“Ranging from media outfits to retail giants, airlines to art galleries, the sweeping survey is organised into three design-orientated chapters: Geometric, Effect, and Typographic. Each chapter is then sub-divided into form and style led sections such as alphabet, overlay, dots and squares.”

Logo Modernism book spread
Pages 82–83.
Logo Modernism book spread
Pages 102–103.

“With more than 3,000 shops, the Kobe-based Daiei is one of Japan’s biggest supermarket chains. The company was launched in 1957 with the opening of a single drugstore. By the beginning of the 1970s the small retailer had grown to become market-leader in the Japanese supermarket sector and the company needed an expertly designed corporate logo. An in-house team took on the task in 1973 with the help of branding agency PAOS, and the new logo took the form of a circle with a piece chopped off. The image became the focal point of the company’s entire corporate design.”

Logo Modernism book spread
Pages 224–225.
Logo Modernism book spread
Pages 378–379.
Logo Modernism book spread
Pages 380–381.

A beautiful brute of a book that bears resemblance to Michael Evamy’s popular Logo, except this one’s larger in dimensions, multilingual (English, French, and German), and focuses on a 40-year period when designers such as Karol Śliwka, Anton Stankowski and Paul Rand were at the top of their game.

Logo Modernism is available through publisher Taschen or Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

Comments

Interesting looking book. Logos from a time when designers where fascinated with geometric puzzle play. Even more impressive when you think that most of these logos were drawn with india ink onto vellum and cleaned up with a razor blade. My design mentor Ray Wood used to dangle a full ash cigarette in one hand as he fiddled with a pencil getting the flow of a logo curve just right. This sense of solving the logo is still an emotional pleasure that drives me forward and makes me smile when I finally think I’ve gotten one ‘right.’

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