The birth and death of a logo

In my opinion companies spend too much time and money on logos and the bigger they get the worse the logos are.

Below is what we did at Tigerspike. I thought I would write this now as Concentrix, the company who bought Tigerspike has just rebranded as “Concentric Catalyst”, which is the final death of the Tigerspike name and logo.

This was the original Tigerspike Logo design that Dean Jezard came up with in 2003. We came up with “Creative” and “Cutting edge” after I read an article on “one word equity”: which talks about being able to distil a brand essence down to one word. We managed to get ourselves down to two words that we thought described Tigerspike well.

This wasn’t the first logo, though, before this we had the same logo but a tag line below it that read “Creative solutions for converging technologies” which Anna Trybocka (original co-founder of Tigerspike, and later, Oliver Palmer’s wife) came up with.

Later the design team in London were doing some updates to the website I think it was and I remember saying to Nic Newman who ran London “We are not changing the logo, I am 0% flexible on this”. But Nic and the team didn’t listen as he often didn’t, and his team, lead by Dan Newman came up with this new font and logo design above, which I actually really loved.

Next it evolved into a simpler logo from work driven out of our Sydney office. Nassos Kappa writes about it in more detail here.

There was the black version of the logo too.

We resisted making any swag for the longest time as Oliver Palmer said “if you have time and money to make t shirts it means you aren’t really focusing on the business and are on the downward spiral to bankruptcy!”.

We didn’t go bust, and the logo actually looked pretty good on a T shirt.

I agreed with Olly at the time but now I think that nice branding you can wear is a good culture building thing for staff.

After we sold to Concentrix in 2017 things changed a little. The logo below appeared when we became “a Concentrix company”.

The slight change to the logo was a bit of a change for change sake. I think it was unnecessary and the logo looks worse than the previous one. But the thing that got to me was the “TM” after the logo. What is this for!?. It is idiotic and I don’t know why companies do it. Yes I know it means that the name / logo is trademarked, but what do they think will happen. Someone will be thinking

“…nice company name / logo, Hey I have an idea, I will copy it…. WAIT!…. damn, it is trademarked!”

Later I saw the logo above as the company became “Concentrix Tigerspike”.

This mixing of fonts wasn’t popular. I heard one of our designers cried when it happened. Not a very cool move for a design lead company, but big companies are not good at this stuff. The idiotic TM is still there too.

So Tigerspike lasted almost 20 years, but now has been renamed entirely as “Concentrix Catalyst”. This mixture of fonts doesn’t offend me as much as the previous one for some reason, and of course in my totally unbiased opinion the earlier Tigerspike logo was better, but I wish them well anyway.

But seriously take off the “TM”. What is it achieving!