Logo use and Brand Guidelines Confusion

The community touched on this a bit previously. It's important to respect the brand, but I also understand the need for a logo to meld with the rest of your site design for example.

Some popular social icons were actually created by a third-party and adopted by the community through popular use. This reiterates that companies are never in full control of how their brand is interfaced with by customers. You can definitely shape this adaptation or use by providing flexible and robust design reference guides and assets however.

@Graham -

• a) Dont give a rats
• b) No one will ever say anything
• c) Our work is more important that anything Twitter or Facebook give us to use.
• d) Do we follow the rules we like and ignore the ones we don't

Personally my guess is that for most designers it's c.

However I wonder how many web designers that do that have ever drawn up a branding guide for a company.

Probably have no compassion about ignoring branding guidelines. Once you draw up a branding guide and then notice internal users breaking the rules it annoys you, so you would feel similar compassion about other companies branding guides.

It's like the golden rule of branding, do unto other's brands as you would have them do unto yours.

The non-standard icons, I ever thought were appropriate, were versions which were gray scale and changed to the standard icon on hover/click.

I think there's a lot of factors here:

Before social networking went mainstream, like any other new web app, people wanted to support it in a way that brought about awareness. And so, adding links to Twitter or Facebook (or anything else) started to happen.

But many times, these links would be lumped into a social/RSS/email/not sure what to do with these icons group. And since many designers had already designed custom email icons, RSS icons, and more to match the look and feel of their site, some of them simply did the same with the Twitter and FB icons.

As the platforms continued to grow in popularity, designers began to include social network icons and buttons in their website icon sets. Soon you could Twitter, FB, Flickr, MySpace, and others slapped into icons and buttons of every color, shape, and contrast. I think here is where the attitude changed from "supporting these networks" to "adding them to my icon sets to people will download them instead of someone else's."

The concepts of corporate branding, intellectual property, trademarks, and fair use are a big jumble to some. I can see how some people might think it's fine to take the Twitter logo - now, a nice and easy 1 color version that could easily be manipulated - and alter its nature to fit their own needs. Heck, I don't think I've seen a corporate logo (or knockoff of it) more manipulated into various icons, pictures, headers, and more graphical elements than the Twitter bird.

Now, here's my own sort of feeling on this...

Perhaps Twitter allowed much of it to happen because they wanted that support to grow the network. Maybe they feel it's acceptable. You don't see Disney, for example, allowing others to use their mouse ears. But with so many resources for a fledgling company poured into development and more, I'm sure Twitter wanted to avoid legal issues and potential public backlash unless the use of their logo ventured into something abusive or detrimental to the brand.

Anyway... So if you look online now, you'll see a million versions of the Twitter logo. And I'm sure that's why they updated their logo a year ago or whenever it was. They wanted to try to establish a bit of quality control. And they also established their Logo and Brand Policies, but it'll be up to others to actually recognize them and abide.

A bunch of this is based on personal observation, but I hope this adds to the discussion here. In the end as the others have said, "do unto others..." is a fine philosophy to live by.