During our third week we were asked to design a logo for an IMA program at NYU and listen to the podcast.
Reflection on the podcast:
That was definitely an insightful podcast for me. I personally like to read about how things change with time and identify the reasons for that. Also in terms of psychology it’s really interesting to see how human perception drives this change. The guest who was participating in the podcast was Tom Geismar, a famous logo designer. When he was talking about the process of development the logo for Chase bank something resonated with me. Initially some people didn’t like the logo Geismar presented, but after some time they started to wear it as a symbol as a part of their work outfit. I believe it is because the logo stopped being so abstract to them. It became combined with their perception about their bank. Hence, it’s also became inseparable from the part of their personality as an employee. People need to feel that they belong to the groups, and companies or work groups are able to give them this sense of belonging. With that they also acquire some attributes, such as values, specific colors, associations and logos. So I think behind every successful logo there’s a huge psychological basis, and it’s usually highly emotional. For instance, we may remember a logo because it’s associated with the restaurant we had great time in or on the contrary, had food poisoning in. So, from my perspective, it’s important to understand that the logo and brand as a whole can be remembered also because of bad experience. And as studies showed, it is much harder to get rid of bad memories and change bad perceptions compared to the good ones.
Reflections on my logo work:
My idea for the logo came from my confusion. It was really hard to remember what IMA stands for. And I thought what if other people not from NYU see this logo? If it was me, I’d want to have some idea about what this logo means before googling it. That’s why I used full words in my logo. And the stairs part…I guess I wanted to show that IMA program can lead to opportunities in life, to a great career and self-actualization. From the podcast I remembered that logo should be appropriate and distinctive. It’s certainly appropriate to me, as it looks official and can be associated with education. Distinctiveness part may be missing due to color-less format of the task. I actually was inspired by the logo created for the MIT media lab, so the use of color would definitely make my logo different from theirs. The last feature, flexibility, may present a problem. As I haven’t tested it using different materials and environments, for instance in a web browser tab. Thus, there’s still a question whether my logo is flexible enough.
From left to right: Final logo, first logo version, draft and word associations