my first critique post as a new college grad :)

>>Maybe I’m wrong. I hope so. But your comment seems to imply that people here aren’t considering the client or the audience before making their points. That seems like an unfair assumption.

I don’t know if people here have considered the client or the audience before making their points or not, but do you, Chris, mean to imply that any of us has given them as much consideration as Pentagram has? I’d be willing to bet that Pentragram spent a bit more time thinking about this design than your or I, and in that time they probably found a legitimate reason to make the design look the way it does. I believe the ‘S’ was made to resemble some specific object, as a few other commentors have suggested. And notice how the horizontal join is parallel to the terminals: I don’t think that’s coincidental. Is it a beautiful logo? Not particularly. Could it be improved? Probably. But I think anyone who gave it more than twenty seconds of consideration would hesitate to suggest that it’s amateurish or mistaken.

>>Besides, you could say all of that any time a designer says something you don’t like about a logo, couldn’t you?

Yes, “all of that” can always be said, but were the designer’s initial criticisms any less facile? Post any logo–whether designed by an amateur or Paul Rand–and sooner or later someone will point out something that he would have done better. I admit that I enjoy criticizing as much as anyone else: it’s easy, quick, and makes me feel better about myself. This is the first time I’ve felt compelled to come to someone’s defense, not because I’m one of those people who says, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”, but because I think some of the criticism has been too facile.

To be fair, I am not aware of this industry or audience and therefore I am not educated as to if this mark has more education than it shows.

Overall, I think it could be much stronger, but it still works a professional and clean mark.

Maybe I’m wrong. I hope so. But your comment seems to imply that people here aren’t considering the client or the audience before making their points. That seems like an unfair assumption. Besides, you could say all of that any time a designer says something you don’t like about a logo, couldn’t you?

In the case of the Stanmore logo, I imagine the designers were more intent on satisfying their client than on satisfying other designers.