Why We Trust Rounded Logos
What experiments say about circular and angular logos, why curves are liked before a brand arrives, and when the effect changes.
Answer to the question
Do round logos make brands seem friendlier?
Round logos make brands seem softer. In five experiments, circular logos led people to judge a product or company as softer and angular logos as harder. Friendliness is a natural step beyond that finding, and the pull depends on the viewer's self-image and on what the headline says.
Key takeaways
- Yuwei Jiang, Gerald Gorn, Maria Galli and Amitava Chattopadhyay reported five experiments in which circular logos led people to judge a product or company as softer and angular logos as harder.
- The shape effect disappeared when working memory was occupied by unrelated visual imagery, and when an ad headline stressed an attribute that conflicted with the shape.
- Moshe Bar and Maital Neta reported in 2006 that people preferred curved visual objects over objects with sharp angles.
- Liying Xu, Feng Yu and Xiaojun Ding found in three studies that circular logos did more than angular ones to promote green product consumption, with self-construal carrying the effect.
- Yinlong Zhang, Lawrence Feick and Lydia Price found that independent and interdependent self-construal map onto liking for angular and rounded shapes, in a field study of logos from several countries and two experiments.
A mark on a shopfront or a screen is judged in a glance, and part of that judgment comes from nothing more than its outline. Five experiments by Yuwei Jiang, Gerald Gorn, Maria Galli and Amitava Chattopadhyay found that a logo's circularity or angularity moves what people think the company is like.
For anyone asking whether round logos make brands seem friendlier, the closest the research comes is softness: round shapes read as soft, angular ones as hard, and the rest of the evidence adds conditions to that.
Round logos are softer, angular ones harder
The softness result is the base of the whole topic. In the experiments, circular logos led people to judge a product or company as softer, and angular logos led them to judge it as harder. The authors explain this through association: a circle calls up the idea of softness and a sharp-cornered shape calls up hardness, and the idea then colours judgments of the brand. The process draws on mental imagery that uses the visuospatial part of working memory.
That explanation produced predictions, and the experiments bore them out. When people were asked to hold unrelated visual imagery in mind, the shape effect disappeared. It also faded in people less inclined to form images, and when an ad headline stressed an attribute that clashed with the shape. The effect appeared as well when the shapes were primed on the side, without being part of any logo, which suggests the pull belongs to the shape and not to a particular design.
What was measured matters for the headline, because round logos were tested for the attributes they imply. The experiments tested judgments of attributes such as softness, not trust or liking directly. Friendliness is the natural next step for a reader, and it is our interpretation that a soft impression is a warm one. The softness itself rests on the experiments, and a designer choosing a shape for a gentle product has a reason to expect it to help. A designer choosing for a sturdy product has the mirror-image reason to expect angles to help, and round logos need not suit every brief.
Curves win before any brand
Moshe Bar and Maital Neta asked whether the preference starts with the shape itself. Their 2006 paper reports that people preferred curved visual objects over objects with sharp angles, and that the contour of an object strongly shapes attitude towards it. A later study by Enric Munar and colleagues found that humans and great apes both preferred curved contours to sharp-angled ones, to different degrees, which led the authors to suggest the preference arose early in primate evolution and became more open to higher thinking in people.
Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things offers a frame for why a mere outline can carry weight. He describes emotion as working at a visceral level that reacts to appearance fast, before the behavioural level of use and the reflective level of memory and judgment get involved. A logo is almost always met at that first level, which is where round logos do their work.
Colour is read at that same first level, as Black in Branding: Luxury and Authority shows for one colour, and outline is its quieter partner. Why Pretty Things Seem to Work Better covers a related pull of appearance on judgments of how well a thing works, and a rounded outline is one of the quickest ways to win the first glance.
These findings sit together as a short set of working expectations:
- A circular logo raises judgments of softness, which is the core of the case for round logos.
- A headline that stresses a conflicting attribute can cancel the shape's pull.
- A general liking for curves exists before any brand adds its own meaning.
The viewer decides the pull
The shape pull is not the same for every viewer. In a 2020 set of three studies, Liying Xu, Feng Yu and Xiaojun Ding found that circular logos, compared with angular ones, did more to promote green product consumption. Self-construal, a person's sense of themselves as separate from or connected to others, carried the effect, and it disappeared when people were primed with a high sense of power. The pull of round logos, then, can be switched off by a state of mind as well as by a clashing headline, and it was strongest where the viewer's self-image matched the shape.
Yinlong Zhang, Lawrence Feick and Lydia Price had tested the same dimension earlier. Their reasoning was that angular shapes are associated with confrontation and rounded shapes with compromise, so people who see themselves as independent should find angular shapes more attractive, and people who see themselves as interdependent should prefer rounded ones. They expected the match to be stronger when people anticipated that others would judge their taste. A field study of logos from several countries and two experiments with primed self-construal largely supported these predictions.
A shape should therefore be chosen with the viewer in mind. Why We Read Quiet Logos as Status looks at how the message of a mark depends on who is able to decode it, and the shape findings work the same way: meaning sits in the pairing of mark and viewer. Round logos fit a product and an audience that value softness and connection, and angular ones fit a product meant to feel tough. Marks in use bore the pairing out.
Common questions
Do round logos make brands seem friendlier?
Round logos make brands seem softer. In five experiments, circular logos led people to judge products and companies as softer and angular logos as harder, so friendliness is a reasonable but untested step beyond the finding.
Why do people prefer curved shapes?
A 2006 paper found that people preferred curved objects over sharp-angled ones, and a later study found the same preference in humans and great apes. The researchers suggest the liking began early in primate evolution.
What do angular logos signal?
Hardness. The same experiments linked angular logos to hardness, which suits products meant to feel tough, and self-construal studies found angular shapes more attractive to people with an independent view of themselves.
Does the shape effect work for everyone?
Not always. It faded when people held unrelated imagery in mind, when a headline contradicted the shape and, in one set of studies, when people were primed with a high sense of power.
Sources
Norman, D. The Design of Everyday Things. Seed book; vault hub Books/The Design of Everyday Things.
Jiang, Y., Gorn, G. J., Galli, M., & Chattopadhyay, A. (2016). Does Your Company Have the Right Logo? How and Why Circular- and Angular-Logo Shapes Influence Brand Attribute Judgments. Journal of Consumer Research, 42(5), 709-726. doi:10.1093/jcr/ucv049 https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucv049
Bar, M., & Neta, M. (2006). Humans Prefer Curved Visual Objects. Psychological Science, 17(8), 645-648. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01759.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01759.x
Munar, E., Gomez-Puerto, G., Call, J., & Nadal, M. (2015). Common Visual Preference for Curved Contours in Humans and Great Apes. PLOS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0141106 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141106
Xu, L., Yu, F., & Ding, X. (2020). Circular-Looking Makes Green-Buying: How Brand Logo Shapes Influence Green Consumption. Sustainability, 12(5), 1791. doi:10.3390/su12051791 https://doi.org/10.3390/su12051791
Zhang, Y., Feick, L., & Price, L. J. (2006). The Impact of Self-Construal on Aesthetic Preference for Angular Versus Rounded Shapes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(6), 794-805. doi:10.1177/0146167206286626 https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167206286626