Hey, it’s Al Bergeron, Chief Creative Officer of bergeroncreative.com, and this is The Brand Whisperer Briefing, where I provide practical brand strategies that will grow your corporate or personal brands. Giving you greater influence in today’s technology driven society.

On this week’s episode I’m going to discuss icons. Here are examples of companies that use icons; Apple, Dropbox, Facebook and other social media channels. In 1984, Apple introduced icons on its Macintosh computer to view and navigate files and applications. Today, icons can be found on computers, phones, tablets and websites as one of the fundamental features of their graphical user interface or (GUI).

In addition, icons now play important role in brand identity. Many application-based companies employ icons as their primary brandmark or as an extension of their brandmark to be used on computers, phones and tablets. For example, Twitter uses a logotype as its primary brandmark and uses icons with the Twitter “t” or bird to represent its network across different devices.

Here are the advantages of icons: • Substitute for words • Overcome language barriers • Extension of brand identity

Here are the disadvantages of icons: • Confusion with other icons • Confusion with other brandmarks • Potential cultural miscommunication

So, your homework for this week is to answer this question, to determine if an icon would best represent your brand: Will my brandmark need to be used across multiple platforms or devices?

That’s it for this week. Have a great week! On the next episode of The Brand Whisperer I will discuss letterforms.