Altcoin Logo design

As more and more coins and tokens appear in this sector, often with similar features to other coins. It is becoming difficult to stand out in all the noise. Branding is emerging as a key differentiator and is helping coins/tokens/platforms raise above the visual clutter. As a design professional with 30 years experience in the brand identity field I can say that, saving a handful of exceptions, the quality of branding/brand identity/logo design in the Altcoins sector is quite poor. This is a difficult area for dev teams who mostly come from a computer science or engineering background, decisions around design tend to be made using a single subjective criteria of "like" or "don't like". This would never be used to evaluate software design, so why use it in design? Below I will offer some general advice about logo/brand identity design to altcoin developers as I beleive it is the one area that is holding back some very good projects.

1: Style is not Design
Addressing the logo in isolation, without any consideration to all other elements of a brand identity is like putting lipstick on a gorilla. A logo design is one of 5 components of a "visual language system" which in turn is just one of the six components that contribute to the brand communications, and this again in turn is just one of the four components that make up the over all brand. Effective branding is the result of harmonizing all of these components so that your core message is clear and penetrates the visual noise and clutter in this sector.

2: Think communication strategy not cosmetics.
Effective Brand Identity Design is concerned with communicating value and difference. You first need a communication strategy, which informs the design strategy, which then informs the look and visual styling. Jumping straight into the production of flashy graphics, colours, quirky fonts is not the way to start.

3: If your destination is effective design excellence then follow the map and guidance of those who have been and lived there. If your destination is "Same as another's, but different" then you don't need a designer, you just need someone who knows their way around photoshop.

4:With great success come's lawyers.
Future battles in this sector will be fought on trademark infringement which should not to be confused with copyright law or IP ownership. Trademark rights come about through usage, first to use in a commercial sense grants rights, not first to register.

5: Evaluating design work
As far as I can see the core problem is not with the capabilities of designers. It is the inability of the dev team to effectively evaluate the quality of the design work that is produced. Like and dislike are not appropriate criteria to use in evaluating design work. Anyone with an eye in their head will give an opinion on visual material (colours, shapes, icons etc). And everyone is entitled to their aesthetic opinion, but this has little bearing on weather a logo/brand identity will be effective in building a successful brand. There are well established criteria used by professional designers to objectively evaluate design solutions, some general criteria and some specific criteria depending on the nature of the organisation. I would recommend Alina Wheelers book "Designing Brand Identity" 5th Editiion, and Marty Neumeier's "Zag" for anyone who wants to read more about this subject.

6: Design competitions
I have witnessed numerous logo/brand design competitions on bitcointalk. The results are always the same, a surface treatment which focuses purely on cosmetic solutions and visual puns. None of the entries ever address core communication issues or indicate how the solution offered will integrate with the other elements of the brand identity/strategy. Professional designers will not enter this kind of competition because they know that the dev team don't know how to evaluate the work produced. Effective design and pretty design are not the same thing. Consider running your competition in a design forum but first set out the evaluation criteria and publish it with the competition announcement. This gives designers confidence in the judging process and are more likely to engage.

This post is already getting very long, so I will leave it at that for the moment, if you have any questions you can reply below and I will try to address them as best I can.