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Logo “design”!. It’s horrible!. Ugly. Absurd. As I began this chapter I thought I would just run a Google Search on the term: “Logo Design”. Guess what? The first return is: Do-it-Yourself logo design!!!!!!!! For 99 bucks you buy an off-shelf application and In Minutes you can Generate Your Own Unique Logo! You’ll love it. Sacrilege As An Art. And another one! “1000’s of ready designed logos. Just specify! Only $40.00. Change color and add name, another $25.00. So there’s your choice. D-I-Y and don’t call me. Or… Many people confuse "Corporate Identity" with "Logo Design". Forgetting that your "logo" is your "identity" is always fatal. So there is the hincty logo reflecting your corporate values... instead of your aspiration projecting the perfect solution. We will work through the process together, much like therapy. In fact it has been my experience that clients benefit from Logo Design Therapy, because they finally get to grips with the nebulous concepts of branding and marketing, and eventually focusing on Communication. Before we talk about Logo, lets consider Icon or Symbol. Icons convey religious concepts and are usually sacred. Symbols communicate ideas and the best are universal across all languages. Whilst all logos are symbols, or try to be, some Logos become iconic. Sadly, sometimes they are symbolic of corporate or designer inability to communicate clearly. In which case the symbolism is one ultimately of abstract confusion. The thing that has always blown me away is this: the client wants a device that is a symbol of what the company does, whilst his/her thinking has some sort of iconic glow to it. For this they want a designer to create “The Logo”. During which exercise they will cry about the price. Cry about the price that they, are going to hang their corporate reputation, hopes and dreams, AND use as a talisman to ward off evil poverty, and, as a weapon to lay waste to their competitors, AND as a rally call to the market of consumers out there who will surely beat a path to their door steps. Over which The Logo hangs… Icon: In the Church, an icon is traditionally regarded as a kind of window between the earthly and the celestial worlds; a window through which an inhabitant of the celestial world - a saint, or Christ himself - looks down into the earthly one. The image recorded in the icon is a sacred one because of the belief that the true features of the heavenly spirit have somehow been imprinted in a two-dimensional way on the icon. This belief in the sacred nature of an icon was developed by early religious scholars Christians would no more regard an icon as a physical manifestation of whatever it depicts, than they would regard a written copy of a Bible verse as a physical manifestation of whoever it describes -- the icon is understood purely as the sign, not the signified... Which is where icon differs from logo. Logo is the embodiment of the thing signified. I read that: "really the underlying qualities of a client's product or service that define its brand, surely. The purpose of a logo is simply to differentiate - not explain. Incorporating relevant motifs and concepts into a logo is good (when you can get away with it), and increases the recall of a logo, but just as often you wind up with an abhorrent mess which tries to tell too much of a story". Symbol: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. "A symbol, in its basic sense, is a graphical, written, vocal or physical object which represents another, usually more complex, physical or abstract object, or an object property [TOGA Meta-theory]. It is used in a conventional representation of a concept or quantity; i.e., an idea, object, concept, quality, etc. In more psychological and philosophical terms, all concepts are symbolic in nature and representations for these concepts are simply token artifacts that are allegorical to (but do not directly codify) a symbolic meaning. We use simple symbols to exchange of information / tasks / commands between humans. A symbolic representation has two meanings: 1) is a representation of an object, event or property  using a predefined symbol system, 2) refers to a metaphoric representation of an object. Not to far off from Logo.