No. 3.
The design marked No. 3 is quite striking, but if you look at it awhile you begin to see defects in it. The black initial bars are too strong and glaring. They push the rest of the design out of the picture. This defect was cured by putting the initial bars in white with the sole of the shoe in black, and making the background darker. By doing this, the proper balance between white and black was obtained.
No. 4.
The design shown in No. 4 is the finished trade-mark.
In devising a trade-mark, any one who does not clearly keep the requirements of the law in mind is likely to fall into one or another of three classes of errors.
First, there is a natural tendency to make a trade-mark descriptive, to insert in the wording some phrase like "Best Quality", "Sold the World Over", or "Fits the Figure" or "Good for Children"—all of which are descriptive phrases. You cannot register or protect an advertisement used as a trade-mark, and such phrases are advertisements. A trade-mark is a thing to be advertised. It must not be an advertisement itself.
Second, there is a tendency on the part of many advertisers to incorporate their own names into their trade-marks. This often leads to interminable and costly litigation.
Third, there is a tendency among manufacturers to select geographical terms as their trade-marks, to use the name of the towns or cities where their plants are located, or the names of states, or of rivers or oceans. The trade-name, "Baltimore" hosiery, has a good sound, and the word "Baltimore" is easily remembered, simple and euphonious. But if you are a hosiery manufacturer, and adopt it, you do so at your peril, even if you do business in Baltimore. You cannot protect it against any other manufacturer of hosiery who has a plant in Baltimore, even on the grounds of unfair competition, unless you have used the name exclusively, and for such a long period of time, that it has lost most of its geographical sense in the hosiery trade, and has developed into a word of restricted meaning in that line of business.