Tricom, one of the largest service providers in the Dominican Republic – has recently employed the services of a famous brand consultancy to update and refresh it’s corporate image.
The final results are good in my opinion – the color scheme is much more localized than it was before, reflecting the happy & bright colors of the Dominican Republic. I would also suggest that it is a little more technological & corporate without the cartoon dog, an icon that gave it a traditional vibe. I am sure this is something the brand consultants wanted to adjust, which make sense for a company invested in technology.
But the real story here is that it has stirred up an interesting debate within the design community circled around the question of originality.
If you view the logos below, you will see this is just a handful of very similar ideas and very similar executions – and after a quick glance you would do well to match each name with each shape from memory.
But does this really matter? Lets be honest, most businesses would reject the logo on the grounds that it looks too similar to the well known samples below, and would be fairly cross that they had been presented with a non-unique logo.
Whilst it is vitally important to never, under any circumstances, copy another design – is this problem really unavoidable? And does it really have a negative aspect of on the business?
When you consider that this logo was designed by Interbrand – the worlds largest Brand Consultancy – and no doubt involved many hours of research and focus groups – it appears that the similarities really are not much of a concern, and it’s a case that if those shoes fits – the shoe fits.
One things is for sure, originality in design is a debate that will go on and on.
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I agree with many of the points raised in this article. The logo does look more modern and vibrant and although the cartoon dog portrayed the company as fun and cute, I think it is the wrong image to give in today’s times for such a technological product and service.
There seems to be a big trend recently with the design including shapes and colours overlapping each other using what I think is the ‘multiply’ transparency effect. I think we will see a lot more of this style used today and in the future.
With regards to originality I do think it is best if you try and work a design from complete scratch thus creating something that is unique. However, in these modern times clients are looking for that extra bit of ‘jazz’ and 90% of the time will give an example of a brand they’ve seen before to compare to. So in effect I don’t think it does any harm in creating similar styles of logo that have been proven to work but don’t just completely rip off other peoples work, take a little bit of inspiration from them instead.
P.S. Great website Jonny and keep up the good work.
Brian