It’s an election year coming up in 2016 and the campaigns have already begun (sort of). I came across this article about Hillary Clinton’s logo and it got me thinking.

I’ve seen some excellent, very “politically appropriate” logos out there before. They tend to not stray very far from the basic, capitalized, serif font, red, white and blue color scheme. Solid. Reliable. Trustworthy… All the things you want the public to have the impression of when you’re running for a government position.

Ok so here’s Hillary’s new logo:

It reminds me of something that I wrote in another post about the basics of design.

Recently I’ve had conversations with a lot of potential clients that go a little something like this: “Oh no, I don’t need a logo. Can you just put the words in a nice font and make them sort of sit on top of one another, add some color, and maybe add like a shape or a swoosh or something….?” To which I respond, “Sure… you mean a LOGO?”

Here’s the thing to remember about logos. Even if your company name is just written in a regular font, very simple, no color, that’s STILL a logo. It’s still a choice, and it represents you as a company in a visual way.

Social media is here to stay. That isn’t even a point of debate anymore. Many businesses are already on social media platforms and have Facebook fan pages, twitter accounts for customer support, youtube channels and on and on.

However, a lot of what you see on these profiles looks like someone just threw together some random content and some random profile photo, no background image, and they just assumed that because they “have a Facebook page” that they are now “on social media”.

The hard truth is that social media is a conversation. It’s requires constant attention and fresh content being pushed out. But the most important element is engagement.

I love music. And I love design. I’m an avid listener to Pandora. It keeps me company as I sit and work at my computer. I recently noticed that they updated their logo. I really like the new direction. The typography was a great choice in my opinion. Clean, modern, bold. Beautiful.

Here’s the old one:

And here’s the new one:

Simon Flemming-Wood (CMO of Pandora) wrote in his blog, “Our goal with the logo and app icon is to honor our past while looking to the future with a bolder, more modern identity. The visual design language, which we refer to simply as “lights,” is meant to evoke the interplay of lights from a live show while symbolizing the flow of music from artists to listeners.