Benefits of Modular Logo Design

Original M and L logo of MIT Media Lab

Boiled down to its essence, logos are visual emblems of your identity or organization. A good logo designer will go beyond a singular logo design to think about strategy and business goals. Modular logo design can really help a logo be flexible for multiple uses or multiple logos within the same organization.

Many Logos

One approach to modular logo designs is when an organization requires many logos for their subbrands. Here’s a great example: MIT Media Lab. Starting with a simple concept, noted brander Pentagram built the MIT brand identity media lab in a 7 x 7 grid structure. The initial logo is a stylistic M and L (above). That’s pretty unique and simple, isn’t it? Very good design. Now, the process becomes more difficult when 23 different research groups need to look similar to that logo, but be different at the same time! Pentagram did a masterful job. Here are three of the logos on grid paper, and the rest of the modular system to show the 7 x 7 structure.

Three of the logos on grid paper, and the rest of the modular system to show the 7 x 7 structure

So each of these logos that make up the media lab are based on the initial M and L glyph (or logo). You can see how perfectly they work together as a whole system. The initial logo is quite versatile, lending its shape to other logos that make the whole system dynamic.

Pizza Rat

Remember the famous NYC pizza rat?

To dig even deeper into modularity, read the original article published at holabrief.