I'm trying to think of another logo that is so simple yet is so relevant and communicates so much, but I can't seem to. Any other examples?
Obama's logo is good, but if you're talking about simplicity and communication, it barely compares to the culturally-transcendent nature of those corporate logos. Those logos don't identify with a language or anything, they simply carry meaning.
1.The ‘O’ symbolizing Obama. 2.The colors of the flag. 3.The unification of red and blue, indicating cross-party unity. 4.The sunrise image aligning with the ‘hope’ and ‘new start’ campaign themes. 5.The horizon, indicating the future.
Just a few that came to mind. Does the Nike swoosh, the Adidas three stripes or the McDonalds arches symbolically convey nearly as much?
This is going to be pretty confusing when we go back to thinking that red symbolizes commies.
The swoosh communicates more densely, I think: it's a single, monochrome visual element, while the Obama logo is busy being a shape and a letter and a picture and a flag. The Nike logo says a lot, laconically; the Obama logo says a lot by being visually chatty.
There isn't anything intrinsic about communism that says "red, that's the color!". It was just a useful convention.
I don't know how much the Nike swoosh can say, perhaps movement/agility?. It's always been fairly meaningless to me, aside from the whole being the Nike logo thing.
"We" are a very small minority. Everyone -- the US included -- knows who Reds are. Only Americans, and folks who follow American news fairly closely, know what "red states" are.
China flag: http://www.worldclassflags.com/productimages/cf_china_rep.gi...
USSR flag: http://www.worldclassflags.com/productimages/cf_ussr.gif
Vietnam flag: http://www.worldclassflags.com/productimages/cf_vietnam.gif
A logo doesn't communicate anything "by itself" but its empirical nature (text, colors, shape etc.) without branding.
You wouldn't intrinsically know those 5 things having never seen the Obama logo, in the same way you'd simply see the McDonalds arches as a yellow "M".
Both parties stuffed "years" of branding effort into less time through an incessant and overwhelming campaign effort.
From the Obama camp, the "O" logo was literally unavoidable... TV ads, magnets of all types, shirts, pins, flags, posters, lawn-spam, the list goes on. If any company had that amount of time, money, and insane level of word of mouth, they'd be just as well branded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UJ_logo.png
(Excuse the quality of the image).
Here's some information behind the logo:
http://www.uj.ac.za/Informationabout/OurBrand/tabid/8287/Def...
In particular; lochness, food writers guild and gotham books. Fedex gets undue praise everywhere and I think it is a lazy design. the F,e and d don't sit sharply anyway.