Building a strong brand is all about building familiarity and trust with your audience. It is important to be consistent in how you present your company’s logo, fonts, and color scheme on each and every item you publish, purchase, or produce (“The Thing”).
The more frequently your viewers see your company’s logo presented the same way, the more certain they can be that The Thing they are looking at is legitimately from your company. They can trust The Thing.
Building a Brand is Playing a Long Game
Companies spend lots of money and time getting a logo and brand book designed. They are intended to be used by everyone in the company for years, including all departments.
Not everyone in the company needs their own logo. A department doesn’t need–and shouldn’t use–a separate logo if the company already has one to represent the company as a whole. The company’s logo is everybody’s logo.
Here’s an example using my logo, called a lockup.
Let’s say you are already very familiar with my logo. If you saw this t-shirt giveaway, you could be reasonably certain that this is legitimately from me. It uses my logo, my color palette, and my typefaces. Therefore, you conclude that you can trust this ad with your email address (because, after all, my Policy excludes using your email for marketing purposes).
Could anyone with Photoshop reproduce the above and use it to trick you into giving up your email address? Of course. However, that is a separate conversation about Phishing, not Branding.
Familiarity Breeds Trust
What if my web development team wanted to stand out from the rest of the company, and went to Fiverr for a special “Web Development Team” logo? Remember, in this scenario you are already familiar with my logo. Take a look:
Would you trust that this is a giveaway from the official Graphic Strategist? Does this look safe to give your email to? What does the person on the other end do with your email? Who gets your information after clicking “Enter?” Does clicking “Enter” submit your email address, or does it download malware?
This is why the Web Development Team does not need their own logo: viewers are unfamiliar with this logo, and therefore do not trust it. The Web Development Team probably won’t be giving away many t-shirts.
Some Companies Need Flexible Solutions
For larger companies, I recommend lock-ups. Lock-ups consist of icons and words that can be used independent of each other, or together. This creates flexibility.
If you have several departments which do need to identify themselves, it is better to create guidelines in your brand book for adding elements to the main company logo than it is to go rogue and make an entirely new one.
This guidance can include a standard distance new elements should be placed from the main logo, font restrictions, proper naming conventions, colors, and other goalposts to keep everything you send out looking legit.
To see successful examples of lock-up use, compare the University of North Georgia lockup to the University of North Georgia Department of Music lock-up. I had a hand in designing how departments affiliated themselves with the university.