The Role of Aesthetics in a Successful Logo Design

Logos are important; they grab consumers’ attention, make a strong first impression, and are a valuable visual representation of a brand. The visual appearance of logos is therefore important in terms of how they are viewed by consumers and how they influence consumer perceptions of the brand that the logos represent. The central question that is explored in this thesis is what visual attributes of a logo contribute to the logo’s aesthetic appeal and the approach taken is one that analyses data derived from consumer responses. The work described is therefore a collection of consumer-driven studies that use interviews, focus groups and surveys; the latter may be described as psychophysical experiments. The experimental part of the thesis is structured into three experimental chapters that describe 7 studies. In Chapter III, a set of focus groups and interviews collected information from consumers about logo aesthetics and some related concepts such as familiarity. Chapter IV includes two experiments where participants were asked to scale various logos in terms of visual attributes. The data from these experiments allowed a factor analysis that derived four main visual factors: vibrancy, simplicity, sophistication and balance, in order of deceasing share of the variance. These four factors can be considered to form a 4-D aesthetic space for logos. Chapter V describes cross-cultural studies of logo preference using a Likert scale and particularly explored the role of colour and whether a logo was a simple icon or had text. It was found that logos without an icon, consisting only of text, were perceived as being less preferred than logos with an icon. It was also found logos that were coloured were more preferred than logos that were achromatic or multicoloured.