Should you redesign your logo?

I’ve been thinking about logos lately, inspired in part by David Airey’s excellent new blog Logo Design Love. I am often asked to design a logo for a new business or organization, but sometimes I’m asked to do a logo redesign. There are many reasons why a company or organization might want to redesign their logo including:

• The existing logo feels old or out of date
• The logo they have was done on the fly by someone with little or no experience (a surprising number of times an ambitious intern with a copy of Corel Draw. Ack!) and they’d like something more polished and professional
• The scope or mission of the company has changed
• The company has come under new ownership
• The company has a name change

A logo redesign can be great, but here are a couple of things to consider:

It can be costly. After the expense of the logo redesign itself, expect to reprint everything with your company ID on it, including signs, letterhead, envelopes and business cards, brochures, folders, marketing materials, and more. If you have a web site, you’ll have to update your site, and depending on the design, maybe even redesign it. You can phase the new logo in gradually, but I don’t recommend it. It can take a very long time to use up your old materials, and in the meantime your brand spanking new identity is losing the impact it would have with a big rollout.

It can be confusing to your customers. A couple of years ago a real estate agency in my town did a complete logo redesign, with somewhat disastrous effects. The old logo and identity weren’t very aesthetically pleasing but the bright (bright) yellow signs and script logo font were immediately recognizable. When the agency rebranded themselves under a new name they also launched a whole new identity — white signs, modern looking artwork of a row of houses, and a sans-serif typeface — no more script. The new logo definitely looked better than their old one, but no one recognized the new company. For a small local real estate agency with a long standing good reputation, that was very unfortunate. They should have continued at least one of the aspects of their former, well known, logo and ID — color, script…something. The company sold out to Century 21 shortly thereafter. I don’t know if the logo redesign and the buyout were connected, but changing the company logo so drastically left many of their longtime customers wondering what happened.

For some examples of redesigns, both good and bad, visit Brand New. One of my favorites is Lifesavers redesign, above, but if you want to know what makes a logo redesign work (or not work), Brand New is your site.

Are you considering redesigning your company or organization logo? Have you seen a redesign that worked really well? Have you seen one that should have been left alone?