How do you “test” a logo design?

Our design team was stuck. Our creative director had lovingly crafted over 20+ logo design iterations for the rebrand, and each and every time when presenting them to stakeholders were told, “We’re not there yet. Let’s keep trying.”

That’s when our new CMO, so new that he was completely oblivious to our frustration, said, “Look, stakeholders haven’t yet understood the pitch decks because they’re story-based. They’re not data-derived.” He suggested we test each and every logo design.

I turned to my good friend, Nielson Norman Group, who wrote an article on testing visual design. From there, I pitched a new plan.

The game plan:

  1. Clearly define our brand traits alongside stakeholders. We met and paired down to three: professional, efficient, and friendly.

  2. Recruit respondents representative of our target demographic.

  3. Survey respondents. I used Pollfish to target and survey. I wanted to start with an open word association first.

So the testing began, with open word associations first.

We grouped each of these open word traits into positive, negative, and neutral categories. Because “simple/easy” could be perceived in both a positive (clean/minimal/intuitive), negative (boring/plain), and neutral way, we began iterating on the winner of this first round.

We nicknamed him the “little man.” He was closest to our brand traits and won in terms of preference.

Additional iterations tested.

I pivoted from the original testing plan to force rank each logo according to the brand trait.

I learned quite a few things about testing logo designs:

  1. Start with stakeholder’s assumptions. If I had known earlier on in the process that friendliness as a brand trait was more important and should have been weighted higher than professionalism/efficiency, it would have saved a lot of time. See the friendly logo we arrived at.

  2. Craft the tests carefully. Ranking according to each brand trait was the way to go, but it took time to get the test right.

  3. Showcase the benchmark for increased buy-in. All of the new logo designs outperformed our old logo design. It was only when stakeholders saw how low our old design performed in comparison that the necessity for the work was understood.

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