Conveying words into a thoughtfully designed graphic is not as simple as choosing a shape and adding some words. Creating a symbol that succinctly represents your organization, its values/goals, and personality can be a rather difficult task, sometimes leading to unwanted results. Quite often they can leave a lot of room for misinterpretation due to sexual connotations. Although laughable, these are very REAL logos that give off the wrong idea:

1) I assume that this logo for the Arlington Pediatric Center is meant to show that children are in good hands. Now, I don’t think it’s horrible, but given a person’s frame of mind this can be seen as something else.

2) Ah… the Computer Doctors. I definitely see what they were trying to accomplish, but with the way the mouse is illustrated they definitely missed the point and only got to the “tip” of the solution (Thank you, Thank you… I’m here all week).

3) Based off what I see from their logo I do NOT want to know what is in their sauce.

4) It’s easy to see that this is meant to be an Asian-style house set with a red-rising sun in the background. However, given the color scheme, your eyes are immediately drawn to the red with the curved rooftop, and then… ouch. I don’t know how that red person is ever going to have that removed.

5-6) Ugh… What were they thinking? Maybe as a guy I just can’t get past what these letters seem to depict. Lesson: If you arbitrarily add circles to a letter in an attempt to make a logo, you get stick figure porn.

Needless to say, these logos are the direct result of poor judgment. Avoid these mishaps by following a diligent design process and getting some feedback from your colleagues and stakeholders.