This Flickr set of vintage logos has been around a while now, and I looked and didn’t immediately get much inspiration. I mean, anyone else who’s linked to them has done the equivalent of, “Hey look, old logos! Um. Yes. Old logos!” so I guess I’m not alone.

Still, patience rewards the virtuous (or something) and I had a closer look through the ‘Original Size’ of all of them - my, that was a fun exercise, thank you, Flickr - and found some logos that I think are pretty interesting. Unfortunately, most of the ‘logos’ on those pages really don’t deserve the distinction of being called logos. In fact, most of them are pretty poor. I guess that makes the good ones stand out better. Perhaps.

So, enough bad-mouthing. I’ve traced (manually, of course, with lovely beziers) the ones I either like, or think are inspirational and felt quite a bit of ’70s and ’80s nostalgia in the process. You may have a different set of choices of course, and no, I wouldn’t include the Lubalin logo in the ‘crap’ ones. I just don’t like it very much. I know, I know, there’s a space in Design Hell reserved just for me… Below are thumbnails of the ones I’ve traced, and I’ve added notes for most of them too. If you’re reading this on the home page, click “Read the rest…” to see the whole lot.

1. Forening for Boghaandvoerk
   I’ve seen plenty of FF ligatures, but it’s the FB one on this that I like and wanted to keep for reference.
   
2. Cumberland Capital Corp.
   Just great. I imagine it’s supposed to imply ‘growth’ with the tree image, but it makes a pleasing image - perfect for a monogram.
3. Fernandec & Rubin
   This ampersand is wonderful.
4. New York Aquarium
   Reminds me of Japanese mon, and unlike a lot of the logos that look symmetrical but aren’t, this one is. Perfectly.
5. National Sea Products Limited
   A fish with a crown? How could I say no? I like the composition and old-timey lettering too.
6. Oy Finleuy Ab
   This one makes me laugh. It looks like a demented chameleon.
7. Norwegian Caribbean Lines
   Interesting to keep, just to show any letter can be made to trail off into a wavey line.
8. Keystone Park
   I did make a slight modification to this - I cleaned up the ‘central reservation’ in the curved road. I’m not entirely sure what a motorway intersection has to do with a parkbut I’m sure it made sense at the time.
9. Jonneret SA
   Lovely wavey lines… ‘nuff said.

1. Hillside Townhomes
   It’s an interesting pattern, though not sure how that relates to a housing development though. Maybe it follows the rough plan of the road layout?
2. Splendix Musical Instruments
   I think this one would be vastly improved by removing the line trailing to the left. Still, it’s an interesting depiction of a treble-clef.
3. Hawaiian Airlines
   Well, it was fun to trace!
4. Ciba Geigy Canada Ltd.
   I’m guessing this is a trademark of theirs… This one really does look vintage.
5. Hill + Knowles Public Relations
   I like it as an example of the type - though I don’t think it readsparticularly well.
6. Japan Agricultural Co-op Associations
   An iconic little bird - for reference mainly.
7. Distinctive Designs
   Odd logo for a company with that name… it looks agricultural.
8. Kerr McGee Chemical Corp
   I like this because it’s so sparse and clean - it looks like someone overexposed a picture of the logo and just drew what was left of the dark bits.
9. Thomas Walker and Sons
   Well, it’s a monogram that looks like an anchor. What’s not to like?

1. Hillier
     Things to do with arrows, part 295,041
2. Herman Smith Management
   This one reallyreminds me of another logo…
3. Acushnet Company
   And thisone reminds me of this.
4. Arbeitgemeinschaft der Lukal-und
   Bringing to mind a labarynth, without being one.
5. Kusnierz
   On the Flickr set, someone added a comment that this could be an alternative to the Firefox logo. I quite agree.
6. Harvey Dodds Limited
   Simple and clever.
7. Tjernlund Manufacturing Company
   Cute little Viking!
8. Nikko
   Again, for reference - playing with the letterforms to ensure consistent optical space around them. It can be difficult to make letters work in a circle like this.
9. Jelen
   This one seems really familiar too! I just can’t place it.

These are perhaps borderline for me, but there was just enough reason for me to keep them.

1. Beverly Hills Bancorp
   Very simple and attractive - it’s quite sweet.
2. Amigen
   Presumably a pharmaceutical logo - it certainly looks like one. I like it though.
3. Montgomery Ross and Partners
   This was fun to draw, but as a logo it’s incredible aggressive. All those phallic arrows…
4. Franco Ranchetti
   Now, a lot of the logos are simple geometric shapes with a chunk taken out, and they’re as a whole not very good. I think this is one of the few exceptions - the negative space does form a nice R.
5. Ramon Reig Cabanas
   This would be quite unremarkable if the strip hadn’t been removed from the R. It’s curious.
6. Health and Comfort Supplies Limited
   Very much of the time. Probably the only one of the op-art logos that I actually like.
7. Gregson Manufacturing Company
   This is just weird. Combining OCR and traditional forms like that. Maybe they were going for the old "fusion of old and new" schtick.
8. Pinewood Plantation
   Simple, not entirely satisfying, but I kept it as reference.
9. Orchard Decor Canada Limited
   Simple and straighforward… a bit borderline for me.

Bauldoff linked to some scans he’d done of the 1980 promo for the typeface Haas Unica, by Team’77. I’d seen a copy of this back in the 90s but then forgot about it until seeing these scans - back then I was only a callow youth so the idea of improving Helvetica didn’t seem so remarkable or interesting as it does now.

Essentially, Haas Unica came about as a result of analysing the original version of Helvetica, its variants (as they were in 1980) and similar faces and seeking to improve them - to produce the ultimate archetypal sans serif face. A single face to unite them all, if you like. Looking at the comparitive settings of both faces at text size shows how subtle the differences are, with a detail closeup first:

You can get an idea of the kind of analysis they did from this little snippet:

The character width of Haas Helvetica appears to us to be generally somewhat narrow, so that the rhythm of the typeface is rather uneasy in its effect. The same applies to Akzidenz Book. Linotype Helvetica is wider than the Haas version in relation to its character area and appears to us to be generally more balanced. Its character width corresponds basically to that of Univers.

And the results, based on improvements and adjustments to the stroke thicknesses, relationships of the capital letter widths, numerals and the basic forms of the letters:

The differentiation of capital letter widths leads to a tighter rhythm in upper case composition. A slightly more open form in the Haas Unica specimen setting, compared with the original version, together with the individual corrections to characters, improves the readability of the typeface, especially for continuous text.

Unfortunately when the face was released there were some legal problems as Linotype and Scangraphic both claim ownership. As a result it is no longer available commercially, which is a huge shame. Perhaps a petition for the conflicting parties to get over themselves and perhaps release the face jointly? I mean, making some money from it is surely better than making none at all - especially when ‘ownership’ is being judged from contract and the shifting seas of corporate ownership. Meanwhile, some people are taking matters into their own hands by redrawing the letterforms for their own use.

On the left is the original Haas Helvetica, on the right the new Haas Unica, and in between some transitory and experimental forms.

Drawn! the other day had a link to this treasure trove of retro illustrations, posters, books, covers, and pretty much everything else committed to print, and an on-link to the Mid-Century Illustrated Flickr pool. Looking through these is a bit like browsing ffffound, you keep finding things you want to keep links to… or just keep. I tend to want to redraw things, as I find it helps me understand how it was done a bit better and I often learn some new technique or style, or get inspiration for something else. I particularly liked the Black Pearl cover - it’s an engaging and compelling image, but made with just three colours. No halftones or tints either. I didn’t redraw this, I just used clean-up techniques to recreate it:

The Aircraft Propulsion Data Book is interesting as the curve appears smooth and aerodynamic, but under close examination it seems a bit… well, clumsy. Still, that’s the kind of thing that interests me - for example, when doing things like icons the details can seem crude and ugly up close but at their intended size provide useful (and subtle) clues on how to interpret the whole image.

Also in the sets of images are various examples of very nice typography, these two caught my eye in particular:

And linked from the Photo Lettering one, this beautiful, beautiful thing:

Then, finally, no collection of mid-century illustrations would be complete without at least one retro-futurist image, so here’s a fabulous subway illustration by Klaus Bürgle:

I came across Jörg Block’s site this morning from a link on Drawn! There are some fantastic illustrations and paintings on there; I love his clean, crisp, often isometric drawing style, and especially the page layouts:

Have a look at the paintings too, they remind me of the paintings of intersections and roadworks you’d see advertising the Glorious New Future in the 50s and 60s, but with a solitude and darkness that suggest the future isn’t all that glorious at all. Of course, he could just like architectural paintings and puts the figure in for scale?

There are some interesting-looking infographics here on NOTCOT, apparently providing some sort of analysis of various literary works. I’ve had a look through them, and while they’re certainly attractive, they don’t seem to provide any insight at all. The one immediately below, for example, might suggest how shorter sentences bunch up together in the narrative flow, but there’s no guarantee that several groups of small sentences, separated by (say) many long sentences, a short sentence and more long sentences might overlap, giving an illusion of a single bunch of terse, active prose. The rotation of the line by 90 degrees with each sentence is an arbitrary insertion in the ‘analysis’, and in itself provides no valuable meaning - it doesn’t even serve as a neutral carrier for information, rather it distracts the reader and confuses the data.

Some of the other illustrations provide a little more promise, but with having to refer to an (again) arbitrary key, any insight a graphical representation could provide is quickly lost. But, they’re beautiful. It’s as if the designer flipped through Tufte’s books without reading anything in them, and decided to create something that ‘looks like that’. OK, I’m being harsh; I’m sure that after a fair bit of reading and working out how the diagrams were made, there’s some vague possibility of gleaning some tiny hint of insight into the literary style of various authors, but you have to get past the fact that they seem to be primarily designed to be pretty* rather than useful. You can see more of the works on the designer’s site, apparently called “Untitled Document” (at the time of writing), here.

As for the ones attempting to depict sentence structure, they certainly leave a massive amount to be desired - in order to work out the difference between a colon and a parenthesis you’d have to get out your micrometer and be prepared to annotate like crazy. Or you could just read the original text. After all, there’s this amazing set of symbols and conventions that have been used for years to convey meaning and sentence structure. It’s called written language. Heard of it?

* And to appeal to people with more money than design sense, looking at the prices.

Courtesy of the ever-fantastic Ace Jet 170, this collection of images of the 1958 Penrose Annual. A couple of my favourites at the bottom, but I just had to trace the Amores one, below. I love it. The M-R* ultra-ligature was rather satisfying to do.

In the future, we will all have very low, flat cars, road signs will be hard to read, we will have genetically modified pets and will build large industrial entertainment complexes in areas of astounding natural beauty. That’s the future according to these amazing 1960s illustrations from United States Steel International, by Syd Mead*. Naturally, the implication is that we will be using lots and lots of steel, and will continue to use it to make sleek, shiny cars.

It’s strange how these pictures remind me of a book I had at primary school (I was about 7) which showed two possible futures. One was positively pastoral, with blue skies, happy people cycling along clean white paths through a garden city. The other showed what would happen if we didn’t reduce our energy dependency (apparently), and showed gigantic skyscrapers looming against brown, smoggy skies, with traffic jams and people wearing gas masks. They were both illustrated in an almost identical style to these retro futurist ones, and showed almost the same subjects - they could have been taken directly from this series.

The lettering on the signs reminds me of the information screens from 2001.

Browsing Drawn! the other day, I followed a link to Craig Ward’s site, showing some of his fantastic typographic illustrations. I’ve posted a couple of crops of two of my favourite images (so you can see the all-important detail) - visit his site for the full images. Beware the we-don’t-need-no-scrollbars site design. Leave your mouse over the word ‘DOWN’ and you’ll be able to see some more of his work… eventually. Are scrollbars so bad? Still, the site does look lovely.

The nonist is continuing with his series of Graphis annuals and has posted a set of scans from the 1957/58 edition. Go and take a look! If you’re in the UK, you might notice something rather familiar, something that reminds you of an advert much more recent than the late 50s. Now, I’m wary of assigning nefarious motives to people about this kind of thing, but it’s quite interesting to compare and contrast the two:

I’m fascinated by imaginary products created for films and games - there’s an art to creating something just similar enough to real products to be recognisable as a brand type, but without actually copying any particular identity. Some films and games come very close to existing brands (RUF in Children of Men; GAP for pets, Tube in GTA 3; Subway) while others work within the conventions of a product type so you know what kind of thing it’s supposed to be (pretty much everything in the Truman Show). I have an article I’m writing on brand conventions, but that’s not for today. The reason for this post is some of the work featured in this interview with Sarah Bradley, graphic designer and typographer at Pixar, and ex-lead title designer at Disney. In the article is a matrix for a box of rat poison shown in Ratatouille, which I just had to make into a fake box shot - I do this a lot at work and it’s fun to do, so I couldn’t resist.

The original matrix: