In a time where content is king, standing out with an eye-catching and memorable business logo is becoming harder to achieve. Adding to this battle is the need to meet the demands of the medium through which most people will see logos: the smaller screens of our smartphones and tablets.
The prominence of these devices in the modern world means, to translate well, logo designs must be simple and clean.
This current domination of small screens has meant that logo design has had to adapt: now general simplification is the philosophy by which most logos live. This is consistent with trends in website and user interface/experience design too.
Cutting out excess parts from the logo to achieve a cleaner, leaner and simpler design means it is intelligible and compatible across the wide range of gadgets and visual mediums available today. This also informs where logo design trends are headed for the rest of the year. But just because logos should probably look simpler doesn't mean you can't be creative with their design. With that in mind, here are some trends to keep on your radar for 2020.
Minimalism
This logo design trend is not new for 2020: it's been a popular one for the past few years, but it's not going anywhere.
Minimalist logos remain in fashion thanks to the straightforward elements that they rely on to successfully engage audiences, such as clean fonts—usually san serif typefaces—and simple images.
Many well-known brands have stripped their logos of all embellishments, aiming to pare everything back to the bare essentials. This has usually involved removing extra words, detailed graphics, and varieties of color, among other elements. In some cases, such as with Mastercard, they even removed their own name from their logo!
The minimalist approach is also popular for how well its designs translate to backgrounds of all sorts of colors and complexity, and to smartphones and tablets especially. In a day and age where smaller screens are in maximal use, minimalism is so integral it seems more like a mandatory philosophy than design trend.
Vintage/Retro 80s
Logos designed to hearken back to the 1980s comprise a trend that is not new to 2020, like minimalism, but is popular nonetheless. In fact, so strong is the desire for the retro 80s effect that the trend extends beyond logos and into graphic design, music (see Tame Impala), film and television (see Stranger Things), and many other forms of media and entertainment.
Pastel colored neons, shiny chrome, foggy effects, zig zag patterns, and arcade game quality pixelation: all of these are becoming more prominent features in logo design, and the 80s resurgence is likely to be popular throughout the rest of the year.
The 1980s have been a recurring influence on popular culture for a number of years now. But the iconic decade is now far enough in the past that the nostalgia for the vintage technology such as hi-fi equipment and video games is very high. Nostalgia is a big reservoir waiting to be tapped into, including by logo designers. Capitalizing on this trend means adopting the colors, typefaces and styles (but thankfully not hairstyles) of the 80s, and tweaking them with unique and modern flavors to fit current day audiences and contexts.
Text Destruction
This design trend, a sort-of-successor to the lost fragments trend of 2019 and not too dissimilar to the erasure technique used by some writers, is when parts of the letters in the logo are "missing" or "obscured."
This is usually done by using vague lines and faded colors, and by removing chunks of the letters. The effect is like a curious visual puzzle for people to solve when they see it, only they don't realize that's what they're doing.
This form of mental stimulation, when the design is done right, should happen without the audience even really noticing: if a person's mind has filled in the blanks through its own subconscious function, making the logo whole, then you've got a winning design.
The key is to take away the right number of pieces and leave just enough breadcrumbs for people to unknowingly follow and figure out. For 2020, getting people to follow the trail will be a big logo design trend.
Scaling
A logo trend brimming with depth (quite literally) is scaling. A form of the highlighting trend that was popular for use in business logos in 2019, it involves making designated parts of the logo larger or bolder by drawing thicker lines, adding shade or adjusting and using different font sizes, to name just a few techniques.
Scaling creates extra dimensions within the logo, usually to emphasize certain parts to imply direction and weight to the audience. Effectively, this helps people perceive a hierarchy of the logo's parts, drawing them first and foremost to the components that are more important. Logos with text can particularly benefit from this trend, exploiting different proportion sizes for specific effects.
Best of all, provided the scaling design of logo is simple and clean, it will translate with relative ease to the smaller screens that are so prolific today.
Motion Graphics
One might think that logos are typically immobile, fixed to look a certain way regardless of whether you're looking at a company's website or have their business card sitting in the palm of your hand. You'd be forgiven for thinking this, but the use of animation and video in logo design has been increasing in recent years and that trend is set to continue through 2020. The advantage of this trend over the conventional still design is that the logo will be more engaging to the audience, helping in part to overcome the plethora of content that people encounter daily.
You may think motion graphic logos are expensive to create or have commissioned for creation. Again, you'd be forgiven for thinking this. Animation can be a cost-effective tool for logo design, and programs such as Biteable, Render Forest and Canva Pro allow anyone to easily transform logos into either GIFs or moving 3D presentations. Simple methods for creating animated logos also include joining 2D and 3D elements together, for example pictures with an overlay of animated features.
Conclusion
Simplicity for the sake of having a legible logo on a variety of devices is pretty much not up for negotiation in 2020. But there is a noteworthy tug-of-war happening here, with simplicity on one end of the rope, and distinction on the other.
If your logo is overly simple, it will work fine with smaller screens, but likely it won't be distinguishable. That outcome would kind of defeat the purpose of having a logo in the first place.
On the other hand, if your logo is rigorously detailed to set it apart from the rest of the pack, it may not work within the economy of small screen devices. Or it may not even be simple enough to be memorable.
Using one of the logo design trends for 2020 may help in the battle to find the right balance, the right compromise, between simplicity and distinction that will inform a logo capable of capturing the imaginations of all who see it!