This weekend, I bumped into a designer friend of mine whom I’ve admired since we were both working at a theme restaurant to put us through school. In my conversation, I started to gush about my Blue’s Clues blog and how I was able to find logo insight in a show meant for toddlers. I went on about the coloring and the readability, continuing to pound my chest until she stopped and said, “but can you get all that from a paw in black and white?”

Dagger.

She was right. I’m not going to discredit my findings because many of the things discussed still hold true, but I feel I should bring up the very obvious topic I’ve neglected in all my previous blogs.

Your logo needs to look as good in black and white as it does in color. Even though the tide is changing to a more color-minded office world, we can’t forget there are times when black and white will come into play. Email signatures, email marketing and affordable color printing haven’t slain the Faxasaurus.

Perhaps we can use that archaic device to purify our styles. Adobe has made it all too easy to create brilliant logos chalk-full of gradients, textures and bevels. Sure all those things can be seen in black and white, but look dismal next to their color counterparts.

Every class I’ve taken and every book I read pummels the same principles and advice into my brain. Keep It Simple Stupid (and that’s the polite version). And yes, that makes perfect sense. For 98% of creatives out there, there’s one problem.

It’s really hard.

Before you judge and ascertain that I’m turning the Amazon into a salt-water river with my pity tears, understand that this blog is meant to build a bond with other designers and inform interested persons. Whining about the difficulty of simplicity was my bonding moment. Everyone feel better? Good.

Let’s correct the problem with a new way of thinking. In a black and white logo you have more options than many realize. I’ll draw from two of my greatest sources of inspiration, word play and my high school show choir…or Eastern philosophy. Yeah, let’s go with that.

Wordplay means seeing the versatile 26 as shapes, not sounds. There are a few champions of this letter readjustment. T is an obvious choice. It works for ties, intersections, or anything rigid. A lowercase version works for crosses and plus signs. A lower case g works well for tails or can be used in an underline. E works great in upper and lower case. The upper case E has rigid, square elements like the letter T while in lower case, the curvature of the vowel and the straight components of the interior offer a level of diversity and flexibility. With all that said, please, I beg you, do not become boring and cliche. Do not use the obvious answers stated before as a short cut to innovation and bedazzlement.

Eastern Philosophy preaches harmony and balance. Yin-Yang anyone? That’s the easiest place to explore. Even though it may be the most cliche tattoo next to the tramp stamp butterfly (honestly ladies, if you want to show off a whale tail, draw in a harpoon) the yin-yang takes the entire universe, existence as we know it, and simplifies it into a logo. Well done. I could ramble through all the opposite symbolism the yin-yang offers, male vs female, good vs evil, on vs off, but bleh.

The point is, balance is really important when dealing with black and white logos. I’m not arguing for equal time, but I am saying that the elements should be able to hold their own and not distract from the other. For example, if the core of my logo is white lettering inside a black circle, does that lettering get lost in the void?

Kid Rock made a great statement about AC/DC drummer, Phil Rudd and his work on the song “Back in Black.” In the interview Kid Rock discusses how Rudd is a very talented drummer who’s brilliant decision to keep the beat driving and simple is the reason for the success of the song. The moral is, just because you can be flashy doesn’t mean you have to be. If you don’t have to be, you shouldn’t be.

The same should be said of designers. We can be flashy and use every tool at our disposal or we can simply think about getting back to black.