Misc
The Psychology Behind Logo and Color Choice
Some professionals scoff at the importance of branding in business.
For many investors and analysts, this area of marketing seems fluffy and intangible, which makes it very hard to measure any potential benefits. While it’s true that quantifying intangibles is not always easy or accurate, it doesn’t mean that branding has no value to begin with.
In this way, branding may be comparable to the concept of “leadership” in sports. Athletes like Mark Messier, Michael Jordan, Ray Lewis, Mia Hamm, and Steve Yzerman weren’t just good players from a technical perspective, but they also had intangible qualities that elevated the performances of their respective teams. While it is hard to measure work ethic, passion, leadership, drive, and loyalty, or how these qualities rub off on teammates, it’s still clear to many coaches and managers that intangibles help win championships.
Like leadership, we know good branding when we see it, even though it can be tough to quantify. Coca-Cola is recognizable and nostalgic, while the Starbucks name may be the difference in choosing their cafe over an average-looking coffee shop in an unfamiliar neighborhood.
The Psychology Behind Logo and Color Choice
Logo and color choice are two of the most important parts of creating a quality brand. Today we have two infographics from The Logo Company. One shows the five major forms of logos, while the other dives into the meaning behind color choices.
We’ll add some commentary on the implications of logo and color choice in of the areas below.
Companies cannot control the actual emotional responses to their brand on a personal level, but they can do their best to control shape, style, and color to at least guide these interpretations.
In fact, our brains are hardwired to learn and memorize new shapes, so the way a logo is presented can have a big impact on its effectiveness. The five major types of logo forms – brand marks, word marks, letter marks, combo marks, or emblems – are a way to control shape and identity.
Word marks, for example, have the name of the company in the logo itself without any imagery. This helps achieve brand recognition, while the lack of accompanying graphics may convey a sense of sophistication to consumers.
Using just initials in a letter mark can show even more sophistication. Leading luxury consumer brands such as Louis Vuitton or Chanel have used this with much success.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, some companies use just a brand mark to convey a sense of universality. Even though “Shell”, “Apple”, and “Nike” are not spelled out in name, their famous icons are known throughout the world. The Nike swoosh conveys movement, while the World Wildlife Fund can tell a powerful story just by using the famous panda in its brand mark.
Target is another instantly recognizable brand mark. The simplicity and circular shape are key elements to the design, but the bright red color also plays a role. Here’s a guide to how color can evoke different emotions in consumers:
One step further, here is another version with a little more nuance, from Web Designer Depot.
Of course, colors can and do get interpreted in different ways. However, they can also have the power to represent broad ideas for cultural or evolutionary reasons.
In a previous post on the psychology of color, we dive into this in more depth. For example, it explains why the color red stimulates appetite, or why blue brings a sense of productivity and efficiency.
Maps
The Incredible Historical Map That Changed Cartography
Check out the Fra Mauro Mappa Mundi (c. 1450s), a historical map that formed a bridge between medieval and renaissance worldviews.
The Incredible Historical Map That Changed Cartography
This map is the latest in our Vintage Viz series, which presents historical visualizations along with the context needed to understand them.
In a one-paragraph story called On Exactitude in Science (Del Rigor en la Ciencia), Jorge Luis Borges imagined an empire where cartography had reached such an exact science that only a map on the same scale of the empire would suffice.
The Fra Mauro Mappa Mundi (c. 1450s), named for the lay Camaldolite monk and cartographer whose Venetian workshop created it, is not nearly as large, at a paltry 77 inches in diameter (196 cm). But its impact and significance as a bridge between Middle Age and Renaissance thought certainly rivaled Borges’ imagined map.
One of ‘the Wonders of Venice’
Venice was the undisputed commercial power in the Mediterranean, whose trade routes connected east and west, stretching to Flanders, London, Algeria, and beyond.
This network was protected by fleets of warships built at the famous Arsenale di Venezia, the largest production facility in the West, whose workforce of thousands of arsenalotti built ships on an assembly line, centuries before Henry Ford.
The lion of St Mark guards the land gate to the Arsenale di Venezia, except instead of the usual open bible in its hands offering peace, this book is closed, reflecting its martial purpose. Source: Wikipedia
The Mappa Mundi (literally “map of the world”) was considered one of the wonders of Venice with a reputation that reached the Holy Land. It is a circular planisphere drawn on four sheets of parchment, mounted onto three poplar panels and reinforced by vertical battens.
The map is painted in rich reds, golds, and blues; this last pigment was obtained from rare lapis lazuli, imported from mines in Afghanistan. At its corners are four spheres showing the celestial and sublunar worlds, the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), and an illumination of the Garden of Eden by Leonardo Bellini (active 1443-1490).
Japan (on the left edge, called the Isola de Cimpagu) appears here for the first time in a Western map. And contradicting Ptolemaic tradition, it also shows that it was possible to circumnavigate Africa, presaging the first European journey around the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias in 1488.
NASA called the historical map “stunning” in its accuracy.
A Historical Map Between Two Worlds
Medieval maps, like the Hereford Mappa Mundi (c. 1300), were usually oriented with east at the top, because that’s where the Garden of Eden was thought to be. Fra Mauro, however, chose to orient his to the south, perhaps following Muslim geographers such as Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Idrisi.
Significantly, the Garden of Eden is placed outside of geographic space and Jerusalem is no longer at the center, though it is still marked by a windrose. The nearly 3,000 place names and descriptions are written in the Venetian vernacular, rather than Latin.
At the same time, as much as Fra Mauro’s map is a departure from the past, it also retains traces of a medieval Christian worldview. For example, included on the map are the Kingdom of the Magi, the Kingdom of Prester John, and the Tomb of Adam.
Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae (c. 600–625). Source: Wikipedia
The circular planisphere also follows the medieval T-O schema, first described by Isidore of Seville, with Asia occupying the top half of the circle, and Europe and Africa each occupying the bottom two quarters (Fra Mauro turns the ‘T’ on its side, to reflect a southern orientation). Around the circle, are many islands, beyond which is the “dark sea” where only shipwreck and misfortune await.
Fra Mauro’s Legacy
Fra Mauro died some time before 20 October 1459, and unfortunately his contributions fell into obscurity soon thereafter; until 1748, it was believed that the Mappa Mundi was a copy of a lost map by Marco Polo.
In 1811, the original was moved from Fra Mauro’s monastery of San Michele to the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, following the suppression of religious orders in the Napoleonic era, where it can be viewed today.
Two digital editions have also been produced by the Museo Galileo and the Engineering Historical Memory project, where readers can get a glimpse into a fascinating piece of cartographic history.
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