The acne of design

One of the first projects I did for IBM I was called into a senior executive's office at Ogilvy. My offense? I changed the color of the register mark after IBM so that it matched the logo -- IBM blue.

My instincts were right by my application was wrong.

Register marks, copyright marks, and the rest… they are important and do serve a purpose. However, they don't need to take over your message.

Some good go-bys from font.com
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For ®s, TMs and SMs:

• At text sizes, these symbols should be little smaller than half the x-height (height of lowercase) of your text.
• As your text gets larger, the symbols should become proportionately smaller, especially in headlines

For ©s: 

• When it appears after text (such as a company name), the symbol should be a little smaller than half of the x-height (heigh of lowercase) of your text.
• When it appears before a year (as in ©2013), match the symbol size to the size of the first numeral. 

In "March of the Doohickeys" an article by Paul Rapp, a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property law, you can read about the purpose of all of these extra doodads.

Bottom line: the marks need to be legible but not overbearing and not a design element of your logo. So if you are designing a bill board, be sure to scale down the size of the register mark accordingly … it doesn't have to be the size of a stop sign. And if you are creating a logo for an LLC my recommendation is to make it look like a "mark" versus part of the name. And always always follow the brand guidelines.

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