Logo Design In Slow Motion

I'm a big football fan...like English Premiership football. Futbol. Soccer. Hopefully that won't put you off. It does some people. But I think this analogy is applicable to all sports, so bear with me baseball fans.I was watching a match the other day and, as in any sport, there was a questionable call. Two players made contact and one of them tumbled to the ground. The ref said there wasn't a foul and went so far as to give the guy who was went to ground a card for diving. The commentators were incensed. As they watched the foul over and over again in slow motion they couldn't believe the ref had missed such an obvious collision.

The key here is the slow motion part. Stick with me, I'm getting to my point.

When you watched the play in regular motion you could tell by the movement of the player fouled that, while contact was made, it was not enough to warrant the flop that he took in order to get the call. And obviously the ref only saw that in regular motion, not slow motion. The call was good.

So what, you ask, does this have to do with logo design?I think the most difficult thing to do in logo design and perhaps the most important, is to try and look through the eyes of your audience. When someone first sees the logo, what will it make them think? How will they feel? Will the context that they see it in change their perception? In essence this is experiencing a logo in regular motion.More often than not clients are blown away by initial concepts. We have a process where we capture those initial thoughts and reactions very thoroughly because it's the only time they'll ever experience their new logo with fresh eyes...like their customers will. But then the tendency is to switch into slow motion. Then the rethinking, the questioning, showing it to friend after friend begins. The design is over-analyzed and it rarely has a positive outcome.I'm not saying you shouldn't analyze your new logo.What I'm saying is that the initial reaction needs to be weighed substantially more than the slow motion viewing that follows.