not just type. It's type and something else that has been added to it.

And then you have monograms, which usually are taking the first letter or letters of the company name and you do something with that. So that becomes a very powerful approach. WordPress uses a monogram. IBM uses a monogram. Kawasaki uses a monogram. General Electric uses a monogram. So those are very useful kinds of logos. So they're a subset of logos.

And then the last one is logos, which we just have a design there. So we have the three possible components for really good identity design. Word marks, monograms, and logos.

And then you look at the concept side of it. There are only the four different kinds of concepts as I mentioned. The first one that most designers will gravitate to in the beginning is corporate activity. What do these people do? And so the corporate activity for Uniroyal shows a tire stylised straight on. The corporate activity for Animal Planet, which was just done by Chermayeff, Geismar, and Haviv, shows a stylised elephant. So these show what the company does. But that's not the only concept. It's a good one, but it's not the only one.

The next one is to show the corporate ideals. What would this company like you to associate with them?

The identity for Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith or just called Merrill Lynch now, which is probably the largest stock brokerage company in the world, is a stylised bull. Because a bull market is one where everybody makes money so that's something they'd like to associate with themselves.

Prudential life insurance has a stylised rock of Gibraltar. And they used to include it but they don't anymore. They used to include it as their tagline, as solid as the rock of Gibraltar. Because insurance companies were at one point, many, many decades ago, were very ... They could disappear and then all your money in the insurance was wasted.

But ideals can be things like lions showing strength or superiority or leadership. It can be like the Playboy bunny showing fertility and sexual activity. Even on the negative side you have the swastika, which was the reverse of the Hindu peace symbol that was the war symbol, and they wanted to strike fear in everybody's minds and they did with their very effective graphic design. So graphic design is a power. It can be used for good. It can be used for evil. But let's always assume we're going to use it for good.

The NBC logo with the stylised peacock. When they were one of the first networks to come out with living colour. I remember that. I'm old enough to remember that. Most of your listeners probably won't be. So that's corporate ideals. So you want to have some ideal that you want to associate. Not what they do, but just an ideal that you want to associate with the company.

And then the third kind is corporate name, where you just talk about the name of the company. It doesn't tell them what they do. Whirlpool is a big brand of appliances over here. I don't if you have them in Britain. But the logo for that is literally spiralled lines that look like a whirlpool. That's the name of the company. Delta airlines, it shows a triangle shape in the shape of a delta, which was the name of the airline. It doesn't look like an airplane, doesn't really look like anything else. John Deere farm equipment. Again, don't know if you have that over in Britain.

Ian Paget: Yeah, we do.

Michael Shumate: John Deere farm equipment is just a deer. You can't hook up a plow to a deer. So it's not really letting anybody know what they do. It's just talking about the name. That's how you pronounce it. Since it is spelled a little bit different with an E on the the end, it just lets people know how you pronounce it.

Apple computer. Apples are not very effective things and they're not techy. It's just an apple with a bite out of it and that's the name of the company. And it's such an effective logo that they don't even bother putting their name with it because well, it's an apple right there. They don't need to say apple again if can't tell what the picture is. It's very evident.

Shell gas. We do not get petroleum from prehistoric crustaceans. That's not where it comes from. It's just the name of the company. And so it's a stylised scallop shell. And again, it's so effective that they have discontinued putting the name Shell with the sign. It's that effective. So there's the third one.

And then the fourth one is just an abstract approach. And it might sound like a cop out but it actually can be very effective. One of the big brands of car manufacturers over here is Chevrolet. And Chevrolet has this very interesting parallelogram design.

Mitsubishi is another very simple one with three diamonds all connected together to make a triangle. Citroen, the car company is just two chevrons, one on top of the other.

So these are very common kind of things and they can be very effective. The Chrysler corporation, which is big again US manufacturer, had a pentagram with a five pointed star inside of it. These have nothing to do with cars. It doesn't say anything about their ideals particularly. It doesn't say anything about their name. It's just an abstract approach, but it can be very effective.

So you have your four concepts. Corporate activity, corporate ideals, corporate name, and abstract. And then you have three possible components. Word marks, monograms, and logos.

So what you do is you sit down with yourself and you require yourself to come up with at least two concepts that show word marks with corporate activity. That show word marks with corporate ideals. That show word marks with corporate name. And that are abstract. And then you sit down and you say I'm going to do at least two monograms for monograms with corporate activity, and monograms with corporate ideals, and monograms with corporate name, and monograms with abstract. And then you do the same thing with logos.

And then at the end of that you'll have a minimum of 24 concepts. And what you can then do is not editorialise and say, well this one's junk and I don't want that one and that's too simple and this is very trite. Don't do that at this stage. Just look at them and see if there is a shape there in one that you might consider very trite or oh, that would never work, and see if it could be maybe used with, say a negative shape in a letter.

Or see if it could be a plainer or a silhouette ideal. And that brings us to then after you've done the conceptualising, then you kind of try to decide which ones you want to invest in. Which ones do you want to take a step further and see if they're going to work? Because most clients will appreciate more than one design.

I know some designers, they do one logo design and that's it. Take it or leave it. And I've done that in the past too. Because when I'm sure I've got the best design that's what I want to show a client. Because they'll invariably choose the worst design if you let them. So sometimes I do that. But how could you not suppose that that system would not give you more and better identity concepts to start with? Because you'll come up with things that you would never have thought of doing because you're forcing yourself. How can I show this corporation's activity in a word mark? How can I incorporate that into the name? And how can I do that as a monogram? How can I do that as a logo?

You're kind of using what traditionally has been spoken of as the left side of your brain to kickstart the right side of your brain. And traditionally speaking, we've always thought of the left side of the brain as the analytical side and the right side as the creative side. Well, modern brain science shows that that's actually not accurate, but it's a longstanding tradition so let's think in those terms. You're kickstarting the right side of your brain with the left side of your brain and two halves of a brain have got to be better than one half.

So you're going to come up with great things. I know a lot of designers, they sit down and they think and they think and they think until they come with an idea and they run with it. And because it's the only one they've got, they put blinders on and they don't look at its failings or its weaknesses. They just go ahead with it because the only thing they've got. It's their only baby and they're going to run with it.

Where this approach gives you so many ideas, hopefully your dilemma will be how do I choose the best out of all these wonderful ideas? Not just this is the only one I've got and I'm going to go with it.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I totally agree that when it comes around to brainstorming ideas, I do see a lot of designers that just draw one or two ideas. But the way that I like to work and the way that the best designers work, they will have a whole page of hundreds of different potential options. And I'm personally doing that just because I want to explore the potential of the idea, but I love this framework. It's a fantastic approach.

Again, not heard it before until reading your book and running through it now. I'm going to have to use it myself. It makes the whole exercise easier, allows you to come up with more ideas, and it's just impossible to get stuck. A lot of people get stuck when coming up with ideas, but thinking of it in this way, having this framework for idea generation is fantastic. You've done a really going job Michael.

Michael Shumate: Thank you. Thank you. It took 25 years to come up with it.

Ian Paget: It's a lifetime's worth of work.

Michael Shumate: Yeah. And it's because I was teaching students too. When you're trying to teach somebody else how can they come up with better things, over time it came.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I guess that comes down to when you evaluate their work as well, that's how you came up with that blowout because you're having to evaluate their work and give feedback. Because I run something called the Logo Geek community which is a free Facebook group and you see a lot of people sharing their work. I've never really had a proper framework. I mean, there's principles that I would apply, but referencing that blowout and using this approach to come up with ideas, this is like a proper masterclass for logo design so I hope the audience is appreciating this.

Michael Shumate: Well, when I started to teach college I had made up my mind that I was not going to do the things that I hated about my own instructors in university who I felt graded things on what they liked and didn't like. So I had to kind of mimic their taste. And I realised that was totally bogus. It does not belong in any kind of education. And I wanted to grade my students on principles that were solid, that did not change, that I could say, "Look, this is the principle. You missed it here or you totally violated it there." Whatever. Not based on anything that was subjective, but try to get as objective as I could in grading.

So it was always that exercise of ... It was when I was grading that I came up with most of the insights and I would realise this is wrong. What's wrong about it? And ah, this is what's wrong about it. Then I realised, well, I can't really fault this student because I didn't teach them that, but the next semester then I would teach them about this principle that this is something to avoid or this is something to make sure you do.

So, like I said, it did build up over time.

Ian Paget: Yeah. You can really see that. I know when I was reading through this, it's like this is years and years and years of work that's gone into this. Lots of time and thinking. It's very comprehensive so it's a fantastic book. I'll go into that in more detail later on in the conversation because you sent something over to me, this controversy sheet. And it's these different things that artsy designers say versus what you say. Can we run through some of these? Because these are great and I'm hoping that there will be listeners out there that will think, that's me, and they'll hopefully react to what you say and change their approach as a result.

Michael Shumate: Very well.

Ian Paget: It's probably worth if I some of them and then you say what you would say.

Michael Shumate: Okay. Go for it.

Ian Paget: I'm referencing the sheet that Michael kindly sent over. I want to design cool identities that will get me recognition from the design community. What would you say?

Michael Shumate:

I would say that a professional works in the best interest of the client, not for personal preference or benefit. That's one of my first chapters is that you've got to be professional and a professional in any profession ... If I went to a dentist and he said, "How about a root canal today? You don't really need one, but I just love to do them." I would look at him with horror. I would get up out of his chair. I would never go back to him. And I would do everything I could to make sure he never practiced dentistry again because that is not professional.

And if I went to a lawyer and he said, "I think we should sue these people." Well, shouldn't we at least write them a letter first or do something else that's a little less drastic or costly or risky? So again, a professional is supposed to work in the client's best interest and not just what they think is going to be cool, what they think will get them recognition. Recognition will come when people realise that your designs always work.

Ian Paget: Totally agree with you. Now, there's quite a few points on this so I'll add this into the show notes. I'll just pull out a few more. Any visual element, image, or illustration can make a good logo.

Michael Shumate: Absolutely wrong. Because of the different media, the different situations that a logo must be instantly recognisable in, photographs don't work, illustrations don't work. There are so many things that just do not work for logos. And logo designers have to recognise that. It's a very specialised area of graphic design. Some things that'll work in a magazine will not work as a logo.

Some things that will work in an ad will not work as a logo. It's a very specialised kind of design. And the thing that makes it so limiting is that it has to be able to printed, it has to be able to mate into signage, has to be able to put on vehicles, has to be ideally converted to a favicon on your website, which is only 16 pixels square. There are so many different things that a logo effectively has to do that it does indeed have constraints because the function of it so widespread, so broad.

Ian Paget: Totally agree with you. I'm going to bring up one more. Sometimes you have to sacrifice some utility for a cool logo idea.

Michael Shumate: Well, it's only cool if it works as a logo. So there's the flaw in that ointment. Do you really believe that the operation can be a success if the patient dies? You just got to get your priorities straight and start thinking clearly about what it is you're doing for the client, what are you aspiring to do for the client, and keep that focus going.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Totally agree. Well, there's 10 points on that list. It's a PDF. So I'm going to put it in the show notes. People can download it, read through it. I think it's full of great advice and I've heard people say some of the things on there and you've got good arguments for exactly why they shouldn't take that approach. So thanks for sending that over and putting that together.

Michael Shumate: Well, confession, I have said each one of those artsy things myself. I've lived long enough to realise where I was wrong.

I don't know if you wanted to get into the famous fails section of my book?

Ian Paget: Sure. I'd love to go into that now. So yeah, go for it.

Michael Shumate: This book that we're talking about is the second edition. My first book was produced seven years ago and at that time I used three examples of big companies who hired huge branding firms who should have known better to design their new logos. And the three companies were AT&T, Continental airlines, and Xerox.

And AT&T ditched the logo that they had previously, which was an excellent logo designed by Saul Bass. And they replaced it with an homage to that logo, but it was a 3D, very subtle globe that had the blue stripes on it. The problem with it was that it had low contrast. Because I assert that you have to have a minimum of 40% contrast as minimal contrast anywhere. And a logo should always have excellent contrast, which is 60% contrast with its background. This did not have that. Whereas the original Saul Bass logo did. It did not have that. It had to be produced in full colour on all of their stationery, which greatly increased their cost for stationery, whereas typically a logo printed in a single colour and then your address in a second colour, you're printing in two inks and two inks is cheaper than four inks.

So they had that issue with it. It had really clumsy shapes. When you took away the colour and the subtlety and you just looked at the shapes, they were clumsy. So it had three strikes against it. Three of the seven deadly sins it had going for it. It was like absolutely three strikes and you're out. Then Continental, again, they ditched a logo that they had gotten from Saul Bass again, in favour of this new logo which is a globe and it had all these little fine lines on it.

And it didn't work. It didn't print well on their own boarding passes. It would smudge because the negative lines were so fine it would fill in. It didn't look good on their own TV screens. When you sat on a Continental flight, you'd look at the TV screen in the seat and before the movies were available they would just have the Continental logo. And they were not enough pixels to show the lines as a solid white or yellow against this dark blue background. And so it was pixel mush. Then later on when Continental and United merged, they kept the United name, but they also kept this inferior Continental logo replacing a third logo that Saul Bass had designed. A really excellent U logo. So at the time of publishing my book the first time, these were what they were using.

And the third of the famous fails was Xerox. They ditched a design by Chermayeff, Geismar, and Haviv in favour of this new one. And it was this globe. This three dimensional globe that had a white intersecting stripes on it and inside the intersecting stripes there were grey lines. So two colour logos are always a difficulty for registration and so on.

While that logo was being used, that was while I was still teaching at the college, and our college used exclusively Xerox printers. So I would go down to the print room and I would look at the box that the Xerox ... This is Xerox's own box. Cardboard boxes are usually printed in flexography, which is just a glorified rubber stamp on a drum that allows for the flexing of this uneven material. And the logos were horribly deformed because of the thin lines in it. And it just looked terrible on the box.

Then if you opened the box and you got out a ream of paper, that was printed apparently in letterpress because of the millions of wrappers they had to have on the millions of reams of paper they sell around the world. And there instead of the grey lines, they had opted for just solid black lines, but they were out of register with the rest of the logo.

It was only a millimetre or so, but when you're dealing with a logo that's only a half inch around, a millimetre is a lot to be out of register. And that's the problem with two colour logos is that you've got registration issues every time you go to print and you're going to get things out of register. So there was that issue. Then the third thing was on the actual Xerox machine they had these little LED control screens that you use to punch in the numbers and all the things that you wanted with the thing that you were photocopying or printing. And on its own screen their logo was washed out. The grey lines didn't show up at all because it was too subtle for that kind of a screen. And so here on their very own machines their own logo didn't reproduce well.

Now, we always think of Xerox as photocopy company. But it turns out that in the last decade or so their profit model has actually shifted. They are in the big reproduction machines now, where you plug in a USB key on one end and you get a finished publication or book on the other end. That's where their big money is coming now. So they're a reproduction company. How absurd that a reproduction company has a logo that no matter what you do doesn't reproduce well?

So all three of those companies, since the first printing of my first edition of the book and this second printing, they've all ditched their logos. Every one of them. Like I said they should. In favour of something that more meets what I call the core principles of logo design. AT&T got rid of its 3D subtle thing. They have a flat orb that is made with flat colours and it works out well. Not only that, they had to re-sculpt those lines because, like I said, one of the drawbacks of doing a 3D thing is that you don't notice that you've got poor shapes. And they redrew those shapes so that they are much nicer and more refined.

So AT&T has ditched its bad logo and come up with a better one. United Airlines has simplified their globe. It used to have ... I think it was 16 longitude lines and 13 latitude lines and now they're down to eight longitude lines and eight latitude lines. Simplifying it much more so that the lines themselves can be sturdier, in other words giving them mass, so that they can reproduce well. And now it actually looks good on their own website.

They have not converted over all of their 700 plus airplanes and so on because the cost of that has to be horrendous. To do these 40 foot high logos in vinyl. The cost of that just must be horrendous. They have not yet switched all of that over, but they're in the process of it. I expect it'll take them another 10 years to do that. And that isn't money wasted. The money wasted was in adopting the bad logo in the first place and paying to have it put on all their vehicles and everything.

And then the third one is the Xerox globe. And rather than try to redesign that, they just omitted it. And they've gone with the signature that accompanied it, which is nice. It wasn't bad. And so they've just plain thrown in the towel and gotten rid of the logo altogether. So again, that might be the least costly of the three famous fails in terms of reimplementing their identity but it still does cost. They still have to reissue uniforms and reissue all sorts of things to make it better.

So those are the examples of what I call famous fails. They were all big, big companies who could afford the best design. You know they paid many, many bucks to have those things done by the big companies. I think one of them was Lippincott and one of them was Interbrand. And I can't remember which ones are which now, but these are big companies. But these big companies don't have all that good of a track record for designing things that conform to what I call the core principles and that's unfortunate.

Ian Paget: I think in terms of principles, there hasn't really been a reference until you put this together. So this blowout thing that we spoke about earlier in the conversation, that's an incredible resource for referencing work, evaluating it, making sure that it does comply. Because you can have something that will look good, but will it actually work effectively in the real world? And you've identified this system that companies can use, designers use to avoid all of these situations.

You mentioned throughout this vinyl, and just before we move on I do want to speak about this because it's one of the first books that I mentioned it, but there's a section in your book where you speak about colour consistency and I have an episode coming up talking about colour consistency referencing from Pantone as a colour. But in your book you say for the greatest consistency you'd base it off vinyl. Can you expand on that a little bit? Because that makes a lot of sense.

Michael Shumate: Yeah. The big companies, 3M and Avery, who are, at least in North America, the largest producers of vinyl for signage. Each of them have a swatch book of colours that the vinyl is available in. Yes, you can get a custom colour done and some companies do, but they will require you to order literally 10,000 rolls of this custom colour. So that's totally out of the question for most companies. So you have to choose a colour that is available in vinyl for signage and for vehicles.

Now, if you've got a company that doesn't have either signage or vehicles, then that's fine, you can ignore this. But most companies do have one or the other or both. So you can get every vinyl colour in Pantone and of course you can take any vinyl colour and reproduce it in CMYK or in RGB, but the reverse is not the case. You can't necessarily take any Pantone colour and get a vinyl colour to match it. You can be too warm, too cool, too light, too dark, too saturated, too neutral. It just doesn't work. So it makes sense because it's not like they don't have enough colours there. It's over 100 in Avery and it's a similar selection in 3M.

And I don't know what the big companies are in Britain for instance. It may be the same ones. But if you can't find a colour there in those 100 that works for you, maybe you want to rethink your colour rationale. Because it does need to have the ability to reproduce with the vinyl. And like I said, you have the full printed vinyl now. You can get full colour printed vinyl and wrap a whole car in this photo if you want. But those things only last about, at this point, the best information I've been able to find out is that the vinyl only lasts about a third of the time because the printed inks fade and of course vehicles and signage are always out in the elements. They're always being exposed to UV light and that stuff just wears down colour.

So you want solid vinyl, which holds its colour and lasts longer, if you're going to have a fleet of vehicles. Imagine for instance, AT&T. How many thousands of vehicles does AT&T have? I don't know if they even exist over there in Britain but they're the biggest telecommunications company in North America and they have thousands upon thousands of vehicles.

If you have to replace your vehicle graphics in a third of the time of what it would be if it was solid vinyl because you've gone with a full colour printed vinyl, that is a huge hidden expense for your client that they're not going to appreciate that in the long run. So yes, I do say that it makes sense to pick a vinyl colour because then you know everything else will match. That's easy peasy. But going the other direction it isn't. And Pantone is wonderful. I love Pantone. I love their inks. They have colours that you cannot achieve in CMYK and so on and so forth, but even so, you can always get a Pantone colour to match your vinyl, but you can't always get a vinyl to match your Pantone.

So you really start with the thing that has the least selection and work from there. And most of the time it'll work out just fine because most people pretty much opt for some very basic colours. And if you want a more exotic colour they've still got 100 of them. There's something there that should be able to work for you.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Interestingly, after I read this in your book I spoke to a number of designers that I've known for some time that have a lot of experience, and I like, "Have you guys heard this before? I've never heard this mentioned anywhere." And the approach that some of them have taken for big companies, they work for big companies, what they've done is they've selected the colour and then in the brand guidelines they provided the closest match.

It's not always an exact match because they've done it the other way around, but I guess if you do want 100% pure accuracy then it does make sense to go from the vinyl to the Pantone, to the CMYK, to the RGB, and doing it in that direction. Especially for these huge companies where they do have the car wraps and the signage and everything like that. Like I said, it's not something I'd read in a book before and I've read a lot of books on logo design so that's why I wanted to really stress on this and bring it up. Because I can imagine it would be possibly new information for quite a lot of people.

Michael Shumate: Right. Well actually, what I said was that it is possible for a large company to get a custom colour through 3M or through Avery. They can get a custom colour of vinyl. But they have to order 10,000 rolls. But big companies, they will use that. And that's just the cost of doing business. I'm talking about your average company who can't in the world afford to order 10,000 rolls of a special company colour because the designer insisted on this particular shade of puce. Why? Just because? To get incur that kind of cost to your client without considering that another colour could work, I consider irresponsible design.

So again, it's doesn't apply to the big companies because they can order whatever colour they want and it will not affect their bottom line too much. But the smaller companies it definitely would. So that's why I say as a rule of thumb start with the vinyl, pick a colour that'll work, and then you're laughing because everything else can match.

Ian Paget: Yeah. It goes the other way as well. If he was to start with RGB ... And like I said, I've got another episode coming up with this in a lot more detail with Pantone. But if he was to pick an RGB space, RGB, because it's made up of light, has a much wider spectrum than CMYK. So it's a huge mistake to pick an RGB colour and then convert that to CMYK.

Because I've actually had a client very recently that had a website done and they wanted me to match the colour on their website. And we actually went with that in the end, but I had to explain to them, "If you ever get anything printed, it's a very different colour." I mean, this was a bluey, pinky colour. Quite a vibrant colour. And it looks great and in their case pretty much 99.9% of their communication will be online. Because they're an AI company so they do it all online. It's all by email. So they can get away with it. But if they ever needed anything printed, that nice vibrant, purpley blue colour is pretty much impossible to recreate in print. It's impossible to get anything even slightly close.

Michael Shumate: Yeah, it's called colour gamut. I taught colour theory almost as long as I taught logo design and colour gamut is ... CMYK, we think it gives us every colour there is, but it's really very limited. The human eye can perceive so much more. RGB gives the largest gamut that there is in any technology we have, but that's why Pantone has come out with this book that compares CMYK to straight Pantone colours.

They have oranges that there's no way in the world you can achieve in CMYK. You can't get there from here with CMYK. But they have these oranges that are just brilliant and wonderful. There's this book that has them side by side. It's rather inexpensive swatch book, but they're really quite valuable to help you see. If you choose this colour in Pantone, this is all you're going to get out of CMYK and of course anything that's printed, CMYK is your best bet there.

Now, there was a technology called Hexachrome, which Pantone came out with. And if they hadn't been a little greedy and charged $500 for the plugin to go into Photoshop to convert your ads into Hexachrome separations instead of CMYK, they could have done a whole lot better. That gives a beautiful range. It really increases on the gamma of what is possible through print beyond CMYK. Because it uses six colours. It uses a brilliant orange and it uses a very vibrant yellow green. And in addition to a corrected magenta, a yellow that's pretty much the same as regular yellow, and a corrected cyan. But that didn't happen so it's unfortunate. You can see that big companies like Cadillac and Rolls Royce will print their catalogs in Hexachrome, whereas the more common vehicles will just print them in CMYK because it does give a more brilliant colour.

Ian Paget: It sounds like there's so many things that we could talk about. You're very, very knowledgeable on the topic Michael. But we have nearly come up to an hour. So I do want to ask one last question and I don't know how long the answer will be, but I want to ask you about your book. We've mentioned it throughout. You've released this book and you said it's the second edition. Logo Design Theory. Do you want to talk about the book and then we'll wrap up the interview?

Michael Shumate: Sure. When I started to teach the first of my 25 years, I wanted to adopt a book that would tell my students what the basic principles are. The things that don't change. The things that are not affected when fads come in and fashions go out of fashion. The things that are just kind of enduring.

And I could not find such a book. It did not exist. And I thought how can it not exist? There's got to be some book out there like this. And I could not find it. It did not exist. And publishers will throw books at teachers because if you adopt it that's 40 sales a year for every class you're teaching. They will gladly give you every book they've got in the hopes that you will adopt it for your classes. So it wasn't a case of not being able to find it or not being able to afford it. The books didn't exist.

So I realised, well, I'm not going to teach my students that anything goes because anything doesn't go. And so I began to create my own materials to teach with. And that was the basis of this book so some of these things have been in existence since I created them 20 years ago and I've been adding to them ever since.

So when I first put out this book seven years ago, I sent a copy, one each to each of the principles at Chermayeff, Geismar, and Haviv, which is a New York design firm. Chermayeff and Geismar did so many of the great logos that we know. They did the Screen Gems, they did Merck pharmaceuticals, they did Chase Manhattan bank. They did the older Xerox identity. They did a version of PBS. They did a version of NBC. They were the first ones to do the Univision which has since had some iterations. Harper College. All sorts of these wonderful logos.

They're the kind of people that they may have their equals, but they don't have their superiors in logo design. They are the top. And Ivan Chermayeff, bless his heart, wrote me back a letter, a hand written letter that he actually signed. It was typed, but he actually signed it and sent it back to me through the old mail. What's that? And I have that letter. It's a prized possession.

He said, "At last, somebody finally understands what identity design is all about and how it is accomplished." And I cherish that. I put it on the back of that edition of the book and I put it on the back of the new edition of the book. The new edition is bigger by quite a bit. It expands on some of the things I ... Whereas the first edition had 1,300 examples, illustrations, charts, and so on, the second edition has an additional 850 examples.

And I also have sections where I show that today's designers are feeling their way towards these core principles and redesigning identities in accordance with the core principles. And so I go back through all of the seven deadly sins of logo design and I show how people have fixed their designs that had those sins and how they have fixed them. So that's a new section in the book that the old book didn't have.

I just believe that these are correct principles and your eyes will prove it to yourself that they are. I'm not particularly smart, but I have just been dogged in trying to figure out what these things are. And over time I have figured out a few things and I think most designers would benefit from looking at these and considering these things and then of course practicing those things, because they will bear fruit. And designs that will last and have the potential to last forever are the kind of designs all of us I'm sure would aspire to do.

Ian Paget: Absolutely. And that sounds like a really good point to end the interview.

I think it's worth adding, I've read a lot of books on logo design. I've been collecting them for years. And I've always been surprised that no matter how many books on logo design you read there always seems to be some nugget in different books. There isn't the one book to rule them all so to speak. I don't think that currently exists, but what you've put together has come close to that.

Pulling together all these different principles are creating a system to evaluate all the stuff that we've mentioned in this episode. To be fair, a lot of that stuff I haven't even read in books. There's some real gold stuff in this book so it is worth purchasing and reading through carefully.

There's a lot in there. It's not a book just full of pictures. There's a lot of content to go through, but as you can all tell from this episode, Michael you know so much about this topic. We could carry on going for several more hours, but I'm conscious that listeners probably don't want to listen for hours and hours and on. Maybe they do. But in terms of as an episode, I think an hour is long enough. And maybe I'll get you back on at a later date to expand on some things a little bit further.

But Michael thank you so much for your time. This is a real masterclass for logo design. If anyone was to listen to one episode to really learn, this has to be that one so thank you so much for your time.

Michael Shumate: You're quite welcome. Thank you.