What is a Brandmark?

Brandmarks sit inside a family of logo types, as the diagram above shows. Designers usually pick one of three approaches for a brand's primary logo, and the choice follows the brand from business cards to favicons.

Brandmark vs. wordmark vs. combination mark

• Wordmark. The company name itself, set in distinctive type. Google and Coca-Cola are wordmarks: the text is the logo.
• Brandmark. A symbol with no text, like the Starbucks siren. Also called a pictorial mark or logomark.
• Combination mark. Symbol and name together. Many brands design the pair so the symbol can eventually stand alone.

When can a brandmark stand alone?

After the audience already knows the mark. Nike dropped its name from the swoosh only after years of pairing them, once recognition was strong enough to carry the mark solo. A new business that leads with an unexplained symbol is asking strangers to memorize two things at once: the mark and the name. Most start with a combination mark instead and drop the text once the symbol is recognized on its own.

Brandmarks on your website

Even brands that never run a symbol-only logo need one on the web. The favicon in a browser tab, the app icon on a phone, and the profile picture on social accounts are all tiny squares where a full logo with text turns to mush. A simplified brandmark that survives at 16 pixels is part of any complete brand style guide, whatever the primary logo looks like.