Lawyers and Logos: Part I: Design and Branding : Max Kimbrough

Lawyers might best be described as smart people who don’t know how to find a job. It’s harsh, but it’s also kind of true that many lawyers don’t make the effort to get their brand out there and make it accessible for clients. Even if your firm has a client base, how will be difficult to grow without doing advertising and marketing, and all that it entails, including creating a brand identity. Today, we’ll be discussing brands and logos. What makes them good? What makes them bad? And how can you use them to subtly convey your firm’s defining characteristics and implant those characteristics into clients’ minds?

What’s the Point of Branding?

Branding is the art of creating a graphical identity. Logos are usually employed to represent and convey a brand, the purpose of which is to help consumers to find your product over others‘ products. Logos are symbols: they’re little images that use color and shape to describe your brand; consumers then remember your brand by its characteristics. The concept of branding originated with the branding of livestock. Because it was hard to tell one cow from another, owners had to brand their cows with a mark in order to differentiate the cattle and help prevent others from stealing them.

Today, corporate logos are, fortunately, not branded onto consumers, but the concept is still the same. Company A has Product X. Company B has Product Y. X and Y are the same type of product and sell to the same consumers. But Product X is higher quality than Product Y. Consumers tend to want Product X, so they buy it more often. But suppose Company B decides to mimic Product X’s branding and incorporate that branding into Product Y? This leads to consumer confusion: Product Y now looks similar to Product X, and consumers don’t know which to purchase unless they do extra homework. And let’s be honest here: consumers will rarely do that extra homework. As a result, more consumers accidentally buy Product Y when they intended to buy Product X. This results in two things:

Some consumers will still think they actually bought Product X, even though they bought Product Y. Since Product Y is lower quality, these consumers will get angry at the perceived drop in quality, and will take it out on Product X by not purchasing it any more.
Company B “steals” sales from Company A.

Thus, trademark law protects companies like Company A by preventing companies like Company B from blatantly mimicking their rival’s branding. That is, trademark law helps ensure that consumers buy the products they intended to buy. In the context of law firms, clients and potential clients think that all law firms are pretty much the same. They think all lawyers are pretty much the same. And clients stay with one law firm not because they have some incredible devotion to the firm or its attorneys, but because they’re comfortable and it’s easier to stay there than go search for another firm to take their business to.

But how do you get new clients in the first place? How can you snag those clients who are out there searching for a firm to represent them, and seeing nothing buy a flood of identical-sounding and -looking law firms? Better make sure your branding will attract those searchers.

What Makes a Good Logo?

What Are You Trying to Say?

Since, as mentioned above, the purpose of branding is for consumer identification, a good logo will always try to convey some information to consumers to allow them to quickly identify what your product is, what your firm stands for, etc. Is your firm dynamic?

Fun?

Stoic and strong?

Experienced and unflappable?

These are all wildly different logos, both in design and what information they convey. Because a logo is often the first thing a consumer sees when he is searching for a product, what information the logo conveys is crucial to controlling consumer expectations and understandings of your product.

Form and Function

Using Negative Space

Negative space is the area around the thing that is the focus of an image. (It’s “negative” because there’s nothing there.) Let’s see some examples…

This is an example of an image with no negative space.¹ It’s entirely black! But what happens if we give it a little negative space?

Feels much different, no? It’s pretty abstract in this form. That little triangle of white negative space completely changed the image. It changes it further if we add even more negative space:

…and now we have a recognizable image. But at the end of the day, what’s the difference between a black box and the letter “M”? Just three little triangles of negative space.

As humans, we enjoy seeing images made out of negative space. Perhaps the most famous and best example is the FedEx logo.

Seems simple, right? I mean, it’s a pretty normal font . . . nothing too atypical about the color scheme . . . but there’s just something about the logo that makes you think that you’re gonna get your package quickly. Can you see why?

No?

What about now?

Until you’ve seen it once, you don’t notice the arrow that exists in the negative space between the “E” and “x” in FedEx. But once you’ve seen it, you can’t not see it. And what does that little arrow represent? Movement. Speed. Professionalism and steadiness (because the arrow is of a conservative design using simple shapes, and unceasingly moves left to right). All the qualities you’d want in a company shipping your packages. So what about other uses of negative space?

These are two examples of law firm logos that employ negative space. On the left, the Clarke Maguire Narkis logo is simply the letters C, M, and N, with the M created using negative space around three triangles. This logo works quite well: the “M” is well defined because it is bordered by the “C” and “N,” and so those letters help create the vertical lines that make up the M. Moreover, the three triangles represent stability; in the context of the rest of the logo, the triangles reinforce that the firm is stable, strong, and focused (on account of having a simple logo).

The Polley & Powell logo above also employs negative space to create the letter “P,” although the effect isn’t quite as well done as in the Clarke logo. This is primarily because there is nothing to the left of the “P” box logo to help define the vertical stalk that leads up to the white circle. That is, unless you’re looking for the letter “P,” you’re more likely to instead see a blue box with a white “O” in it. Nevertheless, the “P” is there, and is readily apparent because both partners’ names begin with that letter.

The next example is, like the FedEx logo, a brilliant use of negative space, although it’s not for a law firm logo. Rather, it’s for Vodafone, the telecom company:

Taking a simple “O” and creating a little extra negative space, the red “O” becomes a white quotation mark. In the full logo, with the word Vodafone spelled out, you’ve got two “O”s and therefore both an open and closed quotation mark. This tells you everything you need to know about the company and its product: you’re gonna be doing some talking. The quotation marks here aren’t as subtle as the FedEx arrow, but I suspect that’s the point: Vodafone wants you to see it consciously. They want their brand to be associated with communication.

Branding

Remember, that’s what this is all about: branding. You’re taking some kind of image and using it to represent yourself or your firm for the purpose of making it easier for consumers to find you and remember you. A good example of this is when you go to the grocery store. You have a list. You need to pick up some soda. Let’s say your favorite brand is Coca Cola. How are you going to find it? After all, the soda aisle at most grocery stores is filled to the brim with bottle after bottle of dozens of different varieties and brands. Yet you’ve never had trouble immediately finding a bottle of Coke, have you? Of course not–Coke does a brilliant job of branding its products so that consumers can immediately find it within the soda aisle, like finding a diamond in the rough.

So how does Coke do it? (Or Pepsi for that matter.) Although soda manufacturers have been trying to change the look and feel of their bottles recently, soda bottles are still basically all the same size and shape. The difference in soda branding really comes down to colors. Pop quiz: can you tell me which soda brand below is which, based solely on their predominant color scheme? (Click on each image to see the answer, but no cheating!)

You got both A and B correct, right? And I bet at least half of you got C correct. And that’s exactly how you pick your soda at the store, isn’t it? You go down the soda aisle and instead of reading every single label, you just beeline toward your favorite brand’s colors. You see the red and white bottle and you know it’s a Coke. You see the gray and red and you know it’s a Diet Coke. You see the black and red and you know it’s a Coke Zero.

With other products, color still matters, but shape becomes the more important brand signifier. Indeed, Coca-Cola has even trademarked the shape of its iconic bottle:

This point is largely moot for lawyers, since shape is more important for products, and lawyers are in the business of selling services. Nevertheless, as illustrated above, images can be powerful logos and can convey a lot of subtle information. In Part II, we’ll discuss ways to create logos that are ideal for certain practices and industries.

But Is It Ethical?

Lawyers, of course, must be wary of violating the professional code of conduct when using logos; it’s advertising, after all. Fortunately, the ABA Model Rules are pretty liberal when it comes to advertising. ABA Model Rule of Professional Conduct 7.1 prohibits lawyers from making false or misleading ads. Rule 7.2 permits lawyers to advertise “through written, recorded or electronic communication, including public media.” Rule 7.3 generally prohibits direct solicitation by the lawyer of prospective clients, unless the prospective client is himself a lawyer or the soliciting lawyer’s family member. Addressing firm names and letterhead, Rule 7.5(a) says only that firm names, letterhead, and “other professional designation[s]” (read: logos) must comply with Rule 7.1 (i.e., no false or misleading firm names, letterhead, or logos).

Conclusion

As you can see, the Model Rules don’t do much to restrict a lawyer’s use of logos. However, the general prohibition on direct solicitation does make it difficult for lawyers to differentiate themselves in the minds of prospective clients. With that in mind, it is to every lawyer’s great advantage to employ logos. As mentioned above, color, shape, and negative space are three of the first things people see when they look at logos; they are three of the first things that stick in peoples’ minds. And that’s really what advertising and branding is all about: making sure things stick in your mind. Indeed, advertisers will tell you that the key to a successful ad is not getting people to rush out and immediately buy the product; the key is to get people to remember the ad/product/brand six months later. Successful logos act as reminders–they remind you that this product is the one you’re looking for–and they act to simplify the search for the desired product in a sea of seemingly-identical products.

Used properly, logos can transform this logo . . .

. . . into this one, in clients’ minds:

And who wouldn’t want that?