Actually, it is highly likely that among the millions of existing apps, many already pre-date your initials! Illustration 6: Alphabet soup.īrands with short names or multi-letter abbreviations can safely choose them as a logo and count themselves lucky. Even if your “initial-mark” does get accepted, you will not be able to avoid use of the same letter by a different app. Trademark offices in many countries refuse trademarks for single letters. The registered brand name does not provide protection for its initials. While this may be an understandable solution for brands with high pre-existing brand awareness, it is a bad strategy from a legal protection perspective. A common solution is to use the brand name’s first letter in a specific font or style. Limited space is a particular constraint for icon design: brand names are often too long to include. Illustration 5: Category colors weakening trademark strength: Communication and Taxi services. Staying away from the pack will guarantee enhanced distinctiveness, and thus trademark strength. Stand out from the competition and choose one or more original colors as part of the mark.Ĭertain colors have become common identifiers for particular categories, for example green for communication apps and yellow for taxi apps. Use distinctive colors Illustration 4: DistinctiveĬolors are powerful identifiers and can contribute significantly to the power of trademarks.
Illustration 3: Examples of strong intrinsic distinctiveness.
So why create a handicap from the start? The strongest trademarks are original logos, unrelated to the services provided. But that is due to intensive use and massive global attention, the luck that only a handful of companies will have. It doesn’t mean that descriptive app icons cannot function as trademarks at all, as testified by the fact that most people will recognize the icon for WhatsApp above.
#ROUNDED CORNER APP ICON GENERATOR REGISTRATION#
Apart from the distinctiveness issue, a rationale for excluding such elements from registration as trademarks is that registration would give an unjustified monopoly to a single market player. This condition is somewhat counter-intuitive, as many marketers consider descriptive elements as logical entry points to guide consumers. Illustration 2: Examples of visual descriptiveness. It is therefore also unfit to function as a trademark, or will be weak and difficult to defend at best.
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