This is the final post for our Logo series, and as we’ve covered in the last couple of posts a logo can most often be the face of your company – so you want to get it right! Ideally you will be able to make a good decision, with the help of a professional graphic designer, to pick and design a great logo that will last you for quite some time. However, sometimes you either do not start with a good logo or your logo can get out dated and you have to change it. Keeping your logo current can show that your company is current. This is generally a very expensive decision, especially if you are a well established company, so not a decision made quickly!
Let’s look at a few major companies that have changed their logo in the last few years:
As you can see all of these companies have updated their logo a few times. And the visual progression usually really suits the time. For example, Pepsi went from the old fashioned Soda Pop “scrawl” to a more modern looking logo “button”; still picking up on the bottle top shape, but showing they’re a strong enough brand that they do not need to have their text in the logo anymore. I personally think that the most recent change in the Pepsi logo was too minor for the crazy amount of money they spent on it though; hundred’s of millions of dollars to make it a “flat” image with the wave slightly changed? Wow.
Wal Mart has kept a very simple look throughout the years. Again as the times changed, so did their logo. They went from a more comical western style font to a very modern all lowercase letters with a very stylized star/sun image. Simple and effective.
Xerox did both text changes from caps to lowercase as well as, over the years, a change from an imaged logo that was more of a label kind of look to just text. The biggest visual transition is from when it dropped the “Haloid” name and went with just Xerox, since then the main visual changes have been moving from upper to lowercase letters and changing the stylized “x”. The stylized “x” is definitely the largest difference in the last few logos and really updates their logo to a more current look.
The big things to notice is that all the logos have kept a current look. Some times they used a logo for over 30 years, but that generally tended to be the initial or early logo, more recent logos have been updated more frequently. Depending on your company and industry you may need to update your logo more often or perhaps not very often at all. If you would like an assessment or update on your logo feel free to contact us.