06.04.07
Now you see it...

In a recent meeting, as we presented our work for insurance company MORE TH>N, we realised that it had only just dawned on the potential client that we had placed a ‘more than’ symbol into the word. Now, it’s fair to say that the more than/greater than keystroke isn’t a particularly famous mathematical symbol and probably now has more relevance in html code but it is basic algebra, after all.

It made us wonder how many times the general public must simply skip over the things that we graphic designers prevaricate over. We really had intended people to see the ‘>’ as a more than sign, and thought it might prove to be a useful mnemonic device. In research most saw it, and could still read the logo (although what else those two words could possibly spell remained unexplained by the idiot researchers). Mind you, some people see the ‘h’ in our Shelter logo as a roof and a chimney – we don’t, we just see a roof. Sorry.

Designers have been planting these typographic tricks into logos for some time – one of the all-time classics must be the example of Q8, developed for Kuwait Petroleum (as in Ku-eight – get it?). A remarkable piece of salesmanship on the part of the designers really given that Q8 predominantly operate in Europe where the phonetic joke doesn’t quite fly. (Q8 is pronounced kuuy-acht in Dutch, for example).

Probably the cleverest typographic twist of the last decade has to be the Fedex logo, with its hidden device. Many people simply don’t see it. But present it to a group of students, point it out and there’s an audible ‘ahhh’ as half the room suddenly see the arrow that its designer Lindon Leader (then at Landor) so judiciously placed between the ‘e’ and ‘x’ of the logo. Perhaps worried about the then ubiquity of arrows in ‘communications’ graphics, they preferred to keep it a ‘hidden bonus’. As Leader himself has said of his creation, ‘punchlines that need to be explained are neither funny nor memorable’.

Needless to say, the man who didn’t see the ‘>’ didn’t give us the job. Neither funny, memorable nor hired.

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