Declaring things dead—drawing lines of demarcation related to cultural and business trends—has become a parlor game of some allure over the past decade or so:

• TV shows “jump the shark.”
• Brown is the new black.
• Scripted television is on its last limb.
• 50 is the new 40.
• The once magically futuristic compact music disk is one short breath from the grave.
• Print, as we all know, is dead (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)--especially that pound-and-a-half of colorful circulars that fall out of my newspaper every Sunday. Books continue to sell at a brisk pace, and the most robust newspapers and magazines continue to print millions of pages each month, despite some of their peers going dark. OK, so print isn’t dead.   

But what about logos—those brand signifiers that are the graphical representation of all that a brand encompasses? The design press of late has been laced with treatises from one or another expert suggesting that logo design will soon go the way of letterpressed ad layouts and rubber cement. Some say it already has.

Others have come to the defense of brand identity/logo design, highlighting its unquestionably significant role in the evolution of corporate communications, retail commerce and the larger culture in general, and the fact that, well, they’re still around and highly visible.

(A few brands have become so ubiquitous as to resort to experimenting with a rather bizarre form of stealthy “anti-branding" - like STARBUCKS)

While pretending to infallibly foresee the future beyond lunch tomorrow would be folly, the truth with brand identity as a distinct discipline surely lies somewhere between the extremes: Logos and logo design will remain a key—though perhaps gradually less significant—factor in the marketing communications mix for decades.

Understanding why requires a brief look at how we got where we are. Let’s state a couple of obvious things:

• The desire to use symbols—pictures, markings and later, letters—to express ourselves dates to the Pre-Hilfiger Caveman Days. (Caveman on Facebook, circa 400,000 B.C.: “Text me if U C meat. Peace out.”)
• Somewhere shortly after the Industrial Revolution, and most assuredly during the go-go days of post WWII America, the concision and wisdom of “brands” as it relates to sales and commerce became self-evident.
• Cavemen—or Ozzie and Harriet for that matter—didn’t have the Internet, 500 TV channels, and more than 40,000 new company names and product brands rolling into the marketplace every year. My understanding is they didn’t even have basic cable -

But we do.

The take-away: The relative gravitas of the basic logo and brand identity has gradually lessened with the onslaught of new media and innovative ways to support brands that have little to do with graphic identity in its narrowest sense. Will the next 10 years of change be as dramatic, or more so, as the last 30? If that question is answered affirmatively, the power of pure logo/brand identity as a discipline will probably be further diluted.

But will the logo die? Survey says: No.  

(Doug Cook)