- I'm pretty sure that
most of you out there
will know what this acronym stands for.
Keep It Simple, Stupid.
A famous man, this man right here,
once said, Simple can
be harder than complex.
You have to work hard to
get your thinking clean
to make it simple.
But it's worth it in the end,
because once you get there,
you can move mountains.
Steve Jobs knew what he was talking about.
He took Apple to meteoric heights,
in its simplicity of design
and its user interfaces.
To produce a design that's
complex is much easier to do
than creating something which is simple.
Simplicity is hard.
It requires you to think,
and it also requires you
to plan and research.
And be creative with it.
When I'm designing brands
or logos for clients,
I need to keep the KISS
acronym firmly in my head.
It's very easy to produce a logo
which is overly complicated.
Most overly complicated
logos tend to be literal.
They try to get across exactly what
a product or a service is,
using imagery and arrows and text.
And just, they're really busy,
really, really busy logos.
To get an effective
logo which is very basic
in its design, very simplified, is hard.
What you have to do is you
have to research the brand,
research the product,
research the service.
Figure out what can be thrown away,
but what needs to be kept,
what is the core thing,
the core message that's
coming across from this brand.
If you can get that, if
you can get that essence
and that core value of the brand,
then you can take that and
move into the design process.
And start working on the concepts.
You'll end up with a
nice, clean logo design
which represents the customer,
represents your client,
represents everything that they are about,
but without doing it in a
way which is like a punch
to the face, saying we sell
this or we provide this.
Before you go to approach any designer
about a new brand or a
rebrand, have a good think
yourself about your own business.
What can you throw away,
what can you chop off
when you're trying to describe
your business to someone
that will still get across
exactly what it is that you do
and the ethos that you have behind hit?
If you can do that, and
take that to your designer,
then you're going to have a
brilliant design experience
and the designer is going
to have a clear message
that they need to get across
when you produce your logo design.
So remember that acronym,
Keep It Simple, Stupid.
And until next time, stay creative.
