In 2003, Christopher C.H. Simmons designed one of those logos that almost immediately captivated the attention of not only his client, Paradox, but of publication editors, competition judges, and designer peers across the United States. The mark was no more than a perplexed, silhouetted chicken studying a nonchalant egg-but it tickled the imagination, nonetheless.
Why it breathes so deeply explains a lot about Simmons' theory behind his logo design: It succinctly represents a complex idea. It refers to a universal bit of knowledge-in this case, a universal paradox. The chicken/egg quandary is a tangled puzzle that has sparked debates between everybody from barstool mates to metaphysicists. But Simmons presents both characters at the exact same time
His depiction somehow makes a very deep concept newly accessible. It does not solve the quandary, but it forces the viewer to consider it in a different way. It's an apt fit for the client: Paradox, is a production and promotion company that promotes fine and performing artists, and produces events that range from elegant, formal occasions to bizarrely beautiful underground happenings.
"It's not a new idea, and it's not my idea. It's a cultural idea that I chose to represent," the designer explains. "It's like Thoreau said, 'The newest is but the oldest made visible to our senses.'"
Now that he has opened his own office, MINE www.minesf.com, after an eight-year stint at Alterpop (formerly Akagi Remington), he has had the opportunity to explore his personal design philosophies even further. He is also current president of the San Francisco chapter of the AIGA and has also authored a new book, "Logo Lab," which will be released in June 2005 (HOW Books). buy the book
In fact, he has developed a model that he shares with clients to explain how design and identity should work within an organization. It shows leadership at the core, surrounded by the quality of their product or service, surrounded by the quality of their support of that product or service, surrounded by the quality of their marketing strategy, and finally surrounded by their design and brand strategy.
"For the most part," Simmons says, "only inner layers can affect the outer layers, which means that no matter how good your logo or identity is, it's not, for example, going to make a bad product any better."
When Simmons creates a logo, he reviews the brief, asks plenty of questions, and then tries to articulate responses back in paraphrased form. If he is lucky, he says, he will have gotten some of the information wrong and the client will be forced to clarify nuances that were lost in translation. This is where the truly valuable conversation starts, where designer and client are forced to reevaluate their preconceptions, he says.
From there, he studies motivations-what motivates the client's customers? Why did the client want a new identity? What motivates the client's employees to care about the company? He also surveys competitors and partners to gain a better understanding of the industry in which he is working.
Then he stops. In a day or two, after setting the project aside, ideas become to percolate quickly. The result should "facilitate, not unilaterally achieve" the goals stated at the project's outset, he says. Generally speaking, he believes it should express the client's individual vision and values, and promote a pride of relationship among its clients, staff and others associated with the business.
Landor's relaunch of the BP logo is one that does this, Simmons says. It preserves everything that was essential to the identity-its colors and colloquial nickname-and completely reinvented it. The strategy behind the change is bold and ambitious.
"Convincing consumers to re-associate the 'B' in BP with 'beyond' instead of 'British' cannot have been an easy task, but the logo makes that association seem natural and honest. It's a great example of how design can help a company clearly signal a shift in strategy and focus," the designer notes.
Simmons believe that an interesting direction in logo design today are the flush of recent redesigns-for Unilever, Xerox, BASF, The United Way, Bausch & Lomb, YWCA, GE and even the U.S. Air Force. Some are for the better, while some feel tiresome.
It's fascinating, he says, to observe the varying degrees of sensitivity with which some of the marks are being retuned. "I love, for example, how restrained the GE update is, preserving the integrity of the mark, but dramatically reinventing its implementation."
Not as fascinating is the sheer ubiquity of logos, Simmons says: The whole concept of "the logo" seems cheap and disingenuous sometimes. The trend of making everything puffy and 3-D also particularly irritates him, especially since design seems to have only minutes ago extricated itself from the swoosh phenomenon.
Will logos eventually be ubiquitous enough to become irrelevant? Simmons thinks not.
"If design were to become really sophisticated, where every article and experience, through its design, betrayed its origin, we'd have no commercial need of logos. Identity would be so pervasive that a logo could be considered an afterthought," Simmons says, citing Apple's success in doing just this: Without the Apple logo, the company's stores, website, ads, and products would still proclaim its identity clearly. But the designer believes that people have a natural attraction to logos that will not go away.
"Beyond their commercial function, logos are art. We enjoy them, the good ones, for their form, grace, wit and energy. I believe that will endure."
