Examples of Good/Bad Logos

Ian Brown
3 min readJan 23, 2022

In the real world, there are cases of logos that are really good or some that are downright trash… Let's go over a few of which I think are both successful and unsuccessful…

Successful

For our first successful logo, let's look at Target. I was drawn to this logo because it’s so simple and the font works well with this. The artists of the logo wanted shopping right on target if you know what I’m saying (no pun intended).

When I look at the FedEx logo, I see a color combination that has been successful for many years. In the early ’90s, I believed that the logo was very unsuccessful because of not only the color choice but the font used. Changing the font to Futura in 1994 really expanded the logo’s horizons and made the company thrive.

The final logo I chose for being successful is the Canadian company, Roots. I chose Roots because it has been an icon for Canada for years and it has one of the more distinguished animals in Canada history which is the beaver. One other thing, the font choice, which is Cooper Black, is super effective in my opinion.

Unsuccessful

On the contrary, I believe that this logo is absolutely terrible. Just seems really bland and doesn’t look professional at all. The font choice is not the same color as the car, and the viewer has no idea if this is a real place at all to get decals done for a car. When I think of decal car locations, I think of vibrant colors, making the viewer excited. This makes the viewer cringe in disgust and looks for other options.

When I saw this logo, I thought that it would not work considering New York is a bustling city. I thought, “How could they get away with this?” The main reason it's unsuccessful is that there are two fonts. Usually, in a logo, there is one font and this just doesn’t work…

I said I would try to expand my horizons from sports but here we are… The Cleveland Browns logo doesn’t work in the slightest sense and there are many reasons why. Some could say it's generic, some could say the designer is cheap. In my opinion, they could have used something like the dog pound as their logo. However, this is probably the worst sports logo I’ve seen in my life…

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