When law firms consider improving their logo and visual identity, the conversation is normally framed as a binary choice: a) keep it, or b) throw it away and start from scratch.

As discussed in our previous piece, there’s another option that’s preferred by the world’s most successful brands, including Apple, Shell, Starbucks, BMW, and Coca-Cola. These big brands evolve their logos. They seldom, if ever, fully redesign their logos.

An evolutionary approach is smart because it allows an organization to retain hard-earned brand equity (and encourage brand loyalty) while modernizing and improving its look.

Catalysts for a Logo Evolution

In our experience, logo tweaks seldom happen on a whim.  Rather, they are prompted by a need to address a specific shortcoming of the firm’s visual identity.  Below we’ve detailed four common issues that prompt organizations to tweak their logos and graphic identities.

1. Digital Scalability

Logos that were designed for print often fall flat when viewed on a screen. Typical monitors are low resolution when compared with a printed page. As a result, logos that feature thin lines, gradient effects, and small text tend to break down when they appear small on a screen. 

For example, the Wilson Elser logo formerly included small text that became illegible as the logo size scaled down. This issue prompted a logo tweak to remove the text, vastly improving the impact of the logo on digital properties.

The Rolling Stone (magazine) logo was recently adjusted for a similar reason. The original logo was designed with lots of hairlines and drop shadows that looked great atop its printed publication, but this didn’t scale well in digital applications. So, the logo was simplified to make it more impactful in the digital world.

Several major brands recently returned to an earlier iteration of their logos because it scaled better for digital usage.  For example, the newest Burger King logo (introduced in 2021) is nearly identical to their legacy logo, which was discontinued in 1999. Also, the ABC television network recently returned to its 1962 logo because it scaled more easily for digital usage than its more recent logo that featured 3D gradient effects, which didn’t scale well.

2. Social Media and Smartphone Usage

Most law firms have text-only logos (not to mention long, long names) that tend to look awful when squeezed into the little logo bubble offered by social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

For this reason, Patterson Belknap recently evolved its logo to include an icon. This kind of brand mark works much better on social media, and it has the added benefit of looking great on a baseball cap (among other usages).

Similarly, the original YouTube logo was designed before the invention of the smartphone. As a result, the logo didn’t lend itself to the square format of a smartphone app icon. So, like Patterson Belknap, YouTube tweaked its logo to include an icon that would stand out within this new context.

3. A More "Modern" Website

It’s nearly impossible to modernize the look of an organization’s website if the logo is old and stodgy. This is because the logo is typically the first thing you see on every page of the site.

For example, the old Beveridge & Diamond logo impeded the design of a fresh-looking new website. So, the firm decided to make some subtle adjustments to color and font to modernize the logo, without reinventing it. To maintain brand consistency, only minor tweaks were made to the firm’s wave icon.

4. ADA Color Contrast Compliance

Over the past several years, ADA compliance for websites has become a “must-have” for most large organizations, law firms included. One of the most challenging aspects of ADA compliance is the minimum color contrast requirement, which is intended to make sites more accessible to people with vision problems.

Many older companies (like Dunkin Donuts) have brand colors that were selected long before color contrast was a consideration. Thus, color contrast is (increasingly) a catalyst for a tweak of their logo and brand colors.

In the case of Dunkin, their logo was redesigned in 2019 (to remove the word Donuts). Just three years later, as part of a website redesign, they tweaked their logo again to address color contrast issues.

Key Takeaways