Posts Tagged ‘logos’
“Nothing is more memorable than truth beautifully told”*…
If physicists and mathematicians can’t be rock stars, they can at least have rock star logos. Dr. Prateek Lala, a physician and amateur calligrapher from Toronto has obliged with 50 nifty “scientific typographics” of important cosmologists and scientists through the ages.
Inspired by the “type biographies” of Indian graphic designer Kapil Bhagat, Lala designed his logos to make the lives and discoveries of various scientists more engaging and more immediately relatable to students.
Dr. Lala’s work was for a poster that was published in the latest issue of Inside The Perimeter, the official magazine of Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. One can subscribe to the magazine by email for free here.
Meantime, one can read the backstory, and see many more of Dr. L’s lyrical logos at CoDesign.
* Rick Julian
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As we ponder personal branding, we might send dynamic birthday greetings to Daniel Bernoulli; he was born on this date in 1700. One of the several prominent mathematicians and physicists in the Swiss Bernoulli family, Daniel is best remembered for or his applications of mathematics to mechanics, especially fluid mechanics, and for his pioneering work in probability and statistics. His name is commemorated in the Bernoulli principle, a particular example of the conservation of energy, which describes the mathematics of the mechanism underlying the operation of two important technologies of the 20th century: the carburetor and the airplane wing.
A contemporary and close friend of Leonhard Euler (see above), Bernoulli was the son of Johann Bernoulli (one of the early developers of calculus), nephew of Jakob Bernoulli (who was the first to discover the theory of probability), and the brother of Johann II (an expert on magnetism and the propagation of light). Daniel is said to have had a bad relationship with his father: when they tied for first place in a scientific contest at the University of Paris, Johann, unable to bear the “shame” of being compared as Daniel’s equal, banned Daniel from his house. Johann Bernoulli then plagiarized some key ideas from Daniel’s book Hydrodynamica in his own book Hydraulica, which he backdated to before Hydrodynamica. Despite Daniel’s attempts at reconciliation, his father carried the grudge until his death.
I’m so blue…
Readers can try their hands at recognizing the identifying hues of tech brands, NFL teams, and NHL clubs at Name that Blue.
[TotH to @mattiekahn]
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As we cogitate on color, we might recall that it was on this date in 2001 that energy high-flyer Enron (which had blue, among other colors, in its logo) declared bankruptcy. The company, to that point a widely-cited exemplar effective corporate management (Fortune named it “America’s Most Innovative Company” six years in a row), turned out to have been innovative in an altogether different way: it was revealed that Enron’s performance– it claimed revenues of nearly $101 billion during 2000– was largely the product of institutionalized, systematic, and stealthily-executed accounting fraud. In the aftermath, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed; Arthur Andersen, the auditing firm that certified Enron’s results (and was, in the most charitable construction, asleep at the switch) went out of business; 11 financial institutions (among them, Deutsche Bank and Citicorp) paid over $20 billion dollars into the bankruptcy creditors’ account in recompense for having colluded with management… and “Enron” became synonymous with “corporate fraud and corruption.”
Deft Metal…
Since 1977, Christophe Szpadjel has designed over 7,000 logos for black metal bands around the world, including Emperor, Moonspell, Old Man’s Child, and Arcturus. Now he’s applied his creative vision to Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and more…
Browse more of Christolphe’s “translations” at CoDesign’s “11 famous Companies Rebranded as Black Metal Bands.”
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As we reach for a bat, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jone, and John Bonham–Led Zeppelin– signed with Atlantic Records. Manager Peter Grant had flown to New York City in October, 1968 with the master tapes of “Led Zeppelin I” to meet Ahmet Ertegun, the label’s owner and founder, and his close colleague Jerry Wexler. Unbeknownst to Grant, Dusty Springfield had already put in a good word for the group to Wexler while recording “Dusty in Memphis” the previous month. (Springfield was a friend of LZ bassist John Paul Jones, who had spent time as a member of her touring backup band.)
Atlantic had been devoted largely to blues and jazz, but had already had success with one former Yardbirds colleague of Jimmy Page’s– Eric Clapton and his group Cream– but Cream was falling apart and the label was looking for a replacement. Ertegun and Wexler loved the tape, and offered a $149,000 advance. Page had financed the album entirely, so had the final say; as it was the biggest deal of its kind ever offered a new band, he agreed.
“It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense….”*
What people really think…
Many, many more at Honest Slogans.
* Mark Twain
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As we appreciate the eternal relevance of “caveat emptor,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1961 that Brian Epstein, a lapsed actor who’d studied at RADA with Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, and Susannah York, but returned to Liverpool to run his family’s record store, visited the Cavern Club… where he first heard The Beatles. Smitten, he signed the group to a management contract, shepherded the group through a series of unsuccessful record company pitches before convincing George Martin of EMI to sign them, and oversaw their meteoric rise until his death in 1967. As Paul McCartney observed, “If anyone was the Fifth Beatle, it was Brian.”
Brian and the boys
The Land of 10,000 Logos…
Designer Nicole Meyer has set herself a heroic– that’s to say, Herculean– task:
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.
Check in on her progress-to-date at Branding 10,000 Lakes.
As we chose our vacation spots, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 that avid outdoorsman and staunch conservationist President Theodore Roosevelt designated the Grand Canyon a National Monument. Land and mining claim holders blocked efforts to reclassify the Canyon as a U.S. National Park for 11 more years. But Grand Canyon National Park was finally established as the 17th U.S. National Park by an Act of Congress signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in early 1919.
TR on Jacob’s Ladder, Bright Angel Trail (source)
Faux Logo…
Luis Gispert was photographing car interiors when he stumbled upon a kitschy white Cadillac Escalade, its seats upholstered in fake material from Takashi Murakami’s 2009 collaboration with Louis Vuitton. While the owner showed off his pimped-out ride, the wheels turned in Gispert’s head. “I figured there had to be so many cars with counterfeit interiors”…
This inspired a two-year “obsessive quest” to document a subculture of people crafting custom designs from counterfeit materials. Gispert attended car shows across the country and captured interiors bedazzled with logos, from a Burberry-upholstered BMW to a Gucci-themed Mercedes. Honing in on the culture itself brought Gispert to more-intimate spaces, like the home of a Florida-based drug dealer, whose bedroom was decorated with Versace’s signature Greek Key motif. Gispert’s photographic journey is the subject of an upcoming solo exhibition, Decepcion, at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York [open now]…
He spent a year capturing cars before turning his lens on the owners themselves—many of whom had closets filled with backpacks, sneakers, and jackets custom-made from fake designer materials. Gispert’s project evolved to incorporate portraits of men and women modeling counterfeit fashion, such as a DJ clad in a pleather MCM jumpsuit…
Designer customization was born in the early 1980s, when a haberdasher named Dapper Dan began selling one-of-a-kind Louis Vuitton boots and $8,000 custom Gucci jackets out of his boutique in Harlem. “He was likely cutting up actual Gucci bags and using the materials to make jackets and luxury car interiors,” said Gispert. Dapper Dan’s clientele consisted of drug dealers—until LL Cool J and Mike Tyson took the street trend mainstream…
Unlike Canal Street vendors, Gispert’s subjects aren’t trying to pass off their creations as authentic. “These people are appropriating the material, the actual logos and fabrics, but they’re not trying to mimic high fashion,” he explained. One photograph from the series features a woman wearing a Louis Vuitton dress that Gispert described as “some kind of nightgown, flamenco hybrid.” It looks nothing like Louis Vuitton couture, yet it’s splattered with the designer’s cult logo. “In a way these people are hijacking signs of wealth, bastardizing logos and turning them into something completely unique.”
Read the entire tale at The Daily Beast, and see a selection of Gispert’s arresting photos on his site.
As we reckon with the collision of High and Low, we might wish a fashionable Happy Birthday to Coco Chanel’s greatest rival, Elsa Schiaparelli; she was born in Rome on this date in 1890. Schiaparelli, who collaborated with artists including Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, and Alberto Giacometti to dress socialites (like Daisy Fellowes) and celebrities (like Mae West) was frequently dismissed by Chanel as “that Italian artist who makes clothes.” While Schiaparelli is not as well remembered as Chanel, Schiaparelli made lasting contributions to fashion: she created wraparound dresses decades before Diane von Furstenberg and crumpled up rayon 50 years before Issey Miyake’s pleats and crinkles; she created the first evening-dress with a jacket and the first clothes with visible zippers. But her most fundamental contribution to couture was surely the sense of fun– of playfulness and “anything goes”– that she shared with her Dadaist and Surrealist friends.
The Quest for Verisimilitude…
Brandalism: Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It’s yours to take, rearrange and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.”
— Banksy (Wall and Piece)
The good folks at Behance pondered the ways that familiar logos might be revised better to reflect their subject’s essence…
More at “Honest Logos.”
As we wonder if it can be printed on a tee shirt, we might recall that it was on this date in 1864 that the first instance of mass unsolicited electronic commercial communication occurred. As The Economist recounts: “several British politicians were disturbed by a knock at the door and the delivery of a telegram—a most unusual occurrence at such a late hour. Had war broken out? Had the queen been taken ill? They ripped open the envelopes and were surprised to find a message relating not to some national calamity, but to dentistry. Messrs Gabriel, of 27 Harley Street, advised that their dental practice would be open from 10am to 5pm until October. Infuriated, some of the recipients of this unsolicited message wrote to the Times. ‘I have never had any dealings with Messrs Gabriel,’ thundered one of them, ‘and beg to know by what right do they disturb me by a telegram which is simply the medium of advertisement?’ The Times helpfully reprinted the offending telegram, providing its senders with further free publicity. This was, notes Matthew Sweet, a historian, the first example of what is known today as ‘spam’.”
