Video by mockiro

So a logo can be anything. It could be a dot, it could be a square. The problem with dots and squares is that they're a little bit universal. They're a little bit difficult to make unique and memorable. So one has to use some ingenuity in making dots and squares memorable. That ain't easy.

It's very easy to sell something that represents some recognizable object as, again, something that's purely abstract. The object of the logo is to be recognizable as a signature, and it could be anything. Why did Alfred Knopf use a dog as a symbol? And why does the famous French sportswear manufacturer use an alligator?

These are real commercial symbols, and they're extremely arbitrary. It just happened that this guy liked alligators, and Alfred liked Borzoi dogs. And they turned out to be very profitable, not because they were alligators or dogs, but because they were recognizable. And that's the function of a logo.