JKR

As an agency, we spend our time making brands as easy for people to identify as possible. We have a few simple tests to help us determine whether we’ve succeeded or whether we need to work on. Creating an app symbol for a brand could easily form part of that stress test.

The conventional approach is to shrink your logo down so that it fits into the 9mm square. That way the whole logo will be visible and they’ll be no risk of mistaken identity.

But safety can be at the expense of style. Rolling Stone magazine’s app for Spotify is still instantly recognisable, but has a little more élan because of its abstraction. It’s possible that it was a case of needs must, as it would be a squeeze to fit the whole logo into the box. More likely however, that Rolling Stone knows its readers will clock it in an instant.

These other examples from Saks, J&B and Coca-Cola all demonstrate enough confidence in their own identities to know that they’ll be recognised, even if they don’t show the whole picture. Sometimes the simplest tests can be the most revealing.