05.09.07
Spot the logo

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It doesn’t seem to be cool to design logos. Spend any time at any student show and you’ll see viral ads, YouTube stings, type animations, blind-embossed handmade books, animated hand made type blind-embossed onto YouTube stings, you name it really. But you’ll search high and low for a student fresh out of college who seems interested in logos. In fact you’ll struggle to spot a logo, full-stop.

This has always struck me as a bit odd. Whilst some parts of graphic design fluctuate in fortune (most notably the last decade’s shift from print to pixels), branding still remains. Companies, institutions, organisations, cities, charities, even countries need brands, and brands need logos (most of the time). And we can discuss flexible identity until we’re blue in the face but at the end of the day the client will nearly always ask ‘where’s the black and white logo then?’

So it’s perplexing that students don’t study it and courses don’t teach it. If they do they’re perpetually locked in some 80s pun/gag/wit/whimsy/self-perpetuating loop of recycled ideas that does more harm than good.

Maybe it really isn’t cool. Maybe they don’t care. But if I pointed out that branding is the only sector impervious to the ebbs and flows of the market, they’d soon change their minds when they see jobs at the end of it.

Perhaps you can blame some of this on publishers - a sector seemingly falling over itself to produce endless vanity monographs or ‘ten thousand ways to use uncoated paper’ style how-to books. But if you wanted to bulk out your logo shelf, pickings have been slim. Phaidon’s Marks of Excellence must have seemed like a good idea in the editorial meeting but gathers dust on the shelves. The los/dos/tres/whatever logos series is chronically hampered by an obsession with fashion graphics, not logos that last.

For practising designers, an up-to-date collection has been missing, if only to check that the idea on your screen hasn’t been done before (a serious issue in an increasingly litigious climate).

Luckily Laurence King have seen this gap in the market and have commissioned Logo by Michael Evamy. A nice, thick, objective, sort-of-scientific tome, full of up-to-date work (as well a good smattering of the obligatory classics). Most of the logos are subjected to the black and white test, and most of them survive. Sure, the selections are a bit UK/USA-centric, but with a UK based editorial and design team that was inevitable, and probably reflects the vast proportion of intended sales. There’s a bit of a bias towards the younger, groovier UK outfits, but again, not such a bad thing.

I’m sure there’s some great ID work being done in Asia, but there’s not that much here. But this, to be fair, is a minor quibble – most of the good logos you’ve seen over the last twenty years have made the cut. Not many dodgy ones. Not too much filler.

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I wonder if too many design books have been produced recently with an ‘invite 1,000 designers to contribute then they’ll have to buy the book’ subtext, but here the editorial hand seems to have been much firmer. It’s rare for these types of books to feature multiple selections from one company, but just a quick scan of the index shows that Evamy had no reservations about asking Chermayeff and Geismar for just about everything they’ve ever done, and sure enough 40 or so of them of them are recorded here. That’s fair enough – great identity design shouldn’t be limited to some absurd ‘3 projects per company’ rule, or suchlike.

The books designer’s, Spin, have avoided the temptation to cram the book with their work, which was the right decision, since any whiff of vanity publishing immediately devalues the gravitas of a book like this. (Incidentally the kings of the ‘PR by stealth’ approach remain The Partners who managed to cram about 50 of their own projects into A smile in the mind. Remarkable.)

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Some of the logos are produced in colour, but not many. I thought that might limit the books appeal, but it makes you concentrates on the logos’ form. The sections, as ever with books like this, are a little arbitrary and end up clumping similar logos together. This does make for some interesting juxtapositions, and adds to the entertainment value, that’s for sure.

You’re certain to spot similarities. You may even spot things that are remarkably close to things you’ve thought of, or done. In my case, some old ‘bottom-drawer’ ideas that could have re-surfaced can now be ripped up because someone (usually Chermayeff and Geismar) has got there already. Damn them.

The book doesn’t seem to have any major ambitions to unpick the strategic groundwork that will have preceded many of the more recent projects, other than some carefully worded, accurate and often insightful captions. On balance, that’s probably the right decision: if student designers are ever going to enjoy this end of the business they need to be greatly excited by great work, and quickly. Not bogged down in tedious strategic discussions, however important they may have become - we’ll leave the news that these kind of projects sometimes take 2 years to complete for another day, I think.

Perhaps nothing can make logo design cool again? Who knows. But in its rarified, nu-swiss, old-Graphis-annual sort of way, this may well be the book to do it.

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