Core77

As anyone walking down Canal Street can attest, logos have both meaning and value. Somehow plastering two intertwined "G"s or an upside down black triangle on the side of a mundane bag can vault its price into the stratosphere. People accord a great deal of value to logos and brands, though as much of that worth is emotional as financial. Carolyn Davidson's Swoosh logo is now so pervasive that the name "Nike" is superfluous in its presence. Yet at the time she crafted it the three stripes of Adidas were far more evocative of running than her design. Even CEO Phil Knight was reportedly ambivalent about her stylized wing. Now, a once unrecognizable set of curves has become an asset for Nike to manage, just as carefully as a factory or a bank account.

Since corporate value and image are commingled with branding, it's virtually impossible to assess whether Nike would still be "Nike" if it had used a more literal representation of the goddess's wing instead. Capsule's Logos 01: an essential primer for today's competitive market tackles the many facets of this chicken and egg problem in its pretty pages. Since we're inundated with logos and branding on a daily basis, a book filled with more of them may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I felt that upon reading Capsule's book I had been provided with an insider's view of the thinking that goes into the iconography we see on a day to day basis.

The early sections of Logos address broad issues in logo design, such as: Planning, Creation, and Implementation. Each section is further divided into a variety of chapters that highlight issues and questions that logo designers may face, such as "How to Mange Your Research" or "Colors and Clients." These chapters can stand alone as essays or be absorbed in succession so that they add up to a cohesive whole. Each chapter is eminently readable and largely free of industry or typographic jargon.

Most of those chapters include sidebars and pictures of a variety of logos and case studies that provide support for their argument. Consequently, inclusion of a section called "Case Studies" at first seems surprising, since any reader who has examined the early portions of the text will feel as though he or she has been exposed to a lot of logos already. The case studies, however, are by far the most interesting part of the book. In the case studies, we finally get to see what designers call process. This section includes graphics of ideation, historical evolution, and the many logos that didn't make the cut. For a designer, the process is fascinating because the failures illustrate the thinking behind the design better than the crisp and perfect finished product ever can. I wished for more depth in this section, along with the inclusion of total misses and napkin sketches. With a book as polished as this one, I understand the urge to cut away all the rough edges, but I certainly miss them.

As a coda, the final section consists of a logo gallery with nearly 200 sample logos. This section showed me just how difficult it is for a logo to stand on its own. Here, logos were presented without context, six to a page. Since we're used to seeing them on corporate documents or on signage near retail locations, perusing the logo gallery demonstrated the profound importance of historical clout and familiarity. Though the logos were grouped by broad business category, it was difficult to determine the exactly what most of the companies did unless the viewer was already familiar with the company or the logo included support language like "Financial Group, Inc." or "Raw Bar."

Perversely, this gallery demonstrated the very impact of logos, while simultaneously diminishing their stand-alone import. In part the final section does a fine job of explaining just how intertwined logos and branding have become. Neither has a life without the other. That's why it's so easy to mock a redesign ... it's not just the logo that's being changed; the consumer's emotional attachment to the whole corporate image comes along with it. Thus, the alteration of a few lines, vectors and colors suddenly becomes a high-stakes game. It takes a book like Logos to peel back the veneer and show us just how deeply our emotions and decisions can be tied and associated with seemingly simple blots of color and words.