A short time ago I was cycling around Amsterdam when I spotted the offices of Surinam Airways and invariably their logo. I stopped the bike to take a closer look at its resemblance to the Lufthansa logo. A couple of weeks pass and I see another airline logo, this time it’s Air India; once again it had characteristics of the Lufthansa bird. After this I began to think more about familiarity within design, there are predefined rules and expectations for nearly every single piece of design out there. When these expectations aren’t fulfilled we can easily feel lost and uncertain. If we are going to change convention it needs to be replaced with something better. There is a very fine line between hitting the right visual note or succumbing to tiresome solutions or in some cases direct copying. I cannot stand plagiarism, it is totally inexcusable; however in this article I am discussing the influence of convention as opposed to stealing. Personally I find many of these airline bird logos to be highly generic and very forgettable. Design with the expectations of the end user in mind is crucial, if it is a box of cereal it needs to look like a box of cereal. On the contrary preconceived notions and ideals can easily play too much of a role in determining the final solution all the while forgetting about innovation and creativity.

It is important for a logo, particularly in the service industry to communicate the service of the company. Birds fly, as do planes, it’s an obvious connection which communicates exactly what it needs to. At what point does designing by convention or common rhetoric become a lazy or boring solution. Design conformity is something that I struggle with on every single project I work on, convention makes it very had to try something drastically new or different, we need and want to feel familiarity. Trying to change convention can easily result in confusion if we’re not careful. If The New York Times decided to change it’s title header type it would no longer be The New York Times. It’s possible to dramatically change things, so long as the change is for the better, but as usual change will met with resistance.

I recently attended a seminar on way-finding, we were introduced to fundamentals, theories and logical reasoning behind way-finding decisions. Way-finding diagrams rely a lot on the convention of urban-planning maps and educated guessing, a green patch on a map means grass, a blue patch translates to water and a gray block is read as buildings; these are not rules but rather elementary standards which define how we approach such a task. We feel comfortable when we see what we know, disregard these expected standards and you better have a superior alternative. We feel comfortable buying a blue carton with a white splash on it as we know it’s milk, even if we can’t read a word on it, mix up the colours and you’ve got a different product. Convention is useful and unavoidable, most of the time it exists because it works but it can nearly always be improved on. As designers this is where we come in, to improve what is already there. This leads me full circle back to the airline logos, they are conforming to the basic idea of a bird in flight but are failing to improving on the concept, all the logos begin to look the same without any clear distinction between each of them.

From a customer point-of-view some of these logos are so similar that in most cases they could be interchanged with one another, there is very little distinction between them. We see this in many areas of design, people who conform to preexisting standards for no reason other than feeling safe, afraid to take risks because they know what has worked, not thinking about advancing but rather freezing in a moment scared to break the mold. The thought of failing is too much to worry about so they settle on the safety of tried and tested design, this way of working will only lead to blind ignorance and tiresome solutions. On your next project try something very different, open up and see what happens. Take a risk.

The bing logo really oozes of basic lack of type optics. Look at how the n gets so narrow and thin at the apex. The g sits off the baseline with a half loop that doesn’t link up, not that it must, but in this case it looks too awkward. The counters are ludicrously huge and the descenders don’t rise near high enough to forgive such a huge x-height. Large x-heights are good for reading, but with a low cap you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

It will need more work but what I have done, I have done well when compared to the current state of affiars. I have paid attention to the letterforms and the space around them, the weight, contrast and the flow, something that wasn’t done the first time around. I’d advise the folks at Microsoft to get a typographer/foundry to design a custom face; or at least the four letters, or even use a typeface that already exists? Microsoft’s reluctance to pay for typeface licenses in the past render that unlikely. e.g. The Helvetica/Arial Story.

Here are some more images,

Integrated on the website without much obstruction or effort and it looks quite acceptable. Of course you could argue a total redesign of the site is needed but it is the logo I’m focusing on more than user interface.

Bing logotype at different sizes.

The logo is based on Chaparral Pro Semi bold Italic, above.

I would be exaggerating slightly to say I am content or even close to finished with this, however it is more of a suggestion of what I envision, a step in a better direction. It is in it’s early stages but already we can see an improvement. Over the coming weeks I hope to develop this further, rather than just making it acceptable or a step in the right direction I’d like to make it something more than that, something with character that is memorable. If anyone is interested in advising me on it or even offering feedback or constructive criticism I’m open for suggestions.

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