Sometimes, the best logos of the world look so simple that they look like they had been created in a matter of minutes.
And it’s often true.
Many times, the most amazing solutions to real-world problems seem so obvious and simple. And they’d be so simple that it should have taken not more than a few minutes to come up with them.
It most likely did take only a few minutes.
But the real time that it took to come to that precise simplicity is many months if not years.
Logos of brands, design of everyday things, ways of doing some work, methods of thinking — almost everywhere, we find simple but profoundly practical solutions at work. And they look as if they’ve been created in minutes.
And that false-perception is a problem.
It’s a problem because decision-makers and ill-informed/ignorant critics tend to value the impact of the work in terms of the time put into it.
A non-design founder is prone to under-value the work of his/her designer when the said work appears as if it could have been done in a matter of minutes. And this undervaluation leads to rejection.
People creating things seem to think that their creations need to be sophisticated (or at least appear that way) for others to value them (and pay for them). And sophistication is often tied directly to the number of hours of hard work and thought put into something.
We live in this kind of an environment. Simple is thought of as frivolous. Obvious is thought of as uninteresting. And a work that is both simple and obvious is treated as too unimportant to be part of the sophisiticated suite being built by the rest of the team.