Lined & Unlined

When your customers are designers, you know your new logo will get a full crit. But when publishing software giant Quark, Inc. unveiled its new identity, timed to coincide with the release of a beefed-up, feature-rich Quark 7, it got something else: a lesson in the difficulties of designing an original logo in a world more packed with logos than ever before.

The new logo seems simple enough—a circle-square hybrid that we’ve dubbed the “squircle,” resembling a very mod-looking uppercase Q, writ large in “Quark Green,” a.k.a. PANTONE 368, a color that Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, equates with growth and innovation.

But “innovation” wasn’t the first word that came to designers’ minds when the logo debuted in early September. Shortly after its release, the design community erupted in accusations that the new mark had been ripped off. Admittedly, the logo is far from original. It’s very similar to logos promoting tourism to Toronto and the Bahamas, and easily comparable to those of Moen Faucets and AkaDemiks Jeans, not to mention a bevy of design-related logos for Sterling Brands, Artworkers, PhotoObjects, and the popular design blog The Designers Network. And color aside, it’s identical to the mark designed for the Scottish Arts Council by the notable Scottish firm Graven Images. In our checkup, we counted 15 logos we’d call highly similar.

Why, the Logo Doctors wonder, weren’t their fellow designers as outraged at the similarities between those existing 15 marks? More importantly, why have so many different companies chosen the squircle? And is Quark to blame for choosing such a common logo?

The answer to the first question is simple: Designers love to hate Quark, for both its limited functionality and its unhelpful customer service. (We happen to be Quark fans, for the same reason we type our columns in TextEdit—sometimes less is more.)

The rise of the squircle is harder to pin down. Like any abstract form, it can be rationalized into a solution for just about any brand. That creates a snowball effect: the squircle’s burgeoning ubiquity endows it with the familiarity that designers aiming to connect their clients with consumers will build on. Focusing on who unveiled the squircle first misses the point.

But try telling that to the Scottish Arts Council (SAC), whose reaction comes as close as we’ve seen to a logo street fight. The defensiveness is somewhat understandable: in 2001, the SAC’s new logo outraged Scots with its publicly financed $37,000 price tag, and the SAC must feel more than a little compelled to defend it tooth and nail.

While a Quark spokesman claimed to Macworld that the company conducted “extensive checks to discover similar existing logos,” this defense is a little tough to swallow. Not only did hordes of enterprising bloggers manage to track down so many within hours, but the shape has been used by multiple companies catering to the same market as Quark.

If you can pardon the company for its total ignorance, the squircle seems better suited to represent Quark than to represent many of the others. After all, it looks a lot like the capital letter Q. (And not very much like the lowercase letter “a” for “arts,” as the SAC claims.) By rationalizing the shape into a monogram, Quark may have used it more effectively than others have. Still, if any mark provokes customer outrage, you can do all the rationalizing you want and the logo is still a failure.

But whose failure is it? While Quark has to shoulder some of the blame and most of the embarrassment, we’d like to suggest that its collaborators at SicolaMartin, a division of Young & Rubicam Brands, should’ve stayed up a little later doing their competitive analysis homework. And we’d extend that advice to them in marketing their own firm. The SicolaMartin website uses the phrase “Good design is good business,” which is trademarked by the furniture manufacturer Knoll. Originality’s a bitch.

As Jeremy Hedley of the blog Antipixel observed, designers are paid as much for the quality of their thought as for the actual Illustrator file sent along at the end of a project. We absolutely agree. If you claim to deliver a blend of differentiating thought leadership along with visual acuity, as SicolaMartin does, then you have to walk the walk. Diagnosis? While the new identity may have its merits, its utter lack of originality is certainly not one of them.

The version of this article that was published on 30 September 2005 by BusinessWeek.com is available here. © 2005 Rob Giampietro and Kevin Smith.

On 2 September, more than 1,600 Sprint and Nextel stores opened their doors beneath new signs bearing a common logo. This marked yet another massive telecom merger, following Cingular’s buyout of AT&T last year and anticipating Verizon’s possible takeover of MCI in the weeks to come. Whenever two become one, a new logo is an inevitable offspring, and this merger is no different.

Will the monolithic new company be dubbed “Sextel,” as bloggers once giddily suggested? Hardly. The new branding doesn’t exactly get us all hot and bothered. Like that forgotten soda from the ’90s, it’s basically…O.K.

Then again, post-merger logos are seldom visionary or inspiring because they’re design-by-committee projects mired in politics. So if the committee is actually able to produce a logo that’s on time and un-ugly, they deserve a pat on the back.

And that’s exactly what a team of execs from Sprint and Nextel—along with branding agencies Lippencott Mercer, TBWA/Chiat/Day, Publicis, and Hal Riney—have done. Because a successful logo merger is always a challenge, the Doctors decided to take a closer look at this team’s decision-making process.

The trick to making a successful logo is keeping what works and ditching what doesn’t. In play are three key elements: name, mark, and color. In the case of Citicorp’s merger with Travelers Group in 1999, the name was resolved from the start: the new entity would be called Citigroup. In designing the logo, Pentagram wisely shortened the word to the very recognizable “citi,” keeping Travelers’ red umbrella, a symbol of protection, while playfully using a “t” as its curved handle. The lowercase “i”s are both human forms and points of connection. The colors of both companies are integrated in the new logo. A masterful merger.

JP Morgan Chase’s new logo is more straightforward. Both banks had great brand equity and name recognition, but Chase’s lovely emblem—designed by Chermayeff & Geissmar in the 1960s and still a classic—was preserved as the more recognizable symbol. They compromised on the colors and updated the typography. Well done.

Finally, when FedEx acquired Kinko’s in 2004, they scrapped the copyshop’s forgettable logo but kept the highly memorable name. Since FedEx has no logo aside from its name, Landor Associates (makers of the original FedEx mark) recognized the need for a logo to anchor the new brand and set it apart from FedEx’s. They devised an innovative asterisk made from three arrows coming together. Three of the colors—orange for FedEx Priority, green for FedEx Ground, and purple for FedEx—were already in use. The remaining color, an aqua blue, became the symbol for FedEx Kinko’s.

In the case of Sprint and Nextel, the left side of this slide shows the assets in play. On the top row, the names “Sprint” and “Nextel,” and the typography of those names: Sprint’s in outdated bold italic, Nextel’s in an all-caps, no-nonsense sans serif. In the second row, the marks: Sprint’s ungraceful diamond-pyramid thingy, Nextel’s mundane cursor. Finally, the color schemes: Sprint’s commonplace grey and red on a white ground is similar to Verizon’s, Nextel’s black on a bold yellow ground is totally its own.

The right side of the slide shows this process of combining existing brand elements as used by another telecom company. When WorldCom acquired MCI in 1997, the new company took MCI’s name but kept WorldCom’s branding. Later, post-scandal, the company ditched the “WorldCom,” but kept its more distinctive look.

This approach wasn’t an option for Sprint and Nextel: While Sprint clearly had the more recognizable name and Nextel clearly had the more recognizable color scheme, neither company had a mark worth getting excited about. The designers decided to create a new one.

The new logo is a vast improvement over the previous two. It visualizes one of Sprint’s most memorable marketing claims—its network is so clear that you can hear a pin drop—to remarkable effect. In so doing, it also has overtones of Cingular’s “full bars,” a symbol of the completeness of their network. The new mark also resembles a bird’s wing, a symbol of the freedom of cellular communication.

Here is Sprint’s final logo, with upper- and lowercase sans serif letters that hybridize the companies’ former typography. In virtually every graphic way, the new branding distinguishes itself from its competitors. We hope Sprint will wear it well.

The version of this article that was published on 15 September 2005 by BusinessWeek.com is available here. © 2005 Rob Giampietro and Kevin Smith.