Harry's Answer to "How can I improve my orchestra's logo?"
For a better reading experience, I would recommend going to Quora for my original answer.
Hello there!
Allow me to offer some thoughts on your logo. Typically, I tend to break logos down to two parts—the logo mark and the type.
For the type, I see that the typeface is very similar to Arno Pro, which belongs to the font family Arno, an old-type serif typeface inspired by various 15th and 16th century typefaces. Because of this, I would argue that the text looks better in proper case rather than all-caps. I’ve included an image below.
This is the Arno Pro typeface; again, very similar to what you have for the current logo. You can immediately see how the text flows much better visually and is more pleasing to the eyes as we skim through it. Legibility should always be a priority when having any body of text, especially when it’s a longer set of words or phrases.
In contrast, the all-caps text seems a little stiff and conflicting. All the serifs try to point your eyes along the direction of the whole text, but the individual capitalized words stand as barriers blocking your eye movement as you go through the text.
For the logo mark itself, I would suggest moving away from the literal representation of what the organization is about—Your acronym and a music note, and try something that is more streamlined, original, and memorable.
B.P. doesn’t really stand for any memorable word except the name of the orchestra, which makes it harder for people to associate and recall its name. If anything else, you would be resisting the urge to say BP Gasoline instead.
The music note is too broad and widely used to be an effective unique icon to the particular orchestra. We know it’s related to music, but not much more than that.
Here are some quick concepts that try to mesh the two elements together that I think could give you some ideas to play around with.
And together with the text.
To sum it up, there are two key points which I think are worth noting.
Both the logo mark and the text should be able to stand by themselves as separate entities. To this end, the text should be clean, legible, and conform to the overall identity of the company/organization.
The logo mark should be simple and quickly identifiable with the company/organization which it represents without the fear of being mistaken for something else. This is the hard part which requires extensive research and conceptualization to ensure the mark is original and thoughtful.
It feels a bit rushed because I’m stuck with a few other projects and I’m procrastinating a bit by writing answers on Quora, but I hope it helps somewhat. Cheers!
Edit: Damn. Sorry, I misspelled orchestra. Did I say rushed?
