What is a logo evolution?

Evolving a logo is a not-so-extreme makeover to sync it with recent graphic, typographic and visual trends in your industry. Avoids remaking the logo from scratch losing all your current brand recall.

Logo evolution cares more about the semiological factors of the logo and how to update them without losing their identity as a whole, which gives you a fresh set of elements with the same identity.

How to know if my brand or logo needs an evolution?

Is hard for the people in constant contact with the logo to notice how it might be aging. A logo tends to keep its aura of novelty across the time.

Sometimes competitors are the ones who give you clues to notice how your own image might be getting old or looking out of place. But if you want to act proactively, your best option is to consult with a 3rd party (someone not related or familiar with the brand) or an advertising/marketing professional.

Is the logo evolution only recommended for big businesses?

The most famous logo evolution jobs are generally attributed to big corporations and multinationals. This is mostly due to the big surface that this change covers and being something that requires significant coordination and budgets for updated signs, stationery, advertising, the whole virtual space, etc.

This can lead to think that a logo evolution is something reserved for big companies. Maybe because costs are out of reach for the small and average business. Fortunately this is not the case. Truth is, only one person -or a few at most- is whos actually evolving the logo, the rest is production.

Any small or personal business can invest in its own logo evolution as part of the routine investments in graphic production and digital marketing. Their surface is not that big and the owners or managers themselves can update the whole set of branding in a day. Usually there’s not too much to redesign in websites or stationery, simply replacing the logo can be dome in some cases.

Is logo evolution only recommended for established businesses?

It is in fact better to do it early if its really needed. Having solid branding from the early stages of a business helps to save time and costs in creative and production services on the mid to long term. Ideally, no business should ever go to market without a solid branding job and assets. Same as no website should ever be published without a SEO strategy.

For example, and going with the most likely reason why you are here: You have a business and at the beginning you left your logo as a secondary expense, maybe you hired a fiver, you did it yourself, or got your art-student cousin to help. But now you are looking over on how to evolve what you already have, for whatever reason.

If you decide to evolve your brand now, you are spending more that what you originally spend because your surface is bigger, you are locked into a design basis that might never be the ideal for you so is harder to evolve (and might even take you to the point of starting from scratch), and you will never get back the time wasted positioning a brand that wasn’t showing all your potential.

Clients rarely see what’s expensive in branding until it bites them: is not the logo that’s expensive, is how a bad branding limits your business, and how fixing it keeps getting more and more expensive with time.

Cases in which you should consider a logo evolution:

• Changes in management, marketing or business focus in general.
• Low effectiveness on current promotional efforts.
• Weaknesses in the brand positioning and recall.
• changes in market segments and categories.
• Your image is too-alike to those of your competitors.
• The logo is, or uses, copies of stock or registered designs.
• You don’t have source files and want to update some things at the same time.
• Changes or additions of younger target markets.
• changes or additions of international target markets.
• The logo is just getting old.

When does it stop being a logo evolution?

There is a very thin and subjective line that separates a logo evolution from a logo redesign. It is mostly the answer to the question: Is it the same logo? For an evolution it should be YES, there will be BUTs but that’s normal. For a redesign you’d expect to hear NO if your intention was to end all associations with the old brand.

Logo evolution is not change for the sake of change, there must an immediately evident connection between the old brand and the new. Sounds like is less work for us but it’s not, there might be less clicks, but more thought between them.

The idea is that for someone that already knows your logo, their first impression is that is a new image of your brand. Not simply another brand that looks like the old one.

And there’s no wrong option: Which path works best for your current design -evolution or redesign- depends in your own vision of what you want your branding to be from now on, how the service is named will always be secondary.