Michaelbox

My Favorite Logos #1: Target

by tw2113 on May.05, 2010, under Creativity, Graphic Arts

Orig­i­nally, this topic was meant to be a really quick high­light of a bunch all in one post­ing, but I real­ized that each one of these deserves the spot­light on their own. We are going to kick off this blog series with Tar­get Corporation.

Target's bullseye logo

Brief his­tory

Tar­get Cor­po­ra­tion, usu­ally known sim­ply as Tar­get, is an Amer­i­can retail­ing com­pany that was founded in Min­neapo­lis, Min­nesota in 1902 as the Day­ton Dry Goods Com­pany. In 1962, the com­pany opened its first Tar­get store in nearby Roseville. The Tar­get store con­cept grew and even­tu­ally became the largest divi­sion of Day­ton Hud­son Cor­po­ra­tion, cul­mi­nat­ing in the com­pany chang­ing its name to Tar­get Cor­po­ra­tion in 2000. The com­pany has opened stores in all but one state (the excep­tion, as of Octo­ber 2009[update], being Ver­mont), oper­at­ing as Tar­get, Super­Tar­get, and for­merly Tar­get Greatland.

via Wikipedia

Original Target Logo

Tar­get logo from 1962 to 1968

The brand­ing used for Tar­get has evolved over time, but has retained the visual red ring ele­ment since its incep­tion. The orig­i­nal logo from 1962 until 1968 had 3 con­cen­tric cir­cles and a font that I have yet to iden­tify. While it was fit­ting for a time, it was updated to make the brand­ing more modern.

In 1980, Tar­get redesigned their brand­ing again. In this ver­sion, they sim­pli­fied the bulls eye logo to a sin­gle ring sur­round­ing a solid dot. They also high­lighted the name of the store line in the strong yet sim­ple font Hel­vetica. With this design the bulls eye became visual brand­ing that peo­ple rec­og­nized most.

In 2004, one more brand­ing change occurred, mov­ing the Tar­get name below the bulls eye and sim­pli­fy­ing to a sin­gle red color. Accord­ing to Target’s com­pany site, “96% of peo­ple rec­og­nize the Bulls­eye, nudg­ing out Apple and the Nike swoosh.” That is quite a high level of recog­ni­tion with very strong com­pe­ti­tion in a world full of pop­u­lar brand names.

Logo from 1980 until 2004.

It is not hard to under­stand why this is a per­sonal favorite logo. The bulls eye is extremely sim­ple and com­posed of two sep­a­rate shapes. For those of you who have designed logos before, you know the best thing you can do is “KISS.” Keep It Sim­ple, Stu­pid. Even when the bulls eye is cou­pled with the Hel­vetica type­face, it still works very well.

What are some of your com­ments or thoughts on this logo or per­haps some other logo that you really love?

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