Passive vs. Active
One interesting facet of logo design that I’ve been considering a lot lately is the concept of instilling motion or a sense of activity into a logo. This isn’t always appropriate (such as with the Apple logo), but sometimes it can really give a logo the boost it needs, both from a visual and conceptual standpoint.
As an example, let’s look again to the Twitter logo. Way back in the early days, the bird went from sitting perched and passive to becoming active and taking flight.
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In the most recent iteration, they took this concept even further by pointing the bird in an upward direction to indicate that it’s climbing into the air rather than floating along the same old trajectory.
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A sense of motion is especially important when it comes to logos with mascots. The image of the marlin below doesn’t depict the fish merely lying still, instead it’s leaping into the air in a victorious pose.
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This concept even extends to typically inanimate objects. Consider how much better the logo below portrays the concept of “rough house” by instilling a sense of motion.
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