Adventures in corporate logo development (1 of 3)

Houghton Mifflin merged with Harcourt in January of 2008. Of course, it was in the works for months before this. In fact, it was in the works, unbeknownst to me, before I was even hired. But that’s a story for another day.

For the months before the merger, Corporate Communications had been doing prep work with several design firms and focus testing groups to determine what the new identity for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt should be. They’d collected a wealth of information, but hadn’t yet seen anything they liked. That wealth of discussion and information was the pile that was dropped on my desk in November, when Steve Tapp, then President of Great Source, tapped me as new Design Director of Great Source, a division of Houghton Mifflin, if I and my group would take a stab at it. Of course, we did.

At Great Source, I managed a staff of Senior Designers, spread over a volume of five disciplines; Math, Science, Social Studies, Reading and Language Arts. Given this workload, and the fact that this logo work was spread on top of it, I didn’t feel comfortable assigning the work of logo research, development and sketching, so I presented it to them as an opportunity that they could participate in, but not a requirement. One Senior Designer stepped up to the idea, and delivered some solid sketches. In addition, I dug into this myself.

As food for this, we studied the results of several focus group reports, as well some competitors logo suites (examples below).



We also did research into corporate branding in general. There are many areas to balance in logo branding; history of the corporation, symbolism inherent in the logo, and what the logo is intended to evoke or communicate. We studied a wealth of great texts, such as Fresh Ideas in Corporate Identity, by Mary Cooper and Lynn Haller. But at the end of the day, we weren’t starting with a blank slate-—we were working on blending two well established and vested corporate identities, into a new form of life.

Part of the issue was that combining the Harcourt logo (below)

with the Houghton Mifflin logo (below).

was too deceptively simple. The Harcourt logo symbolized ripples on water, the ripples reflecting the effect of education, literature, et al. The Houghton logo was a boy on a dolphin, which is a mythological reference that’s a mystery to 8 out of 10 people. But the colophon was nonetheless memorable and easily identifiable to many customers. Therefore it might seem combining a boy on a dolphin with rippling water would be a no-brainer…except for the fact that the resultant logos were reminiscent of Sea World.

Next: Some of the final sketches