You are (not) your logo

Published on 25^th February 2010 in Design, Websites, tagged Thunderbolt.

Whenever I redesign Thunderbolt, one of the most discussed aspects of the site is its logo. Although the site has been around for nearly ten years, we’ve never had a single logo for more than a few years. Is this something we should be concerned about or doesn’t it matter what logo your website has?

Let’s play a game

Can you recognise which websites these screenshots belong to?

How did you do?

Anyone who’s used these sites should immediately recognise their distinctive styles. They are, of course, BBC News, Facebook, The New York Times and Wikipedia.

The importance of identity

What that hopefully demonstrates is that a website’s identity is not simply its logo, but the entire design. Identity is not just a small trademarked name or symbol, but all of the other details that define its visual style. It’s the typography, the borders and lines, the use of colour and images.

Within specific industries, identity is even more important. Standing out from your competitors is crucial and so you need a recognisable visual style. This is one area in which I believe Microsoft made a huge mistake when they launched Bing.

Compare these two screenshots:

Which of these is Google and which is Bing?

It’s hard to tell at first, because Bing’s visual style (top) is an almost exact copy of Google’s, which is one of the most recognisable on the Web. When you see Bing’s search results, you don’t see Bing, you see Google.

Perhaps Microsoft would interpret this as what search looks like, not what Google looks like, but either way it’s a telling sign of the extent of Google’s influence.

Designing the visual style first

If you accept the premise that a website’s visual style is comprised of and defined by many things and not just the logo, then this allows you to change the way you design. Instead of creating a website to fit a logo, you can design a logo to fit your website.

Thunderbolt’s design is unique because we pay particular attention to the legibility of our articles and because we don’t have any adverts. Where other videogame websites are cluttered and overwhelming, ours is clean and tidy. Consider this comparison of another videogames website and Thunderbolt:

When it comes to redesigning a website, it’s okay to change the logo if you retain the visual style. That doesn’t mean copying it exactly, but making sure that certain details are recognisable. Take, for example, the current and new versions of Thunderbolt:

In the second, development version, there are a number of changes to this area of the design, but it still looks like Thunderbolt. The background and font size may be different, but by using the same border styles and typeface, we retain the aspects of the design which define our identity.