When should a company rebrand or change their logo? Not as often as you may think and here are our thoughts on why that is the case.
If you’ve spent a while developing your brand, any change will have an impact on the brand that you’ve built up. And even a small change to just the logo will mean that anything with the previous logo on, will then be out of date!
So, when should a logo or brand be refreshed or changed? Well, if your company or business moves in a different direction and the existing brand does not appeal to your new market. If a competitor starts to make an impact in your market place and their brand or literature is more professional looking than yours.
Often the solution is to build a stronger or more consolidated brand around the exiting logo, brand colours and typeface. I can even follow a strict brand guidelines and create literature that not only looks really good but will be more effective for the business.
I’ve had clients approach me to change their logo or brand for no other reason than they have become so used to it that they effectively want a change. But this seems a little crazy – if the brand still looks better than your competitors and it still appeals to your target market then don’t try and fix something that isn’t broken! And what a position to be in – having a logo for so long and building up your brand recognition more effectively. They may feel a little out of love or bored with it because they are so used to it – but I bet their clients don’t think that or all the potential clients it’s still effectively targeting.
Now saying all that above, I’m going to explain why I changed Tent’s logo after 17 years of use. The brand has happily evolved over the years too but it’s consistently used the brand colours and typeface. At the beginning it was quite heavy with the a lot of our darker ‘Tent’ green but over the years I’ve used more of the paler colours. So the brand has evolved but still uses all the same elements.
I could have continued to used the old logo but we are now in a different era to when Tent first started and online and social media has meant that sometimes a logo needs to fit in smaller spaces.
I felt I could refresh the Tent logo so that it could be used at larger sizes in smaller spaces. Keeping the existing Tent icon and typeface for the text, but looking at a better placement of the word ‘TENT’. After considering a few options, I decided to use it as a visual shadow to the icon. Fully integrating the word ‘TENT’ as part of the icon connected the name of the business and the icon in a much stronger way than it was done before. I also moved to uppercase lettering as this matched a small change in the brand typographic style. So it’s really a refresh more than a new logo and therefore still manages to be part of the existing brand.
I planned this update to the logo to coincide with the necessary updates to our stationery. The website just needed one file swapping over and the social media banners were also a relatively quick change.
But I appreciate that I’m a professional designer so can do this for myself for free. And my advice to clients is only to change a logo or brand ONLY when it’s strictly necessary. Even when a client described themselves as the ‘Kylie Minogue’ of their business sector and they needed to periodically re invent themselves; I’d probably disagree, turn down the work and offer a more cost effective solution to make their existing brand truly effective.
Anyway, here’s the difference in the old logo and the new one. Sized to the same width, the new logo has bigger text and a bigger icon. Yes, it’s taller, but most logos are fitted to a width when used on literature.
Also another point to bear in mind is the size of text to icon. With a large icon and smaller text, the company name is going to appear quite small especially when used with other logos. Often logos are put together so they visually balance with each other so when the text and icon are balanced well the logo will really stand out. Logos that are edging to a square-ish format rather than longer landscape ones will also fill the space more effectively.
I was really pleased when I dropped our new logo into the Supporters slide for the Thinking Digital Conference. The sizing meant that the logo was really maximised in it’s space while still being very visually balanced with the other logos.
So if you want a knock out logo and brand that not only appeals to your target market but is also super effective when in use; and that will last for a very long time, let’s chat. And you may not even have to fully re invent your image to gain your knock out brand!