Logo Design For Travel and Destinations
Travel and destination brands operate in a complex environment. Not only do they compete within the world of travel, but also with many other categories that vie for our personal free and leisure time. This includes TV, movies, video, computer games, the comforts of home, recreational and leisure activities, family time, soccer, even shopping.
Before starting an identity project, it is essential that you analyze the competitive set and then determine what gives your brand distinction. Since the competition is so broad, its important that travel and destination brands understand where they fit so they can successfully stand out from all of their competitors.
Distinctive design can give a brand a unique presence and expression.
While a logo is only one component of a brand, it’s purpose can be thought of as a visual ambassador. The right logo will help create desire. It will have a point of view. And set the standard. It should represent a body of core ideas, yet rarely can it perform this task literally. The best logos imply meaning through representation and metaphor. They can take their form as wordmarks, or letterforms, as graphic symbols or a combination of words, letters and symbols. They range from the literal to the illustrative to the abstract.
With so many possibilities, shapes and personalities, how do you choose the right direction for your logo?
In creating a successful travel or destination logo, we start by looking at the competitive environment and then consider three elements - shape, color and content. It is unrealistic to expect a logo to represent every detail of your brand. But having a good ambassador with a unique, authentic expression will serve your destination well for years to come.
The Competitive Logo Review
It’s a wonder that so many travel and destination brands within a competitive set use similar iconography in their logos. Comfort Inn, Holiday Inn Express and Days Inn all have a sun icon. The MGM Grand and Ritz Carlton logos both sport a beautiful lion.
Many cities utilize a rendering of their skyline. Golf course logos all too often incorporate complex illustrations or clip art of golf clubs. According to logodesign guru, a website where you can buy a logo starting at just $99:
“A golf course logo graphic should be very creative and must highlight the salient features of golf, like clubs, balls, etc.”
In other words — make it look like every other golf course.
A few years back, when we were rebranding Windham Mountain, we collected the marketing materials of 52 competitors, to better understand their competitive set and search for an opportunity to create meaningful differentiation. What we found was nothing short of cliché: 90% of the competition had a mountain in their logo. The mountain iconography ranged from the abstract to the literal, but in the end each of these resorts built an identity around what makes them similar, not what makes them different.
The folks at Windham learned from this exercise that mountain imagery in whatever form was something they needed to stay away from in order to stand out from the crowd. The place to draw inspiration for their identity was their unique brand positioning — that differentiating, relevant, deliverable and ownable mojo that makes Windham Mountain desirable to its customers.
There are actually a handful of ski resorts who have gone so far as to eliminate references to anything to do with skiing and snowboarding in their logos. The ones that have done this are attempting to communicate their brand essence, what’s makes them different. Now one might argue, for example, that a logo like Beaver Creek’s has nothing to do with skiing and therefore doesn’t communicate to skiers, especially if you had never heard of Beaver Creek before.
Beaver Creek’s logo is about luxury. Its monogram of interlocking ‘B’ and ‘C’ letterforms are reminiscent of Coco Channel’s C’s or Gucci’s G’s. The script typographic wordmark would more likely be found on a bottle of champagne.
While Beaver Creek's logo is effective at differentiating the resort, script type and monograms are not necessarily the best way to communicate luxury in all situations. In fact, scripts and monograms are actually pretty common in the broad category of luxury. However, Beaver Creek was the first to successfully and sustainably position themselves as a luxury ski resort and, as a result, they own it. No competitor can take this position away from them as long as they remain true to the promise.
Avoiding Logo Design Fads
A trap to avoid when contemplating a new logo is the design fad. Design fads not only occur within a specific travel and destination sector like skiing, but can also span across multiple industries. Often we see companies copy a trend regardless of the look having anything to do with the brand’s core message.
A favorite handout in my Graphic Design for Corporate Identity class at RPI is a Graphic Design USA article from the late 1990’s. In it is a page of logos that are all designed with what I call The Swoosh Factor.
After the Nike logo became popular, it seemed that whenever someone designed a logo, no matter for what industry, the trend was for it to have an arc. From health care, to high tech, to active outdoor, to resort branding, the swoosh factor kept showing up whether or not the symbol made any sense at all. It was hard to tell industries apart, no less companies within the same competitive set. You have to wonder if Hyatt considered that their logo symbol is the same as many from the manufacturing or high tech industry.
Swoosh Factor logos still in use today
It’s difficult to stay away from fads. There's no sin in wanting a destination to be perceived as contemporary. But like the latest contemporary fashion craze, watch out: fads fade fast.
It is also easier to think we want something because we have seen it used successfully elsewhere. But design fads do not help your brand to stand out from the crowd (in a good way) anymore than knocking off the “Got Milk?” campaign does. If someone else has already done it, then you cannot own it. And everyone will know that it is not original.
The Role of Shape In Logo Design
The brain acknowledges and remembers shape first. It has to do with the four regions of the brain known as V1, V2 , V3 and V4. Researchers have been able to show that visual information flows from the eyes to the V1 sector first and then moves toward higher processing areas like V4, where increasingly complex properties of the object are analyzed and encoded. V1 represents very simple properties like orientation, color and direction of motion.
Shape recognition is inherent in the way we learn. Whether it be geometric or something more organic, a distinctive shape is memorable long after it leaves our view. In order to read, one must have an ability to distinguish and recognize the shape of letters and the distance between words. Each letter becomes associated with a meaning and also a sound.
In our research of travel and destination brand identities, we have found that there are actually very few logos that rely on a unique, well-defined shape. Too often, logos in this category rely solely on their name as the main image. The problem is that, while a well-designed wordmark can appear powerful, research shows that a wordmark that has a distinctive shape or is integrated within a distinctive shape is far easier to remember.
See how many of these logo shapes you can recognize
You will find the answer key here.
Many logos have distinctive shapes that also combine the initial(s) of the brand into the icon. The “W” from the W Hotels is one of our favorites. The styling of the simple “W” is clean, modern and streamlined and has distinctive points that create its shape. The bottom of the“W” and the center top point are razor sharp.
You could argue that the W Hotels logo is a word mark as they capitalize on the simplicity of their name, but you wouldn't confuse them with any other hotel that begins with a “W”. Theirs is a powerful use of shape and language, creating a completely ownable logo.
The Emotional Impact of Color Logos
Color is the second most powerful element in creating brand recognition. It is also the most subjective element because it triggers strong emotions. Individuals, as well as cultures, perceive color differently.
We often associate it with a variety of events, rites of passage, and objects. Things we taste, such as a lime or orange, generate color imagery. So does the scent of a pine forest or a bouquet of lilacs. Certain colors are often associated with emotions, such as blue with loyalty, yellow with cowardice, and purple with spirituality.
Some ancient societies believed in the healing power of color: red for energy, blue to reduce allergies. Although modern society is skeptical of such “powers”, consider this: babies born today with jaundice (a yellowing of the skin) are treated by exposure to a blue light which triggers a positive metabolic reaction.
In western cultures, some wear white to symbolize cleanliness, virtue or chastity. In China, white is associated with grief and mourning. In western culture black has negative associations — the dark side, blacklisted, the Black Plague, black magic and death. Our language uses color in euphemisms — the grass is always greener, don’t be a yellow belly, or his face was red as a beet. In the past few years the color green has taken on newfound meaning while becoming the color and word of the decade. Whether through subjectivity, spirituality or science, colors create meaning in our world.
Research shows that 60% of a decision to buy a product is based on color.
Sometimes that color is not defined in the logo itself, but how it is applied to the overall brand to stimulate recognition. UPS utilizes brown as their signature color on vehicles and uniforms, and even verbally in their campaign slogan “What can Brown do for you?” Tiffany’s is infamous for their little blue box and Target uses red everywhere.
But be careful: similar industries often use similar color palettes. Many beach resorts and coastal destinations use medium soft blues with some soft yellows and/or oranges in their palettes. Ski resorts tend to use a lot of cold blues and white. This is why carefully considering color palette for your destination brand is critical as you move forward with the implementation of your logo and the brand identity grid.
The Use Of Language In Logo Design
Content is third in the sequence of recognition behind shape and color because the brain takes more time to process language. Letterforms can be very powerful in creating content and meaning. The use of initials as an identifying mark has been around for centuries since medieval kingdoms became economic enterprises. Letterforms are often abstracted to create clever symbols which act as metaphor for the core brand positioning. These symbols combine a strong form and shape that influences content.
Many logos consist of only the name of the destination without any iconic symbol. These wordmarks or logotypes range in complexity from straightforward typesetting of an existing font, to a completely custom typographic mark. The most effective wordmarks have something unique embedded or changed in the typography that create metaphor and imply meaning. It can be a clever graphic inserted into the word, a texture applied to the letters, or the transformation of a letter(s).
Too often travel and destination brands rely on cliches such as script typography to denote luxury, even though it doesn’t necessarily distinguish or get to the heart of the brand. It's not that these logos aren’t nice on the surface, but do they really speak to the core of the brand message? It's hard to understand why so many believe that script type is the only way to attract a luxury customer.
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of staying at the Lake Placid Lodge, the script type should confuse you. The Lake Placid Lodge is designed in the Adirondack Great Camp tradition. The script type has little to do with the resort’s heritage and brand position.
Destination Logo Design: Suggested Reading
If you'd like to learn more about logo design and how shape, color and language content are interpreted by the human brain, we recommend these sources:
Designing Brand Identity
by Alina Wheller
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006
'Meggs’, A History of Graphic Design
4th Edition
by Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. Purvis
John Wiley & Sons, 2006
An Osteopathic Approach to Children
by Jane E. Carreiro
Elsevier Health Sciences, 2003
Dual perspectives give science added insight into brain
by Michael Purdy Homewood
The Gazette Online, the newspaper of The Johns Hopkins University 2002
VOL. 32, NO. 2
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