Simplicity Is Key To Iconic Rebrandings
The most successful businesses may be lucky enough to find that their business logos have been so successfully entrenched in the public consciousness that a sweeping change would be drastically counter-productive. Who wouldn't want to be in this position, aside from those who don't currently want to remembered? (e.g. BP) You'll want to keep your logo unchanged to insure that customers remain loyal. But the truth is, even the best brands in the world need to change (and have changed) to reflect changing trends. Even those designs that have persisted for decades (maybe even centuries) have only done so in the most abstract sense. Such logos morphed gradually, almost imperceptibly as time went on. The following are couple of brands that rose to the challenge and met with great success with a measured approach to change.
Logo designers may be seen as somewhat unadventurous for choosing this path, but it is true to say that some great results have been had from those who have taken an iconic logo and distilled it even further. The logo for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has shown that there's room for this in even the most simple logos. The change started (as things often do) with the move to a sans-serif font after the 50s. By the end of the 60s, the typography (and the boxes that enclosed it) had been rounded off and slanted. A late 80s redesign applied more sophisticated coloring to the design, and gave the boxes blue, red and green underlines. But this was a true 80s aesthetic and one unlikely to last beyond the often garish early 90s: the current, non-italicized, sanserif logo has been in use ever since.
Another obvious example (with principled design at its core) would have to be the Apple logo. Apple's main market asset is the sophistication of its industrial design. But for logos, multicolor is no longer high-technology. Their traditional rainbow scale apple simply had to go with the advent of the iMac and iPod. So is simplification the elixir of life for logo design? Unlikely. But when a logo is seemingly on its last legs, distilling it down to its base elements may just give it an exponential life boost.