Yeah, I am talking about the 'arrow' that you can see between the E and the x in this logo. The arrow was introduced to underscore speed and precision, which are part of the positioning of the company. However, they chose to keep it sublte, or in other words, a subliminal symbol. The creator of the logo, Lindon Leader, explains why this was done thus.
The power of the hidden arrow is simply that it is a "hidden bonus." It is a positive-reverse optical kind of thing: either you see it or you don't. Importantly, not "getting the punch line" by not seeing the arrow, does not reduce the impact of the logo's essential communication. The power of the logo and the FedEx marketing supporting the logo is strong enough to convey clearly FedEx brand positioning. On the other hand, if you do see the arrow, or someone points it out to you, you won't forget it. I can't tell you how many people have told me how much fun they have asking others "if they can spot 'something' in the logo."
Besides, FedEx is also an interesting case where the brand consultants convinced the company to shorten their corporate name and logo from "Federal Express" to the popular abbreviation "FedEx". Besides creating a shorter brand name, they reduced the amount of color used on vehicles (planes, trucks) and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in paint costs. Now that is some true 'value for money' consulting.
The SUN Microsystems logo is a wonderful example of symmetry and order. It was a brilliant observation that the letters u and n while arranged adjacent to each other look a lot like the letter S in a perpendicular direction. Spectacular.
The above logo is for an editing studio. I like the way the logo attempts to convey what they do.
The above are two magazines from the Readers Digest stable. Again, the attempt to communicate what it is about quite figuratively through the logo catches my attention.
I liked this logo of a hair stylist for the cheeky humour it brings to the (dressing) table.
This was a logo created for a puzzle game called Cluenatic. This game involves unravelling four clues. The logo has the letters C, L, U and E arranged as a maze. and from a distance, the logo looks like a key.
This logo is too good. For the name Eight, they have used a font in which each letter is a minor adaptation of the number 8.
Eighty-20 is a small consulting company which does sophisticated financial modeling, as well as some solid database work. All their work is highly quantitative and relies on some serious computational power, and the logo is meant to convey it. People first guess that 20% of the squares are darkened, but that turns out to be false after counting them. The trick is to view the dark squares as 1's and the light squares as 0's. Then the top line reads 1010000 and the bottom line reads 0010100, which represent 80 and 20 in binary. Kinda like the surreal green screen of The Matrix, they want us to read stuff in binary...
This was a logo designed in-house for some internal event at IBM. I like that they are quite relaxed about the logo, unlike certain other companies who do not like the logo to be tampered with in any way even for internal promotions.
You might think the arrow does nothing here. But it says that amazon.com has everything from a to z and it also represents the smile brought to the customer's face. Wow, that is quite deep.
As a parting note, I wish to leave with this marketing tactic that was used by an apparel shop:
Ha ha, the desperation of the shoppers of these days, I say. Have you people completed your festival shopping, hopefully from the racks and not from the mannequins on display at the window?
Copyright © All logos displayed above are copyrighted and are registered trademarks of the respective companies. Used here purely for reference purposes.
