Great logo designs are hallmark of a successful designer. The core objective of a creative artist is to design a brand identity that is appealing and memorable. But ever heard of a designer whose sole purpose is to deliberately create bad logo designs? Yes folks, there actually is an individual who creates horrible logos purportedly for beer money. On his website, he showcases all of his ‘best’ works which include some of the most hideous logo designs you will ever see.

Some of you may remember a post of mine a few months ago that showcased these horrible logos. I thought this was some sort of a joke and that it would end soon. But it turns out that the person has continued creating bad logos for meager sums of $5 & $10 (which he terms as ‘beer money’).

So as sequel to my earlier post on terrible logo designs, here are 30 more that will make you laugh.

Nick Stone Design	Patrick Haupt – Guitarist and Composer
Dead Ink Apparel	Refinery Audio Productions
Group Stage	World Is My Man Cave
RF-Communications Aerial Installers	OLYMPIA
Coded Colors	52 Cakes
Maphattan	Space Chimp Media
Natural Hypnosis	Reviewing.net
Daily Trap	Inglorious Blogsters
theMTC	Stephen Flavahan
Mobal World Phones	Adverspew
PolicyOwl	Localize Over Lunch
Chris Loach	Phoenix Air Conditioning
Logomotions	Mark Hesemann
Brad’s Pictures	Pamda
Ons	Ncahyadi

Video games are electronic games created using interactive electronic devices (like keyboard, joystick, and controller) on different display formats. Most of you might be familiar with classic arcade games like Atari’s Pong that dramatically increased popularity of video gaming. This was soon followed by console game developers like NINTENDO, SEGA, Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s XBOX. All of these game developers have a unique and renowned brand identity that is represented by its company logo design.

Since video gaming involves human interaction, their logos must also be dynamic and interactive. Depending on the genre of video games that developers deal in, the logos must portray the exact experience to the users. Logo designing is also employed in in-game advertising, a concept of subliminally promoting your logo within video games.

For your inspiration and understanding, here are 28 interactive gaming logos that exhibit fun and entertainment.

Jawfish Games	4 Clowns Game
Gamerty	Pool
Digimaze	88 Games
GameZion	Game Land
BEC Games	SocialVilla
STARCOM	Game Queen
Anim’Aktion	Ground Storm
Speed Monkey	Bounce
OSM Games	Juegamer
51 Game Zone	Gaming Geeks
Game On	Gamer Grip
Game Globe	GamePlus
STRIFE GAMES	Happy Stick
Play	CouchPlayer

When you are developing a brand identity for a client, you cannot afford to call your own shots. Most logo designers like to run their own show in a logo design project and also want the clients to be satisfied with whatever they do. But the fact of the matter is that you cannot have your cake and eat it too. The principle aspect to focus on when creating a brand identity is your ‘target market’.

In a few cases, the client helps you in recognizing their target customers. However, when the client does not properly describe their intended audience, it is up to the logo designer to perform this endeavor himself. But without proper branding knowledge, designers fall short of correctly realizing the audience they are to design for. In this day and age, every business must focus around the preferences and liking of their customers. A company logo design that is deviant of these characteristics is unproductive. Hence, a customer-oriented logo design is necessary to effectively target your audience.

So how do you develop an identity that is customer focused and targeted to your intended market? Following are five principles through which you can create a customer-oriented logo design:

1. Evaluate the Sector:

To start off the customer-focused approach, you must first evaluate the sector of your client’s business. For instance, if you are working on a business identity for an automobile firm, you must thoroughly investigate the nitty-gritty’s of the auto sector. This enables you to highlight what colors, symbols and fonts are appropriate for a particular industry. It is an observed fact that similar brands adopt same colors. Moreover, if you observe the logos for famous car brands shown above, you will notice that most of them employ a similar circular, emblem style pattern.

2. Analyze Rival Firms:

After an overall sector study, a logo designer must also conduct an internal analysis on the major players of the industry. Now this does not mean you start copying logo concepts from rival firms of your client. Analyzing the identities of competitors help you in understanding what elements appeal to the customers. For instance, if you are working on a soft-drink company identity, you will benefit greatly by learning famous brand logos like Pepsi logo and Coca Cola logo as they will aid you in comprehending what people look for in a beverage company logo.

3. Assess Demographic Attributes:

Once you complete the above steps, you are now ready to move your attention on your target customers. Understanding the consumer behavior involves two distinct aspects namely, demographic attributes and psychographic attributes. The demographic study of your customers involves knowing factors such as age, gender, race, income etc. For instance, the logo for famous Toy manufacturer Toys R Us was created keeping the demographic age of their target market (kids) in mind.

4. Examine Psychographic Attributes:

The second phase of understanding consumer behavior is psychographic attributes which involve factors such as personality, attitudes, values, interests and lifestyle pattern. This is equally essential in devising a customer-oriented logo as these these variables deeply affect the way consumers react to a particular brand logo. For instance, when designing religious logos, these factors come into play as you need to comprehend the values and beliefs of your target audience.

5. Put Your Logo Through a Trial-Run:

One common logo design mistakes that most designers make is not testing their final logo design. Before you settle on your ultimate design, you should put it through a trial run to verify whether the response is favorable. We have a perfect example of the Gap logo redesign that highlights the importance of my point. Without adequately testing their new identity in the market, Gap badly failed as a roar of criticism encapsulated their rebranding efforts.

To me, it is always the simple things in life that matter the most. Be it the personal or work life, I like to keep things simple and sweet. Most people prefer things that are uncomplicated and expedient. Similarly, we can apply the same rule in corporate identity world. Amongst all the complex identities in the corporate world, it is always the simple company logo design that stands out.

The correct term employed for simply designed corporate identities is minimal logos. The art of minimalism involves creating an ultimate design using the least possible elements. However, minimal logo design trend must not be taken as a mode of convenience or shortcut. Minimalism in logo designing is a creative technique of conveying the company message in the simplest comprehendible form. Designers use various methods like negative space and hidden logos to craft a minimal identity. The idea is to hide a message for the audience to easily interpret.

To give you an idea of how minimal logos are crafted, here are 30 inspiring logo designs that say more with less.

Panda	HE Logo
Oneload	Papeterie Haute-Ville
Rdio	Data Recovery
Animodul	Brandon Winckler
Up Stocked	Bedroom
East Village	Home Table House
Red koala	Inforce
Volcanic Music	Space Egg
light music	Fear Door
Open	M4
LogoNook	Cat and Mouse
catfeeds	Property Portal
F & H	Gigaxe
Work Monster	Conex Dating
Writetime	Spytec

It is the ultimate dream of every sports athlete to represent their country in the Olympic Games and win a medal. Within a few days, the London 2012 Olympics Games is about to get underway as over 200 nations fight for glory and honor. While the excitement for the world’s foremost sports competition is soaring, London 2012 Olympics logo has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. There have been fierce criticisms from the general public over the vagueness of design and its unscrupulous allusion to an objectionable human pose.

The word ‘Olympics’ has taken root from its originating venue of Olympia in Greece where it was first hosted in 8th Century BC. The International Olympics event is divided into two phases that take place in summer and winter respectively. Initially, both the Summer and Winter Games were held in the same year after every four years. But it was after 1992, that both events were conducted two years apart. Moreover, with the passage of time, the number of featured events in Olympics increased with the addition of other sports.

Back in 2010, I featured a post on evolution of FIFA World Cup logos that showcased all identities adopted by FIFA for its most coveted tournament. Sighting that the Olympic fever is high, I decided to display the evolution of Olympics logos and how they transformed all the way from 1932 to the present 2012 form.

	Winter Olympic Logos	Summer Olympic Logos
1932			1932
	Venue: Lake Placid, New York, United States	Venue: Los Angeles, California, United States
	Number of Events:14 in 4 sports	Number of Events:116 in 14 sports
1936			1936
	Venue: Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany	Venue: Berlin, Germany
	Number of Events:17 in 4 sports	Number of Events:129 in 19 sports
1948			1948
	Venue: St. Moritz, Switzerland	Venue: London, England
	Number of Events:St. Moritz, Switzerland	Number of Events:136 in 17 sports
1952			1952
	Venue: Oslo, Norway	Venue: Helsinki, Finland
	Number of Events:22 in 6 sports	Number of Events:149 in 17 sports
1956			1956
	Venue: Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy	Venue: Melbourne, Australia / Stockholm, Sweden,
	Number of Events:24 in 4 sports	Number of Events:145 in 17 sports
1960			1960
	Venue: Squaw Valley, California, United States	Venue: Rome, Italy
	Number of Events:27 in 4 sports	Number of Events:150 in 17 sports
1964			1964
	Venue: Innsbruck, Austria	Venue: Tokyo, Japan
	Number of Events:34 in 6 sports	Number of Events:163 in 19 sports
1968			1968
	Venue: Grenoble, France	Venue: Mexico City, Mexico
	Number of Events:35 in 6 sports	Number of Events:172 in 20 sports
1972			1972
	Venue: Sapporo, Japan	Venue: Munich, West Germany
	Number of Events:35 in 6 sports	Number of Events:195 in 23 sports
1976			1976
	Venue: Innsbruck, Austria	Venue: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
	Number of Events:37 in 6 sports	Number of Events:198 in 21 sports
1980			1980
	Venue: Lake Placid, New York, United States	Venue: Moscow, Soviet Union
	Number of Events:38 in 6 sports	Number of Events:203 in 21 sports
1984			1984
	Venue: Sarajevo, Yugoslavia	Venue: Los Angeles, California, United States
	Number of Events:49 in 6 sports	Number of Events:221 in 23 sports
1988			1988
	Venue: Calgary, Alberta, Canada	Venue: Seoul, South Korea
	Number of Events:46 in 6 sports	Number of Events:263 in 27 sports
1992			1992
	Venue: Albertville, France	Venue: Barcelona, Spain
	Number of Events:57 in 7 sports	Number of Events:286 in 32 sports
1994			1996
	Venue: Lillehammer, Norway	Venue: Atlanta, Georgia, United States
	Number of Events:61 in 6 sports	Number of Events:271 in 26 sports
1998			2000
	Venue: Nagano, Japan	Venue: Sydney, Australia
	Number of Events:72 in 15 sports	Number of Events:300 in 28 sports
2002			2004
	Venue: Salt Lake City, Utah, United States	Venue: Athens, Greece
	Number of Events:78 in 15 sports	Number of Events:301 in 28 sports
2006			2008
	Venue: Turin, Italy	Venue: Beijing, China
	Number of Events:84 in 15 sports	Number of Events:302 in 28 sports
2010			2012
	Venue: Vancouver, BC, Canada	Venue: London, England
	Number of Events:86 in 15 sports	Number of Events:302 in 26 sports

I have always preferred keeping things simple in both life and work. Most of us value the simpler things in life because of their ease and convenience. Even in the logo design field, a lot of designers follow Leonardo Da Vinci’s golden principle which states that, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” The correct term for this in design is minimalism which emphasizes on using least possible logo design elements to create a memorable identity.

But sometimes I get the feeling that minimalism in logo design is being taken for granted. I say this because I have periodically heard many logo designers label their work as clean and minimal. But using minimalism irrelevantly will not make your logo effective. If the logo fails to communicate properly with the target audience, then it will be boring and lackluster.

• Examples of Famous Logos:

In recent times, there have been quite a few cases where a clean and minimal logo was regarded as dull and meaningless. Recall the Gap logo redesign blunder that took place a couple of years ago. The firm wanted to revamp their identity and introduce a clean and simple logo. But the reaction of brand fans was cynical who considered the logo as boring and meaningless. Eventually, Gap had to revert back to their old logo design.

1. Meaningless for Customers:

The main function of a company logo design is to communicate the rationale of existence of any entity. For this purpose, you must enhance the content of your design in order to transmit a complete and explicable meaning to the target audience. Some designers, in pursuit of creating a clean logo, bury the real message of the corporate entity. For customers, a brand logo is worthless and boring if it doesn’t provide them with some useful information.

2. Unable to Clear Confusion:

We are living in a world that is flooding with brands and corporate companies. With the rise in competition, it gets confusing for customers to comprehend which brand is best for them. Hence, they expect a company’s logo to communicate the purpose. Many logo designers keep their logo clean, but minimalism is a concept that not many people understand at first go. Hence, customers need to be continuously educated in order to comprehend the concept of minimal logo design trends. A clean logo without a proper connotation will be unable to clear confusion and reservations of target audience.

3. Gives an ‘old-fashioned’ feel:

The younger generation is always fascinated by hi-fi gadgets and futuristic designs. The design that used to be a super-hit fad decades ago may not appeal to the present-day consumers. Right from concept car designs to movie poster, young consumers of today consider detailed and futuristic designs to be in vogue. For them, a minimal and clean logo design is old-fashioned and out-dated. A design that may look ‘clean’ to logo designers may not appeal young audience these days because of being dull and monotonous.

To wrap up, I would articulate that overdoing any design trend can ruin its beauty. It might be possible that the same is happening with the trend of clean and minimal logos. Using minimalism out of context is bound to make your brand identity dull and monotonous.