In my recent article about domain abbreviations, AbdulBasit remarked “if DG is for Domain Gang then AB is for AbdulBasit”. This comment led me to think about the practice which logo designers adapt. That is putting an acronym in the logo for the actual brand/company or website name.
For example: Sites like DomainGang uses ‘DG’ in its logo; Domain Investing & Domain Incite uses ‘DI’ in its logo and Domain Sherpa uses ‘DS’ and there are so many other domaining and non domaining names that follow this practice. I believe it’s much of a choice of a LOGO designer rather than a company/site owner because he/she has just not thought of its consequences.
One of the reason for this trend is the length of the name. Longer character names are not easy to fit into a particular logo. Logo needs to be small so to be easily fitted at headers of websites as well as papers. But short names are hard to get as a domain name as well as company name. Because of this reason many companies and domain names uses two or three word domains. And, generally in a logo the initial letters of those names are inserted. It’s fine but I thought that it needs a little analysis further and I’ve wrote the following disadvantages of having an acronym in a logo:
1. If you just show your logo with an acronym to someone who doesn’t know what it actually means, he will find it difficult to guess. As acronyms stands for many things.
2. You ask your audience to remember two things: one is the brand name and other is its acronym.
3. Confusion arises if in the same industry someone also uses the same acronym you use.
4. If you see a logo with FB and you type FB.com you reach correctly, but it doesn’t happen with other acronyms. You’ll not land at Baskin Robbins website if you type BR.com which Baskin Robbins uses as an acronym in its logo.
To avoid the above not so obvious disadvantages one should select a shorter name and not use an acronym in the logo. Instead use the full name to drive the impression to remember only one name and not a name and its associated formed acronym. Notice that CocaCola though an eight character name not uses ‘CC’ in its logo. It uses full ‘Coca Cola’.
1) On the other side, showing logo with acronym can be useful. Let’s take an example of Honda and Hyundai. Both has logo and “H” letter in it.
2) As given example above, when we or any one else see the Honda logo, we don’t need to think twice which company it belongs to. It has been stamped in our brain both with logo and acronym.
3) I completely agree on this and the best example I can use right now is Honda and Hyundai. Sometimes it may be difficult for a person who is not much a car lover can get confused to distinguish whether it’s Honda or Hyundai car.
4) True.
Really thank your input. It may be true for big giants but for small businesses I think they should avoid acronym and use full name in their logo. Also, I realized that having full name in the logo is useful while doing social commenting as many miss the fine prints. I mean the text below or beside logo with a company name.
I quite agree with you but on the other side, we should also note that all small businesses are the one who had become big giants today ;)
But as they progressed some re-branded their logo and other stuff like changing domain name. Well, thanks for adding. Just for your note, I checked logo re-branding in Google images & it’s interesting.