Logo Histories

20 stories

Logo HistoriesLA Bicentennial, 1981 The concept and context John-Follis’ 1981 logo for the Los Angeles Bicentennial

October 15

Logo HistoriesPennState, 1983 Strength and dignity – Dixon & Parcels Associates 1983 logo for Penn State.

October 14

Logo HistoriesCommunity Logos No.17 The latest logos from the LogoArchive Community, add yours today!

October 13

Logo HistoriesBank Logo Design: How Banking Found a Modern Identity How designers transformed the visual language of banking, from institutional authority to abstract symbols of trust, progress and global ambition.

October 12

Logo HistoriesSony, 1973 Yasuo Kuroki’s 1973 Sony logo and the 1981 crowd-source competition to replace it.

October 8

Logo HistoriesReuters, 1965 Alan Fletcher's 1965 logo for Reuters.

October 7

Logo HistoriesAtlas, 1964 The story behind Paul Rand’s 1964 logo for Atlas Crankshaft Corporation.

October 6

Logo Histories1960s Logo Design How abstraction transformed corporate identity.

October 5

Logo HistoriesLogoHistories LogoHistories offers readers access to the concepts and contexts behind histories greatest logos

October 1

Logo HistoriesITT, 1965 Carl Regehr’s 1965 logo for International Telephone and Telegraph

October 1

Logo HistoriesAbstract Logos Learn about abstraction in logo design

September 30

Logo HistoriesTarmac Group, 1964 The concept behind Ronald Armstrong’s 1964 logo for Tarmac Group

September 28

Logo HistoriesJohnson + Nephew, 1971 John Harrison’s 1971 logo and corporate alphabet for wire manufacturer Richard Johnson and Nephew.

September 24

Logo HistoriesConcentric Logos Learn about using common centre and axis in logo design.

September 23

Logo HistoriesCommunity Logos No.16 The latest logos from the LogoArchive Community, add yours today!

September 22

Logo HistoriesBanking on good fortune Young Jae Cho’s 1980 logo for Citizens National Bank

September 21

Logo HistoriesUnited States Deaf Skiers Association, 1970 The concept behind David Leigh’s 1970 logo for United States Deaf Skiers Association

September 17

Logo HistoriesHalftone Logos Learn about halftone in logo design.

September 16

Logo HistoriesCommunity Logos No.15 The latest logos from the LogoArchive Community, add yours today!

September 15

Logo HistoriesTime, the eternal theme, is our origin The story behind Rei Yoshimura’s 1986 logo for Seiko I

September 14

発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo