Logo – Typedeck

Retro logo monograms

Bold and minimal with a retro aesthetic. Logo monograms for your viewing pleasure.

I came across this Flickr collection called Retro Logo Goodness. I think, as the name suggests, the collector features logos with a retro aesthetic, not necessarily old logos. In fact, I’m not even sure that all of them are logos for real companies…

Anyway, I’m a bit of a sucker for the bold and minimal, like those vintage Scandinavian logos I posted a while back, so the ones that really stood out to me are the monograms where letters are represented as a unified symbol:

Kimberly-Clark Corporation

1R Radiators

Marcona Corporation

Keystone International Inc.

Barkow Petroleum

Channel 7 (ABC)

The Growth Fund of America

United Engineers

Sierra Corporation

Applied Power

Ed Nacional

Ed manages to find that golden midway: minimalist yet richly detailed, subtle yet bold, monochrome and colourful.

I have long been an admirer of Ed Nacional’s work. A freelance designer form Brooklyn NYC, Ed manages to find that golden midway: minimalist yet richly detailed, subtle yet bold, monochrome and colourful.

See more at ednacional.com.

Rainy Day identity

I enjoy this rather literal identity for Rainy Day designed by Toko, a Dutch studio Based in Sydney, Australia. The result is, as they put it, “almost too obvious but too good to ignore”.

Found via Typeverything.

Edgeboard identity

Hampus Jageland, a Swedish designer based in Paris, designed this simple and clever identity for Edgeboard – an equally simple and clever product…

Hampus Jageland, a Swedish designer based in Paris, designed this simple and clever identity for Edgeboard – an equally simple and clever product. I love the thinking behind it and the way the logo interacts with its environment. The tightly kerned bold geometric lettering doesn’t hurt either.

Edgeboard are handmade chopping boards from the Northern Beaches in NSW that possess a special feature; an edge which you use to slide off the chopped food against.

Friday find: Scandinavian logos from the 1960s & 70s

Great collection of beautifully scanned logos originating in Scandinavia during the 1960s and 70s.

Aren’t these great? Interesting how the logos not only fall within a very narrow palette of colours – with a definite preference for blues and reds – they also share a similar aesthetic quality. How can one describe it… maybe “noble yet understated”?

From a Flickr set by Oliver Tomas where you can see even more.

50 USA state mottos & 10,000 Minnesota lake logos

I recently happened upon two interesting projects sharing several similarities; both are about geographic regions in the USA, both are typographically executed and both are rather ambitious…

1. 50 and 50

Fifty illustrators from across the United States of America each visually interpreted the motto of their own state. The resulting gallery has a nice cohesive feel thanks to a common duotone palette. I don’t know if there were any other particular guidelines in the brief, but it’s interesting to see that many of them feature similar executions like hand-drawn type, misregistered colours and grainy textures. At a glance one might even assume that they were all done by the same person!

The 50 and 50 project was the idea of Dan Cassaro, the force behind one-man studio Young Jerks in Brooklyn, New York. Judging by the post archive, the project was completed in April 2011. Prints are now available from Society6.

Here are a couple of the more delightful results:

2. Branding 10,000 Lakes

Nicole Meyer of Minnesota aka The Land of 10,000 Lakes has embarked on an outrageous quest to design a logo for each of the state’s lakes. Why?

Lake logos have a tendency to be, well, fairly ugly. This project was created to rethink what they could be. One Minnesota Lake. One Logo. Every day. Should only take a little over 27 years to hit ’em all.

Follow Nicole’s progress at Branding 10,000 Lakes. Here are a few examples of the 130-odd she has created so far:

Lovely word marks by Kiss Miklós

Kiss Miklós from Hungary has way too much good work in his portfolio.

Kiss Miklós of Budapest has way too much good stuff in his portfolio for a designer only thirty years of age. His work cuts across various fields including architecture, fine art and information design, but to me the super clean typographic identity marks stand out most. Take a look:

Found via IdN. See more of Miklós’s work on Behance.

A minimalist packaging design experiment

Mehmet Gözetlik of Istanbul, Turkey, is Executive Art Director and Co-Founder of Antrepo, a multidisciplinary design collective. His exploration in minimalist packaging has been receiving some attention lately.

At first, his objective was to see what effect it would have to gradually remove all elements from the packaging design of global brands except for the logo. A couple of months later Gözetlik revisited the idea by taking it a step further and replacing the logo using a single font, Helvetica Neue Bold.

Gözetlik notes that these explorations are not proposals for new packaging design, but rather an analysis of unnecessary elements present in the current solutions. This project does not aim to reach conclusions, so I assume its purpose is to spark some debate.

Here are my thoughts:

A cookie-cutter solution for packaging design is unrealistic and I’m willing to bet that sales figures will reflect this. At the very core lies a relationship between just two parties, the seller and the buyer. The role of packaging design is communication. The best design solution is one which fulfills the role of clearly conveying the necessary information about the product from the seller to the buyer. Any element of the design aiding this communication is adding value, and should therefore stay. On the other hand, anything compromising the clarity of information is a liability to the brand and should be removed.

By reducing graphic design to the bare minimum, this experiment really highlights how heavily communication relies on other properties of packaging such as size, shape, material and colour. The fourth level of simplification is sufficient only in cases where information is successfully conveyed by a combination of type and the physical properties of the container without sacrificing brand recognition.

Examples where the fourth level could work are Tabasco, Evian and Duracell. In other cases I would argue that going beyond even the second level of simplification compromises clear communication, for example M&M’s and Smint.

In conclusion, I think this is a fantastic mental exercise to go through in every design task, finding that threshold between clutter and obscurity.

See the evolution from current packaging (left) to minimal solution (right) for a few of the brands:

Found via ISO50. See more of Antrepo’s work on Flickr and Behance.

You only need one font on the Moon

A look at the typography employed in the 2009 sci-fi thriller Moon.

Last weekend I rented the 2009 sci-fi thriller Moon (yes, I still rent DVDs from the video store like it’s 1999 baby!). Good movie by the way, if you have not seen it, you should. Director Duncan Jones is quoted saying the film was styled to pay homage to similar movies from the 1970s and 80s.

The overall aesthetic decision was to keep a clean, retro feel and deliberately keep away from anything that looked too “high-tech”. – Gavin Rothery

It is quite fitting then, that head of Moon’s graphic design team Gavin Rothery entrusted the majority of the typographic details to a stalwart of 70s science fiction, Eurostile. However, Jones claims that the font used is called Microstyle…

Eurostile was released in 1962 by Italian type designer Aldo Novarese, based on an earlier caps-only font called Microgramma. The only info I am able to find on “Microstyle” is that it’s a variation of Eurostile and Microgramma, so let’s just treat it as the same thing ok?

Here are some examples of the typography in Moon.

Interior of the Sarang Moon Base:

Gerty, the robotic assist:

Fire control graphic:

Digital monitor displays:

Mission badges on the space suits:

Lunar Industries Ltd. logo:

More sources:

Friday find: Atari logo

The Atari logo, sometimes referred to as the “Fuji” symbol, was designed at the company’s inception in 1972 by California based George Opperman.

The Atari logo was designed at the company’s inception in 1972 by California based George Opperman. Sometimes referred to as the “Fuji” symbol, the icon is both a stylised A and a representation of two opposing video game players playing Pong, Atari’s best seller at the time.

Via Art of the Arcade.

Friday find: Get Out There by David Sackville

I love it, and no doubt you have seen it many times before. This “Get Out There” logo is always popping up on design and inspiration sites, but always without attribution. I decided to fix that…

I love it, and no doubt you have seen it many times before. This “Get Out There” logo is always popping up on design and inspiration sites, but always without attribution. I decided to fix that. It took a little digging around on the old Google machine, but I finally found the man responsible…

Ladies and gentlemen, David Sackville from Brisbane, Australia!

In his own words:

A brand concept I worked on for Get Out There but unfortunately was never incorporated. I’m quite proud of it as it was drawn completely in vector without any physical drawing. This is because I suffer from a rare but harmless condition which causes my hands to shake uncontrollably at times, meaning that a mouse suits me far better than a pen. It then went on to become quite a favourite on well visited sites such as Dropular & FFFFound after I posted it online.

See more of David’s work on his website and his Cargo portfolio.

Diet Coke launches bold new can design

I know I’m quite late to the party on this one, but it’s still noteworthy when a global brand like Diet Coke takes design risks. Launched this month, apparently this can is a limited edition. Does that perhaps imply that Coca-Cola is not completely confident in the new design? I’m willing to bet that these will be pulled from the shelves at the first hint of sales dropping.

It’s a refreshing and purely typographic approach, take a look:

Already in stores:

Branded mini fridges:

And I’m not sure what the deal is with this one, maybe an alternate design that never made it to final approval (the orientation of the logo is different). Found on Creative Review:

For more on the topic of Diet Coke’s new look: