I was reading an article by Joshua Foer this spring in the New York Times magazine about training for memory competitions. Making the point that visual memory is a much older skill than verbal memory, he noted, “Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t need to recall phone numbers or word-for-word instructions from their bosses or the Advanced Placement U.S. history… What they did need to remember was where to find food and resources and the route home and which plants were edible and which were poisonous. Those are the sorts of vital memory skills that they depended on, which probably helps explain why we are comparatively good at remembering visually and spatially.”
I had a bit of an “aha” moment because this helped explain something a little intangible: why companies and organizations need to bother with creating a visual identity: Because humans can recognize and remember pictures much easier than words.
Your audience will have a quicker and more lasting reaction to a visual embodiment of your name than they will to just the words. And they will make unconscious evaluations of the form and personality of your identity that they may not be able to articulate. Think about the cheerful smile on the Amazon box, The FedEx truck (would it be the same if it just said Federal Express in a plain font?), and the instant need for coffee when you see a Starbucks sign.
The process to do this properly requires thought a lot of distillation (describing it in more detail is a blog post for later). You don’t have to be a huge corporation to have a good identity. A little planning and the right partner will have fewer people hunting for your company and more gathering insight into what you offer.
