The Back of the LogoThe Back of the Logo

Put a logo on a flag and you find out quickly that it has a back. From one side of the pole it reads correctly. From the other side the wind shows everyone a mirror image.

The Barzin identity included flags, banners and graphics for the office glass, and all of them share this small problem. People can stand on either side. Usually it doesn't matter much. Most people see the front, and a mirrored lion on the back of a flag isn't a disaster.

But I've been thinking about it more since headsets and AR started asking brands for something stranger than a flag: a logo you can walk around.

01What changes in the room

AR, augmented reality, means digital things placed on top of the real world, through a phone camera or a headset. A logo there isn't printed anywhere. It sits in somebody's living room.

On paper or a screen, the designer controls almost everything about how the mark is seen. The distance is roughly known. The angle is straight on. The background is ours, and so is the light, more or less. In a room we control none of it. The background is a sofa or a kitchen wall. The light is whatever lamp the person has on. They can lean in until the mark fills their view, or walk past it and see it from the side.

The big platforms have already moved. When Apple released Vision Pro in early 2024, app icons in its system became circles built from stacked layers that shift slightly to show depth when you look at them. When Facebook renamed itself Meta in 2021, the new symbol was shown moving and turning in three dimensions at its launch, not lying flat on a page.

None of the projects in my portfolio was designed for a headset. The closest thing in normal practice is an exhibition booth. Barzin had one, and anyone who has worked on a booth knows the mark is seen first from far down the aisle, at an angle, and then from one meter away. It's the same problem in a milder form.

02A sign you can pick up

The idea I find most useful here doesn't come from semiotics at all. James J. Gibson, an American psychologist who studied perception, used the word affordance for what an object offers the person looking at it. A handle offers pulling. A flat surface at knee height offers sitting. His point was that we don't first see shapes and then work out what to do with them. We see the possibilities for action almost at once.

A flat logo on a page offers very little. You look at it and read it, and that's the whole relationship.

Make the same logo a solid thing in a room and people expect more. They want to reach for it, turn it, tap it, walk round it. A heavy, thick shield suggests one kind of hand. A thin ribbon suggests another. So the mark picks up a second layer of meaning that the brand never decided on: weight, material, whether it looks fragile or solid. A sign that was only read now also gets handled, at least with the eyes.

I don't think most identity guidelines are ready for that. Mine aren't either.

03Where the flat version breaks

The usual shortcut is extrusion. You take the flat logo and push it backwards, like a cookie cutter through dough. Most 3D logo mockups are made this way, and most of them look like plastic shop signs. From the front it's fine. From an angle, the sides become a large part of what you see, and nobody drew the sides.

Other things fail quietly. A counter, the open space inside a letter like "e" or "a", reads well head on but narrows and closes as you move to the side. Negative space that carried the whole idea of a mark can simply disappear at an angle. A palette checked carefully on a calibrated screen now sits over a room with orange evening light and a patterned rug. Barzin's identity is built on specific Pantone colors. I don't know what those colors become over a stranger's carpet, and nobody does until it's tested.

There's also the question of the back, again. A wordmark seen from behind reads in reverse. A symbol might not care. A lion facing right becomes a lion facing left, which in some cultures and some heraldic traditions means something different. That needs a decision, not an accident.

04What I'd do now

I'm not convinced every brand needs a metaverse plan. A lot of the 2021 rush into virtual worlds has gone quiet since. But phones already put brands into rooms, and headsets will probably keep getting lighter, so the question of depth won't go away.

So the practical step is small. Before anyone builds a 3D version, draw the mark from the side and from behind, by hand if you like. Then decide what kind of thing it is. It can stay a flat sign, like a sticker on glass that only ever faces one way. That's an honest choice. Or it can become an object, with real thickness and a material you've chosen. What it shouldn't be is a flat drawing that a 3D program pushed backwards because nobody made the decision.

Then put one page about this in the guidelines, so the next person doesn't have to guess.

Nobody has asked me yet what the back of the Barzin lion should look like. If someone does, I'd want to draw it myself.