Dave on How Logo Design Reflects Brevity and Clarity

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Из курса от партнера University of Colorado Boulder

Business Writing

613 оценки

University of Colorado Boulder

Business Writing

613 оценки

Курс 1 из 4 — Specialization Effective Communication: Writing, Design, and Presentation

Writing well is one of the most important skills you can learn for success in the business world. Knowing how to write well allows you to deliver your ideas with the power they deserve. Good writing also conveys a sense of your professional excellence to the world around you. In this course, you'll master the simple, effective skills that drive all successful business writing. You'll create impactful documents that not only showcase your ideas, but showcase your own professionalism to your audience. The principles you learn in this course enable you to become a great business writer. They also provide the foundation for moving into Graphic Design and Successful Presentation, so that you can unleash your best professional self whenever--and however--you present your ideas in the workplace.

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Activate Your Voice!

So, you've started to write a document . . . Module Four takes you beyond the scaffold and good grammar to provide you with specific tips that will elevate your language, infuse your writing with clarity, and amp up your ability to communicate your ideas effectively. Every lesson in this module is based on the principles you learned in Module One, and they form a checklist of techniques that you can apply to any business document to insure your ideas shine on the page. Short videos on emails and longer documents give you simple techniques for applying the lessons of this course to a broad range of your work.

Writing IS Revision3:18

Check Your Scaffold1:18

Keep It Simple4:43

Brevity is the Soul of Wit5:06

Dave on How Logo Design Reflects Brevity and Clarity5:22

Always be Specific; Avoid Generalities and Jargon5:04

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Dr. Quentin McAndrew
Instructor
Department of English, University of Colorado Boulder

It's good to hear you say these things about good writing and paying attention to

brevity because in good design it's absolutely the same thing.

Here's a sentence that will probably make your ears bleed.

You've been showing us sentences to do that.

I think the World Wildlife Fund logo is beautiful.

There's a problem with that sentence.

What's the problem with that sentence, Quince?

>> I think.

>> Absolutely, there's no reason to have that as part of this sentence because it's

implied of the speaker is of course thinking that.

So we want to kill the excess baggage in that sentence, I think.

It's a much better sentence now if it simply says,

the World Wildlife Fund logo is beautiful.

>> Exactly. >> It makes perfect sentence.

In graphic design as in good writing, we're always working toward brevity

to keep things as simple and as clear and as distilled as possible.

That served the holy grail for designers, you know I'm not a cook.

Lord knows I'm not a cook but

I do know that when we make a sauce we add white wine, broth, spices and we cook it

down until we get to the bare essence of that particular flavor that we're after.

That's exactly what happens in graphic design.

We're trying to cook things down to their simplest idea just as in good writing.

And nowhere is that more visible than in logo design.

Logos are probably the hardest thing for

any graphic designer to do because they have to be so efficient.

So economical, so iconic, and impactful.

All those things come into play in developing a good logo.

When we do look at that logo, the World Wildlife Fund logo,

we do see that knowing when to stop is extremely critical.

Here's the World Wildlife Fund logo, it's beautiful.

If we add just those two lines, it kills the logo, it goes away.

Taking those lines out makes it an absolutely gorgeous logo.

>> Wow.

>> Yeah, it's interesting how that works.

In writing you might think that losing one or

two words in a sentence is not a big deal.

But it can make or break a beautifully written clear, concise sentence.

>> Exactly.

So, I want to show you just a couple of

logo experiences I've had to show you this evolution, this distillation works.

The first one is a student project that I worked on way back in the day when I

was in art school.

Our instructor assigned us the work on logos for fictional companies.

So my company that I was asked to work on was called Drysant Construction,

not a real company.

The company does large, let's say appartement buildings,

hospitals, that sort of thing.

And this was my first attempt.

It has a crane and would dot the eye with this crane and

I thought that that was a great idea.

I took it to my instructor and she said, you know what?

This is a failure because there's too much, it's too complex.

So, I went back to the drawing board and

came up with this beauty, which was, admittedly, less complex.

>> Yeah.

>> But she looked at that and she said, you know, there's still too much in it,

too much information.

>> [LAUGH] No.

>> Sent me back to the drawing board and

I came up with this one, which I really thought was much, much better.

And my instructor asked a very important question.

What is the sense or the feel of what this company does.

You don't have to show cranes but what do they do.

They build, there's dynamics, there is movement, and

structures are coming into place when you work with this company.

So here is my redo which now, even looking at this all these years later,

I still think it's really nice logo.

>> It's nice. >> It's

showing things being put into place so

I got it down to its bare minimum, that is what brevity is all about.

We want to let form do the heavy lifting and

logo design that is what we are always after.

Here is one I did, a freelance project a couple of years ago for

some folks here in Boulder.

And if I had gone too far and added one to define the circle.

Again, it would have killed the logo,

just as would have happened with a World Wildlife Fund logo.

We need to know when to stop.

It's what good designer is all about, there's another thing with logos,

one idea per customer.

We start adding numerous ideas,

what happens with the sentence when we have more than one idea in a sentence?

>> It get's confusing.

>> It gets confusing, absolutely.

We don't want to confuse people with our design work.

Here's a logo I helped a fella with, actually this was just about a month and

a half or so ago.

Working Class Dogs, he trains service dogs.

We have two things happening in this logo.

A dog waiting patiently for instruction and pawprints being used for

letters in Working Class Dogs.

That's two ideas in one logo, that's never good because now we have confusion.

So in good logo design, we have some basic rules to follow.

The first is don't overstate, we don't need to add too much,

just as in good writing.

We don't want to overload our audience with information.

Again just as in good writing, we don't want things to be overly complex and

we don't want to confuse them with more than one idea in any one logo.

Then it's no longer impactful and economic, it's confusing.

And I don't know if you're familiar with this quote, it's by the fellow,

whose name I can't pronounce but he wrote The Little Prince.

It's a wonderful quote and it applies to writing,

I'm sure William will agree that it applies to public speaking as well.

A designer knows he's achieved perfection not when there's nothing left to add, but

when there's nothing left to take away.

>> That's perfect.

>> Good, I think so too.

I try to live by that all the time as a designer.

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