Written by Richard Baird, founder of LogoArchive, the world’s largest historical logo book with over 5,500 curated logos, and of LogoHistories, home to 200+ in-depth logo histories.
Transitional logos use a change of state to play with ideas such as growth, evolution and creation. This could be stepped line thicknesses, differing heights or smooth scaling.
Shozo Murase used changing heights in his 1987 logo for Marumasa to allude to construction and city planning.
Sometimes these techniques are given a sense of dynamism through a diagonal direction, or used to build concrete imagery, such as trees, to introduce a further conceptual layer and support distinction and memorability.
For Chungbuk Bank, Young Jae Cho and Kim Min combined circles of differing sizes to create a tree, alluding to the growth of wealth.
Transitional logos lend themselves well to companies that make and manufacture, distribute, educate, construct or help people accumulate wealth. For Telewest in 2001, North used line thickness and circles to suggest communication spreading outwards.
What makes the technique work is that the eye reads a sequence. A row of shapes that steadily increase in size is understood as a process, a before and after, rather than a collection of separate parts. The designer can control the speed of that change: an even progression feels steady and dependable, a sharper one feels energetic.
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