Peter King, the writer of the Cranky Consumer feature for the WSJ, created a fictional business in order to test and review, several online logo design companies. Operating under the assumption that the client was a jobless entrepreneur, King set his budget at $150 and under and went to work.

Creating DiskFix, an imaginary data retrieval service who specializes in data recovery from hard drives, King selected The Logo Company, Logo Design Guru.com, Logo Design Creation.com and Logo Loft to build his imaginary brand.Providing only a tag line and a simple one sentence description King purposely kept the input to a minimum and let the designers have at it.

After reviewing each design, King and corporate brand expert Dr. Glenn Christensen, assistant professor of business management at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management, provided their commentary. Although King and Christensen reviewed price, service, and design, we will turn our attention to the design itself.

Logo Design Guru
I liked this one, it seems both corporate and dynamic, while integrating a cyclical motion with an outlined circle around the company name. I also can’t help but notice a very FedEx like arrow in between the “I” and the “X” in “Fix”, very subtle. The typography is also strong and metered providing an excellent hierarchy between Disk Fix, Solutions, and the tag line. I would like to see the tag line slightly larger, but it can work both ways.
I disagree with Christensen’s assessment that the logo does not communicate what the company is. Clearly the circle, hidden arrow, and the circle around Disk Fix Solutions provide some indication of returning a user or a customer right back where they started from, as any customer of a data recovery service would so sorely want to feel. Overall strong text, plus the subtle cyclical motion makes this the strongest contender.

LogoLoft
I found this logo to be slightly more problematic, in that I found it too spread out and elongated for my taste. Also the text is a little bland.   I feel if you are going to design such a text centric logo, you should at least capitalize on it and do something interesting with it.  I’m just personally bored by the text in this logo.

I do like however the hard disk head resting on the platter, jutting out from the “D” in Disk. (I’m a sucker for design elements worked into text.) My only concern with this is that it could be mistaken for a thermometer. If someone wasn’t particular intimate with the internal working of a hard drive, he or she may not know what was being depicted.

Logo Design Creation.com
I have mixed feelings on this logo. I find the type to be very weak, and I’m not just some sans serif hater, this text is Land of Bland. The text is fitting for a road sign on the Autobahn, not for a data recovery firm.

The icon is compelling, in that it’s a blunt in your face representation of the company, but I disagree with Dr. Christensen that it’s the best representation out of the group. To me it’s uninspired and looks a little too much like an oscillating fan.
The logo is also fairly long and horizontal, and not as condensed and compact as most standard logos.

The Logo Co.
This is a compelling logo similar to the Logo Design Guru logo that I think takes the right approach. Circular in design, the logo creates the effect of spinning drive platters and is appropriately turning clockwise indicative of getting back to the start of something.
The 1s and 0s are a particularly nice touch at communicating the nature of the business and providing the necessary fill in inside the logo’s center. My only concern with this would be printing or embroidery. I wonder how well this would come out. I find the font for Disk Fix a little too thin, with the word “Solutions” becoming lost below the company name and above the tag line, but the design is still perfectly serviceable.

After offering our humble commentary on the design portion of this article, what are your thoughts about these logos? Did the Wall Street Journal get the design aspects correct? Which logo is the best and most likely to be selected and used? Which firms could have done better? Leave a comment below or vote in the poll on the right, under the RSS feed box.

Images and Graphics originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal July 16, 2009.

-Kevin Scott