The Evolution of a Logo: A Case Study of GPO's New Brand

In 2002, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) made a landmark move--landmark, at least for a government agency. It stripped its branding of the archaic government seal that is indicative of federal agencies and adopted a more corporate identity, with the goal of heightening its potential to compete with private contractors. Ron Keeney, now a supervisor at the GPO's Creative Services Department, went through the design process to create this logo.

Mr. Keeney received the request to design the new logo when he walked into the GPO on his first day on the job. "I came up with twenty-five to thirty logos. I would pick four or five that I liked and bring take them into my boss's office. We met once every week or two weeks, and he would make revisions on his favorites," said Mr. Keeney.

The concept design phase began in 1999 and was not made a top priority until the current U.S. Public Printer was appointed to lead the GPO. In 2002, GPO designer Rebecca White snuck one of Mr. Keeney's designs onto some temporary signage during an in-house event. The Public Printer saw it and told Creative Services to finalize the design and make it the GPO's new brand, establishing the rapid change that was about to occur at the agency during its move into the digital age.

Knowing that the logo should stand out as a black and white design, Mr. Keeney designed using only black. "I knew that the logo had to be used in large signage, but had to still be recognizable as a small icon," he said.

The final logo represented a mix of the old and the new. The G and the O were drawn in a serif font, representing a traditional typesetting style. The P is a sans-serif font, representing web-based design and GPO's move toward the future. The squares to the right of the O signify flight from paper to pixels. The fonts go from the traditional to the new and then back to the traditional, saying that "GPO is moving to the future, but is not forgetting its heritage," said Mr. Keeney. "The P is reversed," he said, "suggesting hot metal type."

The theories behind the design go even deeper. "By reversing the P and butting it up against the G," said Mr. Keeney, "I used some Gestalt theory, that the whole is a sum of its parts."

In the end, Mr. Keeney selected Pantone Spot 280 as the official GPO branding color, which nearly converts to the web's hexidecimal color of #002776. The final GPO branding standards manual does not require that the logo appear only in this blue or black, but strongly recommends it.

Today, this GPO logo is seen on business cards, trucks, brochures, and all other levels of GPOs marketing materials and correspondence documents. Of the hundreds of designs that Mr. Keeney did, the final was not his favorite, but a close second. "It is a strong solution," he said.

Don't Half-Ass Your Logo

Before you can create marketing material, you must have identity. Effective identity establishes your business as legitimate, productive, and profitable in the eyes of your clients. Your marketing material design should be based on this logo, so don’t start creating letterheads and business cards until you have nailed down a logo that is the same excellent quality as your hard-working business's products.

The best thing you can do for your marketing presence, is hire a professional designer to design your branding. You are a technical writer, and not a designer, no matter how well you know Photoshop and play with Microsoft Word Art. You do not have the training and experience that a professional designer has. And, if you hire a designer, be ready to spend about three to five thousand dollars on your total-concept branding. Any cheaper, and you may as well design your own branding, because you will not likely get quality work. There are a lot of imposters running around calling themselves graphic designers. Total-concept branding is the design mindset that all aspects of your business, including your marketing material, should tie together. A customer should recognize your communication material and packaging as yours at first glance. For a good example of total-concept branding, think of Apple Computers, Inc. They are located online at www.apple.com, if you are unfamiliar with the company.



However, if you are stubborn or broke and don’t want to hire a professional graphic designer to do your logo, go to the library and get a quality logo design book. There are many out there, and many that are terrible examples of good logo design, so be careful with your selection. The best design books in the planet are made by Graphis. Right now, I’m using Graphis Logo Design 6 as an idea-generator in my own business. They are located at www.graphis.com.

Now, start sketching. Harvey R. Ball, the creator of the smiley-face, said that freehand sketching during the idea phase of the design process frees your design and lets you concentrate on concept. He said that your logo develops more character if it was sketched during the brainstorming phase. This also eliminates the possibility of making the number one mistake technical communicators make when they design their own logo–including ridiculous-looking fonts that don’t say anything about your business but that you are an amateur. Dean Gardei, project designer for the Government Printing Office’s Creative Services division said, “The worst thing that has happened to logo design is the technology era, where everyone knows how to use a computer and knows how to play with fonts and graphics. They all think they are experts now.” What the computer-literate masses don’t realize, is that they do not have the design background and the years of instruction and experience on and with composition, contrast, and color. Thoroughly study your selected design books and examine what it is about your favorite logos that grabs you. Most likely, those characteristics have quality in four areas–shape, presence, weight, and contrast. According to an article by the producers of www.webdesignfromscratch.com, “a distinctive logo has a recognizable shape, so that it is still recognizable from its outline. Your brain loves to use shape to identify things, because it can do it very quickly...this is also the main reason why white space is important.” White space is the space around your logo. Despite the name, it is not necessarily white. If your marketing material will present the logo on a black or red background, then this white space is the space around the logo that allows it to breathe. Use lots of it.



In your sketches, create simple logos that are distinctive, but still portray your message. Your message can be subliminal or representative of your primary customer; it does not need to necessarily represent your business of technical writing. Everyone knows that writers use pencils, typewriters and computers, so think outside of the box and come up with some unique ideas. If you do software help manuals, then make your logo attractive to your software developer clients. If you do science documentation, think about what the science community wants to see. At the risk of overemphasizing
the design industry’s favorite logo, the Apple Computer logo, study its simplistic, yet distinctive design and unique message. Another icon of success is the Nike swoosh, which was developed by a design student for an initial payment of $26.

The second thing to concentrate on while sketching is presence. You want your logo to be powerful and exude the power of your business’s services. Sketch bold and clear designs. “The more space you fill with elements that don’t either help recognition or add meaning, the less presence your logo will have,” said webdesignfromscratch.com.

Weight is an important quality to consider. Avoid fine lines that will not show up will in all the media you will be using your logo with. I assume you will be using your logo on a website, business card, and printed brochure. Fine lines do not print well and are lost in websites when audiences are using mediocre monitors, which is the majority of business
and private computer users. Additionally, logos that do not have good weight cannot compete with other bold images on your marketing material. If you are exhibiting large graphics of the technical manuals you have created
in your online and print portfolio, you need your logo to still stand out on these pages, and not get lost. Additionally, an overly complex logo will clash with your other images, making the entire design of your page ugly.
Think of contrast, too. Webdesignfromscratch.com said, “Good logos and icons have lots of contrast on the edges of meaningful visual elements.” That site recommended the squint test as a tool for checking contrast, and suggested that logo designers think of color blind users while designing.

Next, we’ll look at Graphic Design USA’s analysis of different logo types. In a discussion of logo trends, the magazine published an article addressing the different types of logos that have emerged. The first is droplets, defined as, “two or more droplets caught in the act of merging, usually symbolic of convergence or union: the Cingular logo is a wonderful example.”
The second is refinement. Graphic Design USA says that there has recently been a return to simplicity in major corporate logos.

Pop design has been embraced by some logo designers, usually for audiences much different from your own. The trendy and clean design of rave, DJ, and nightclub advertisements and flyers and bled into the corporate design industry, depending on the audience you are trying to reach. This trend has found success because these logos encompass the design qualities that we discussed yesterday, and exude a modern look.

Animal designs are still as popular as they ever were. Linux uses the penguin as its open source operating system’s icon.
One interesting idea is what the article identifies as canted. Designers decide upon a simple geometric symbol and then change the perspective on the symbol to create a faux 3-D design that can exist successfully in the online and print world.
Alpha-face is a term used to identify logos that integrate your company’s name with a friendly face, in an attempt to make your business seem more friendly. If done correctly, a technical writing business could use this method to identify themselves professionally, but of course, it depends on your audience. Many modern logos are using shadows to “give logos a sense of place,” according to Graphic Design USA. Please be careful when using this technique. Drop shadows are the biggest mistake that amateur designers and non-designers make when creating their logos, thanks to Microsoft Word Art and other software tools that automatically create drop shadows. Text with drop shadows is generally not cool, so unless you know what you’re doing, don’t use any drop shadows. Study the way these shadows were used, in responsible design.

Many logos, specifically for technologically-oriented business are using punctuation and numbers in their logos. This could be a good way to incorporate the theme of business as a technical communicator into your logo, in a more abstract manner than just adding a computer keyboard into your logo. As I’ve said, everyone knows you use a computer keyboard
to do your work. Don’t make your audience yawn at your logo. Photo icons are becoming increasingly popular, since corporate presence is often online-based and with advances in print communications. Use these logos as a dynamic addition to the simple one- or two-color logos that you design in your sketches. For instance, Linux’s penguin prints as a two-color logo in print, as a graphical depiction of a penguin. However, its T-shirts and web presence has a 3-D and full-color penguin. These two versions of its logo play together well in different environments.



Sketch and sketch and sketch. Keeping these four qualities in mind, sketch for a few days. Walk away from your designs often and get some coffee or take a walk around the block. You’ll be surprised what decisions you make when you come back to your work with a fresh mind. Use a different page for each sketch, so your various logos don’t clash with each other, confusing your design sense.

Now, you have sketched for days and have narrowed down two or three of your favorite logo designs. It’s time to hit the computer. Everyone has different work flows and computer talents, and software. If at all possible, don’t design your logo in any Microsoft Office software or the equivalent. Use Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw!, Adobe Freehand, or the like. If by some chance, your clean and simple final sketches only consist of simple shapes, then you can use Microsoft PowerPoint to design the computer version. However, because of image-quality issues, you’ll need to have a professional designer redraw it later in an illustrator’s program, so you can successfully use it in print, PDFs, and on the web. Adobe Photoshop has some limited drawing tools now, but you won’t have much versatility. Use the correct tool for the job. Microsoft Word is for creating text documents, Adobe Photoshop is for manipulating photographs. Microsoft PowerPoint is for creating presentations, and Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand, and CorelDraw! are for creating logos. I know you can draw squares and lines in the other ones, but trust me.

After you’ve perfected your final logos in the appropriate graphics program, test them in various media. Upload them to a website, both large and small. Print them a half-inch wide, as they may be used on your business card, print them at 8 x 10, as they may be used on a billboard or a poster. Print them in black and white. Print them in color. Print them as an outline. Tattoo it on yourself. Pin them on the wall and take 50 steps back. Do you still see an easily-recognizable icon? If you do, pick that logo and roll with it. You’re on your way to a successful, total branding marketing concept.