We live in a world of fierce competition, a world where it is very difficult to survive in any field of business. People who are aggressive and always come up with innovative ideas and creative strategies get success, whereas, people who wait for some miracle to happen, can never achieve great success. If you are a business owner or run a huge company, whatever the case is, do you think you have a strong corporate identity? Do you have a strong logo and if you have a strong logo, have you ever thought of making it dynamic? Yeah! This is what I am going to talk about in this article. How successful companies have modified their logos on different occasions, showing creativity and letting their viewers feel excited about the occasions they never remembered.
Its human nature, we all feel weary about things which we get used to of seeing and doing every day. Be it an ad which we watch almost all the time when we open our TV, an Xbox game which was our favorite at some point of time but now we don’t feel like playing it anymore! This is because we all feel the need of having something new to entertain us. Similarly, as business owners, it is our prime responsibility to come up with innovative ideas for our customers to relish every time they experience us in any way.
Today, I am specifically talking about dynamic logos that how companies who practice designing their logos for every special event or occasion grab success and become the talk of the town!
Having said that, I would emphasize on the point that this strategy of designing a logo according to different occasions works best for those who own a website, Blog, Email Signature, Forum Signature, Shop Signage or it can be done for Web Banner Ads, Special occasion direct mailer etc. You must be familiar how internet giants like Yahoo! and Google have started this trend of creating lively, upbeat logos that have been able to stimulate positive emotions in their viewers and have kept their visitors up to date, not only in providing the best quality data on anything, but also about the events which we never celebrate nor remember.
I am not too sure of it but I think Yahoo! had started the trend of holiday logos on its homepage, www.yahoo.com. This was the time when Google wasn’t so popular among the masses and Yahoo! used to be the Home page of most of the people, including myself.
There is no date I could find in this regard, so we can say that Yahoo! is the pioneer in designing holiday logos for its website. Their team started off by making changes in the existing Yahoo logo to make it portray holidays like Christmas, Halloween, New Year, Thanksgiving, and Valentine etc.
Both of the above logos represent Christmas Holiday, with a little bit of design changes in the existing logo. The Christmas tree, the snowman and the snow, all combined together to give the corporate logo, a look everyone can enjoy while visiting the website.
Yahoo! sometimes uses flash animations in its logo designs, which makes them even more interesting. However, my personal opinion is that Yahoo! is far less creative than Google when it comes to redesigning its logo every year on the same dates and holidays.
This practice is very refreshing for the site visitors and who knows this better than the Internet giant Google. According to Wikipedia, “The first Google Doodle was a reference to the Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed. Subsequent Google Doodles were designed by an outside contractor, until Larry and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in 2000. Hwang has been designing the Google Doodles ever since.”
Burning Man Festival of 1998
Wael Ghonim, Google Marketing Manager in MENA, said: “At Google, we like to reflect the ever changing world of our users through the logo designs on our homepage. These ‘doodles’ celebrate different people, events or special dates. Whenever we change these doodles we receive a lot of public interest.”
There first Holiday Logo which was created back in 1999, is shown below
Afterwards, there was no looking back for Google as till now, they have created innumerable logos on different occasions, special events and dates. They believe in keeping themselves up to date and have set the trend of communicating with their visitors through their logos on every possible famous date or occasion.
Today, all over the world, Google fans wait with bated breath to see their next logo design. There are fans, who even dig out other special days and dates; and send them with creative design ideas which have not been covered by Google. Check out the link below to see how Google fans have contributed to it in different styles:
http://www.google.com/customlogos.html
It’s true that Google’s strategy of creating logos on different occasions lit up the atmosphere every time they displayed refreshing logos on their homepage. They created over 150 logos for different occasions including birthdays of renowned people, discovery days, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, Earth Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Google’s own birthday, so on and so forth.
Below are the ones I found highly creative:
Season’s Greetings with a Google Doodle
First day of summer – June 20, 2008 – So simple yet creative
Earth Day – April 22, 2007
There is a list of super creative logos by Google on different dates, which of course I am unable to put up here, so here’s the link for all of you who are Google logo fans. Google has created an online Logo Museum for its fans; you can check it out on the following link:
http://www.google.com/holidaylogos.html
To sum it up, this strategy of giving your logo the touch of that event or occasion is certainly gaining popularity and a lot many businesses have taken notice of it. So if you are a business owner and have an online presence, let your logo shine on different occasions. There are logo design companies who have started catering to this need of business owners who own a logo and want to be different on every occasion. Now the challenge for the logo designers is to come up with the most creative ideas every time as Google and Yahoo! have set up a very high benchmark.
Give your feedback on how you like the article and your views of what you think about the companies who modify their basic logos on different occasions to amuse their customers. I look forward to read your comments in the comments section.
I love this article and the concept of dynamic logos! The examples you include to illustrate your point are great. This gives me food for thought and information I can use to generate connections with viewers to my coming website.
Thanks for sharing this information.
~Kathy
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wow,, that makes so much sense. Thank you for sharing.
PAZ
I will admit I am one of those people that started to notice the change in Google’s name each day I logged on. The different creations became a small happiness to see each morning and it put a little smile on my face. I also directed my friends to Google just to see the new design. It’s amazing how the little things really can make a big impact and has most definitely helped generate traffic towards their webpage.
It also helps that their search engine home page is nothing but their name and the search box – so there are only 2 focus points: Google’s name, and the reason you at the sight, the search box. It’s simple and genius!