License plate photo courtesy of sixes & sevens
Earlier today I received a comment on one of my blog posts that got me thinking. It was from Douglas Bonneville, and he said:
I’ve seen quite a few takes on the Families logo. When I see something this simple, I always wonder 1) how no one saw it before and 2) if we are going to run out of obvious icons buried inside of words in the next few years.
Is good logo design a bit like peak oil? How much more can we continue before we run out and all revert to simply using Courier for everything?
And I thought, with iconic identities having a memorable, simple, adaptable shape, won’t there come a time when every supposedly “new” idea has been exhausted in some previous incarnation? Or indeed, has this time already come and gone?
It’s just one of the challenges we face in identity design—to move projects in new directions, and to not settle for what’s “cool” in this fledgling profession of ours.
