logo – Miscellaneous Details

Keep on truckin’

Imagine the patience needed for this photography project.

Alphabet Truck – Eric Tabuchi
With this edition of Alphabet Truck, Eric Tabuchi completes a work representing several thousands of kilometers traversed over these past four years.

Nostalgic for a better future

NASA’s ‘worm’ logo lay dormant for 28 years. So why are people so obsessed with it? – Fast Company
Danne says these simple, elegant, and versatile visual elements also underscore a deeper meaning. “NASA is very romantic and sexy,” he says. Especially when compared to other government agencies, like the Department of Transportation. “They both have motion built into their matrix, but NASA is the only one that has adventure and exploration.” It represents an entity that takes humans to the furthest possible realms; In just four letters, it “personifies innovation and moving ahead.”

It’s all in the details

These images from Cássio Vasconcellos remind me of Pelle Cass’s work, shared previously. I wonder if ‘painstaking photography’ is its own genre yet.

Amazing collective photography in solitary times – Print
“Vasconcellos’ compositions were painstakingly assembled through hundreds of aerial shots taken over the course of a decade,” the project details. “The outcome is a striking body of work, which was reinterpreted by the designer in the context of what ‘distancing’ means in pandemic times.” The images, fascinating in their own right, are even more fascinating with our newfound pandemic perspective.
Fantastical overclocked urban scenes by Cássio Vasconcellos – Kottke
These are great onscreen, but I’d love to see them in person someday. I could imagine looking at the highways one for hours, zooming in and out on all the details.

More info on his website.

Collectives – Cássio Vasconcellos
In this series, Vasconcellos instigates a visual debate on the urban chaos of modern civilization by exploring jam-packed situations typical of our society: crowded beaches; cluttered car parking lots; motorcycle gatherings; huge aircraft boneyards in the US; masses of people; and the truck pandemonium in São Paulo’s Ceasa, Latin America’s largest municipal fresh food wholesale market.

This sequence from the series, Noise, is terrifying, I think.

How about something less agoraphobic but still full of hidden detail.

Hundreds of symbols from prehistory to modern day comprise a gold ‘S’ screenprint by Seb Lester – Colossal
Centered on the letter “S,” an anachronistic print from Seb Lester (previously) blends hundreds of symbols into one embellished form. Rendered in metallic on black paper, the typographic piece captures an incredibly long timeline, from prehistory to the Dark Ages to the Renaissance to present day. Look closely and you’ll spot snippets of cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics, emojis, and modern logos.

What’s in a name? #5

Every year, millions of people flock to the Netherlands, or more precisely, to just one part of it: Holland. In an effort to manage overtourism, the entire country is rebranding.

Why the Netherlands is ditching Holland as its nickname – Quartz
The government of the Netherlands has a message for the world: There’s more to our country than just Holland.

To ensure nobody forgets it, the country says it will stop using Holland as its nickname come January. The move, which comes ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the Eurovision Song Contest (which the Netherlands will host this year), is part of a €200,000 ($223,000) rebranding campaign to update the country’s international image.

The Netherlands reveals new identity and drops ‘Holland’ for good – Design Week
While the old logo featured an expressively drawn tulip, the new logo embeds the Dutch icon in a more subtle way through the use of negative space.

The N and L lettering forms a silhouette of the tulip’s petals. “The logo is intriguing, but at the same time solid and straight to the point,” Studio Dumbar tells Design Week.

In this way, the logo is “a true reflection of the Dutch mentality”, according to the studio.

Light at the end of the Tube tunnel

The country might feel a little gloomier and more stupid now but, if this piece of public art/graphic design/brand marketing is anything to go by, it’s not all bad.

The London Underground logo gets an inspired redesign – Fast Company
British-Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong has reimagined the traditional transit symbol to reflect the rich and diverse African diaspora that makes up roughly 44% of London’s population. …

In an effort to celebrate not only his Ghanaian heritage but also other African and Caribbean countries, the artist has reimagined the British flag-colored bar-and-circle as a vivid mix of green, black, and red—the colors of the Pan African flag, representing the history of the land, the people, and bloodshed, respectively. A warm and buttery shade of yellow also finds its way into Achiampong’s designs; his use of this golden color is meant to suggest a bright and prosperous future for the diaspora and the UK, more broadly. …

In a country like the UK, which has a history as a violent, colonial power on the continent of Africa, Achiampong’s quest to look backward in order to move forward on a diverse and united front is particularly poignant. For centuries, the impact African people and their culture has had on European society has been erased from narratives about progress. Through Achiampong’s vision, the merged symbols (his flag and London’s transit logo) rewrite the story as a shared one.

A long time ago, a logo far far away

The reviews for the upcoming Star Wars movie are now appearing, ahead of its general release tomorrow. Will it live up to the hype? Is ‘fan service’ a thing, now? Which spelling of cannon should I be using?

But never mind all that now. Let’s go back to the beginning, and take a look at the evolution of the franchise’s logo (though back in 1977, of course, they probably wouldn’t have used that word), with this wonderful collection of images, care of Alex Jay’s typography blog.

Anatomy of a logo: Star Wars
During the film’s pre-production, a decal was produced. … “It was done as a symbol for the film—to go on film cans and letters. George [Lucas] had had one for American Graffiti, and wanted one for Star Wars.”

Lucas referred to the crawl used in the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials. … Dan Perri designed a logo, with a vanishing point, for the opening crawl, but it was not used. Instead, it appeared in print on posters and advertisements.

Suzy Rice, who had just been hired as an art director, remembers the job well. She recalls that the design directive given by Lucas was that the logo should look “very fascist.”

“I’d been reading a book the night before the meeting with George Lucas,” she says, “a book about German type design and the historical origins of some of the popular typefaces used today—how they developed into what we see and use in the present.” After Lucas described the kind of visual element he was seeking, “I returned to the office and used what I reckoned to be the most ‘fascist’ typeface I could think of: Helvetica Black.”

Suzy Rice’s original logo was tweaked a little by another designer, Joe Johnston. You can see that both versions have accidentally made their way onto this book cover; Rice’s original on the back, Johnston’s on the front. (And Luke and Darth Vader are left-handed now?)

Alex has gathered together a fantastic range of 70s and 80s publicity material, for the movies, books, games, comics, posters, calendars etc etc. You must check it all out.

And when you’ve finished, check out what this strange tale would look like if it took place, not long ago in a galaxy far away, but in a 1980s high school.

Presidential logos?

Let’s have a break from UK politics for a moment, and take a look over the Atlantic.

The race to be the Democratic presidential candidate is now down from 23 to 11, and here is how The Center for American Politics and Design orders their branding.

Ranking the 11 Democratic candidates, by their logos alone
7. JOE BIDEN. Say it ain’t so, Joe. This logo may or may not look like it has a groping hand inside of it. But this side note has nothing to do with our expert’s critique. No, they’re more concerned that Biden’s logo looks too traditional.

1. CORY BOOKER. When I first received the ranked list from the Center, I honestly wasn’t sure if I was reading it in the right order. Was Booker first . . . or last? In fact, Booker’s stacked, two-block, blue and red logo, which reads “Cory” and “2020,” received the highest scores from every judge but one.

More to disability than meets the eye

We’ve had that wheelchair symbol for 50 years now, but that’s not really applicable for the vast majority of people with disabilities.

These designers have reimagined the ‘wheelchair symbol’ to include invisible disabilities
50 years on from the release of the International Symbol of Access, a new set of icons are launched to help highlight invisible disabilities. […]

Visability93 is a project designed to spot a spotlight on the 93% of the disabled population who aren’t wheelchair users, and who could be being prevented from accessing the services they need on a daily basis, including car parking spaces, restrooms and priority seating, because they do not appear to have a disability.

I don’t think it’s the designers’ intention that these symbols are used in exactly the same way as the wheelchair one — one car parking space for someone with Lupus, one for someone with systemic scleroderma, one for IBS sufferers, another for people with depression or Crohn’s or diabetes and so on and so on. Rather, that they will start a conversation around the visual language we use and see to depict disability.