Posts Tagged ‘logos’
“a publisher’s emblem or imprint, especially one on the title page or spine of a book”*…
Knowing a book (or its publisher anyway) by its cover (art)…
Colophons started out as short statements providing a book’s publication info—details like where and who and when. Those statements often included little emblems, logos, which are now also referred to as colophons (from the Greek kolophōn, meaning “summit, final touch”), and they slowly made their way to the spines of books. Like tattoos or mascots, many of these logos depict animals, often fish (or dolphins): FSG, Anchor Doubleday, Aldine Press, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Birds are another well-represented category: Penguin, Bantam, Norton, and Europa Editions, to name a few. So if you’re going to be judging a book by its cover (you’re probably kidding yourself if you think you don’t) then you better start factoring in the colophon as well.
These symbols are often taken for granted because most readers are, understandably, less familiar with publishers than writers or booksellers are, but they have a totemic quality to them that’s worthy of consideration, functioning not just as trademarks but as little windows into the personalities of the publishing houses and the people who run them. The following list is a very unofficial ranking of some of the more interesting colophons, the ones that take risks or have more of an emphasis on design, something unique about them, that offer subtle clues as to what awaits us inside…
“An Unofficial Ranking of Publishing Colophons“: Dylan Brown (@dylanwalsdorf) on the fishes, kangaroos, and borzois that adorn our books.
[With thanks to MK]
* “Colophon” as defined by Oxford Languages
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As we linger over logos, we might recall that in Britain on this date in 1752 absolutely nothing happened. There was no “September 3” (nor September 4-13) in Britain that year, as 1752 was the year that Britain converted from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which required an adjustment of 11 days. Thus, that year British calendars went from Wednesday, September 2 directly to Thursday, September 14.
Most historians believe that persistent stories of riots in England at the time, demanding “give us our eleven days,” are an urban legend, fueled in part by an over-enthusiastic take on Hogarth’s 1755 painting “An Election Entertainment”:
“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
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