LOGO DESIGN BLOG   LOGO DESIGN REVIEW

I know that we’ve highlighted Google and Yahoo a few times for the efforts they make during holidays, but I’m doing it again. I haven’t seen any other companies who routinely celebrate holidays by “holidizing” their logos. It’s something simple and fun to do. Plus, you can reuse the holiday version of your logo each year without making any changes.

SnowMasters, a company known for producing fake snow has created a new product. They have produced a substance that looks and floats like a cloud. What is more impressive, is what they are doing with their new product. They are molding this new substance into recognizable logos. “Flogo” was coined using “flying” and “logo.” Flogo is a combination of helium and oxygen which can range in size from 24 to 48 inches.

The Flogos can fly as high as 20,000 feet but will normally fly between 300 and 500 feet. They also have the ability to float 20 to 30 miles and are strong enough to bounce off buildings. Nothing like this has been done before.

Starbucks is going a little retro for the next few weeks by unveiling its new, old logo. Confused?

It’s no secret that the coffee giant has been struggling recently, and most of the nation was interested to see what Howard Schultz (who took back the title of CEO in January) would do to reverse the direction of things. He’s been talking a lot about focusing back on the customer, becoming an intimate coffee shop again and reaching back to their roots. I think most of us expected better employee training so we could finally get rid of the rude baristas, or perhaps coffee grinders in the store rather than using pre-ground beans.

Something nobody expected, however, was the reestablishment of their old logo along with their newest coffee bean, the Pike Place Roast. (FYI – Pike Place is the name of the original location of Starbucks, somewhere the old logo has been proudly displayed for years.)

The new/old logo takes us back to the pre-censored days of Starbucks before they became a public company and had to worry about offending people. It displays a topless mermaid holding her double-fins, which upon further research proves to be just as risqué as it seems. (Look up the history of sirens and especially Melusines.)

So it this what it will take to bring Starbucks a good reputation again? I wonder if the logo will succeed in its mission of bringing back the nostalgic happy feelings of small town coffee shops with an emphasis on service and intimate settings. Or it could just offend people who don’t like the boring brown, graphic image of a nude mermaid on their cup.

What do you think will happen? I guess we’ll find out.