Find a focal point in your logo design

In logo design everything is about attention. You need to get, capture, and keep the attention of the viewer. Logos need to be identifiable and memorisable, without attention you’ll not succeed in getting either. Therefore, you should design your logos around a focal point that draws in the attention of the viewer.

Finding a focal point

Here is a famous logo from a German tv-network called “VIVA”:

The network went bankrupt lately but was the youth music and culture channel of the country for around 20 years. The logo certainly played a big role in the success of the network and its brand.

The yellow triangle in second position clearly is the focal point of the design drawing in the attention of the viewer. That effect would be very weak, if it wasn’t for the blue triangles surrounding it and creating contrast. This shows that a focal point is not just about a single element of the design, it is about that single element as part of the overall work.

The FedEx logo does a similar good job:

Here it is the arrow that is created by the negative space between the E and the x. This focal point draws in the attention and allows the wordmark to reap the benefits. The arrow is interesting enough to get people to invest enough attention to look at the full logo design and memorize the brand and its name.

Create only one focal point

Focal points are crucial to working logo designs. But you should never try to create more than one in a single logo. If your logo has more than one, these focal points would compete against each other, the viewer must invest more attention to understand the design and might lose interest before he has done so.

A good example for a logo with more than one focal point is the official logo of the Olympic Games 2012 in London:

The logo is very artistic, but also confusing and chaotic. Chaos itself is not always bad, but the viewer has no idea where to start trying to understand the logo. There are so many focal points in the logo, that you can’t identify the main focal point. This is why you can’t look at the logo for a couple of seconds, close your eyes, and re-draw it from memory.

If you want to create art, this approach is fine. But design is not art. Design has to be memorable. Most of the time, making things simple makes them easier to memorize.