Uhh, the Nike swoosh? The Adidas three-stripes? McDonalds arches?
Obama's logo is good, but if you're talking about simplicity and communication, it barely compares to the culturally-transcendent nature of those corporate logos. Those logos don't identify with a language or anything, they simply carry meaning.
I’m talking about how much the logo alone by itself communicates. Lets see,
1.The ‘O’ symbolizing Obama.
2.The colors of the flag.
3.The unification of red and blue, indicating cross-party unity.
4.The sunrise image aligning with the ‘hope’ and ‘new start’ campaign themes.
5.The horizon, indicating the future.
Just a few that came to mind. Does the Nike swoosh, the Adidas three stripes or the McDonalds arches symbolically convey nearly as much?
The unification of red and blue, indicating cross-party unity
This is going to be pretty confusing when we go back to thinking that red symbolizes commies.
The swoosh communicates more densely, I think: it's a single, monochrome visual element, while the Obama logo is busy being a shape and a letter and a picture and a flag. The Nike logo says a lot, laconically; the Obama logo says a lot by being visually chatty.
Seems like we'll continue with the red=Republican thing for the forseeable future.
There isn't anything intrinsic about communism that says "red, that's the color!". It was just a useful convention.
I don't know how much the Nike swoosh can say, perhaps movement/agility?. It's always been fairly meaningless to me, aside from the whole being the Nike logo thing.
Seems like we'll continue with the red=Republican thing for the forseeable future.
"We" are a very small minority. Everyone -- the US included -- knows who Reds are. Only Americans, and folks who follow American news fairly closely, know what "red states" are.
Yes, but we're talking about the long term. Americans interacting with Europeans are going to wonder why everyone scoffs about associating 'red' with militarism and low taxes. It's not sustainable.
I imagine when interacting with foreign committees and governments, Obama would use a symbol of the United States such as the flag, rather then his own personal logo.
I guess what you're saying is how much communication was intended for the logo when it was designed, correct?
A logo doesn't communicate anything "by itself" but its empirical nature (text, colors, shape etc.) without branding.
You wouldn't intrinsically know those 5 things having never seen the Obama logo, in the same way you'd simply see the McDonalds arches as a yellow "M".
But did those logos carry meaning right from the start or was that brand recognition built over time? What's interesting about the Obama logo is that it's instantly evocative of a message without needing years of branding, yet it still manages to be super simple.
Both parties stuffed "years" of branding effort into less time through an incessant and overwhelming campaign effort.
From the Obama camp, the "O" logo was literally unavoidable... TV ads, magnets of all types, shirts, pins, flags, posters, lawn-spam, the list goes on. If any company had that amount of time, money, and insane level of word of mouth, they'd be just as well branded.
Oh for sure -- I'm not saying there wasn't tons of branding on the part of the Obama campaign. But this logo was launched at the very beginning, with the speech in Springfield in early '07, before he raised a billion dollars, and even then it communicated a clear message. I'm not sure the same was true of the corporate logos you mention.
Obama's logo is good, but if you're talking about simplicity and communication, it barely compares to the culturally-transcendent nature of those corporate logos. Those logos don't identify with a language or anything, they simply carry meaning.