Century 21 Logo – Functionality in Logo Design

If you’ve been searching the wonderful world of the web to get a little insight into the entire field of logo design, you might find yourself a bit dazed and confused. You know that logos are meant to capture and represent the heart and soul of your business and its products and services. Your company image should be attractive and elicit an emotional response from logo viewers. Graphically brilliant, but economical in its use of color and font size and style. Bold but sure. Bold but tasteful and, above all, simple. If you want your identity to set your business world on fire, why does it have to be simple?

If you stop for a minute and try to think of some of the most memorable logos you’ve ever seen, you’ll find that simplicity is a characteristic common to all of them. Think apple with a bite. Think ReMax hot air balloon. Think of the blue AT&T world of Wikipedia’s Planet Earth. They are all simple designs. And they are all extremely functional.

When we talk about the functionality of a logo we mean the potential to use it in any application without losing any of its inherent value. To illustrate, consider the now famous Century 21 logo. The company name appears stacked and staggered with different font sizes used to accent the first letter of the company name and the numerical designation at the end of the tagline. The use of simple line drawings connotes home and garden. So this identity does the most important thing an identity is supposed to do: suggest what business the company is in. We knew they had something to do with homes. But keep in mind that the logo has no additional text? Why not? Century 21 is a franchised operation and the removal of text references from the design allows franchisees to use the logo with their own text. That is the functionality.

Here are some other things we can learn about the functionality of this example.

First, it is scalable. By that we mean that it can be scaled up or down without altering the impact of the logo in any way. You’ve seen this logo on business cards, apparel, letterheads, huge banners, smaller signs, and a variety of promotional items. This logo can go pretty much anywhere and do anything. On business cards, the image is placed on the left, allowing individual estate agents to embed a portrait image directly on the card.

Second, colors and graphic enhancements can also be transferred to a variety of media. On most signs and in the telephone yellow pages, the Century 21 logo uses only two colors: yellow and black. Again, the meaning is that the logo loses none of its impact when rendered in black and white. And the only graphical improvements are the line drawings and the variation in font size. One of the main drawbacks of many logos designed with nifty software like Photo Shop is the fancy stuff that designers like to add. Many hobbyist designers go overboard here with 3D and shadows and color fades all over the place. Those improvements won’t translate well in many outlets.

Finally, a word about the lack of text. Whoever made this logo understood the nature of the franchise business. This is an identity that can be used at the corporate or franchise level with added text for a variety of purposes, from promoting free market analysis to an open house.