I hate logos. Impossible to avoid them these days. In becoming all
pervasive, logos lost their sole redeeming feature. They traded in their
symbolic appeal for visual banality. For purveyors of popular culture,
that’s a bad deal.

Good logo design harmonises image and type into a memorable symbol or
ingenious form. Playful or provocative; serious, whimsical or straight - a logo
should sum up its product in a direct and vital way. It should grab us by the
eyeballs. That’s the theory anyway. Too bad so many of the new logos we
encounter every day are so boring and insipid.

I haven’t always hated logos. There was a time when I considered the
redesign of, say, the Coca Cola logotype as one of the more exciting events of corporate
culture. But things have changed since American design guru Raymond Loewy
admonished his fellow designers to “never leave well enough alone”. When it
comes to a couple of recently revamped logos, perhaps they should have.

The new Commonwealth Bank ID would have to be one of the missed design
opportunities of the decade. Timed to coincide with the bank’s transition to
a public company, this identity change has done for the Commonwealth what
Elvis did for pizzas. Nothing. The previous concentric circles have been replaced
with a lopsided yellow square, complete with a black notch in the corner. Like
SAO dipped in vegemite, as one of my less generous friends would have it.

Though the symbolic significance of the old circles may have escaped
most of the clientele, the square is a complete mystery. The bold san serif
“Commonwealth” now sits snugly beside the skinny sanserif “Bank”. It wouldn’t
be so annoying if the interplay of shape, colour and typography actually
implied something. But it doesn’t.

Telecom have also gone through a similar revising of identity. Although more
meaningful and seductive, it sits uneasily amid the visual jumble of the street
From my bedroom window it looks like it’s about to slip off the side of the
corporate HQ where it so proudly hangs. Happier on the top of phone bills,
corners of phonecards and sides of vans, there is at least an attempt to develop
consistent usage that doesn’t assault our visual senses. Invoking the look of a
satellite dish, Telecom, it seems to say, will beam us up into the age of global
communications.

For modernists like Peter Behrens, whose logo for German industrial giant AEG
remains unchanged since 1906, or Paul Rand (creator of IBM’s trademark in
1956), a logo had to be logical reflection of a company’s product. A good logo
looked right stamped on everything the company did, from product to
letterhead and blazing neon. For the classic modern designers, the logo was to
be an orderly industrial icon that united the whole of the company into one
image while marking it off from its rivals in the marketplace.

The logo took over where the trademark left off. It could anonymously compete
with the friendly animal or human figures who would sell us ice , petrol or
potato chips. The kooky smile of the bulbous Michelin Man seemed to guarantee
the quality of the tyres that formed his body. About the same time, Nipper the
RCA dog sat listening patiently to the recorded sounds of his master’s voice.
The corporate logo, however, was to extinguish this more human dimension,
replacing it with the image of a smooth-running machine.

The modern logo, which had its heyday in the 1970s, combined the mechanical
precision of photography with the abstract look of diagrams. This might be too
austere for these funky postmodern times. Hence the 1980s saw a revival of interest
in the popular trademarks of the 1920s and 1930s, with all their intricate and
dynamic naivety.

In the 1990s this interest has shifted to popular clothing labels. With the help of a
cheap bromide machine or digital scanner, the mark of a 1930s airliner or a
sports label like Nike (it doesn’t matter which) can be transformed into an
ersatz record label or cheeky T-shirt print. At least these logos go easy on the
symbolic banality and heavy on the ironic appeal.