Logos ... they're a craft, right?

Unbeknownst to some, I used to own an online logo company. The now-defunct www.offtheracklogos.com sold pre-designed company logos for an off the rack price. For a design fee, we custom designed the logos to fit your company name, colors, etc. It was cool. And our logo was a drag queen. Awesome. We merely took the logos we designed for clients that were scrapped before they got farther than the drawing board. After two of us doing designs for many years, we amassed so many, we wondered what to do with them, and voila - off the rack logos was born! Due to lack of funds, and online theft of ideas and logos (other companies cropped up overnight with a larger marketing budget than us, that stole the idea, stole some of our logos, and even stole our drag queen!) It was a fun idea that sold some logos and gave us experience.

Nevertheless, I've always been fascinated with logos. From the time I realized The Bay's logo was a "B" and not an animorphous blob, or the time I made the connection that the Calgary Flames logo was a flaming C and the Pittsburg Penguins logo was also a P. (My brother had a hockey team logo banner, in case you were wondering about the amount of hockey references) I imagined an intelligent, mysterious presence behind their mystical shape. The art of creating an entire identity, wrapped up in a neat package has always caught my imagination. If you really get into it, logos - now mostly symbols of companies, products, organizations, countries... have been around forever. Their origins come from ancient history. They are used to associate a complex idea easily.

I'd love to share some of my most favorite ones with you.


Toblerone. The delicious triangular Swiss chocolate synonymous with Christmas and duty-free shops in airports is known by their logo - a distinct line art of the Matterhorn. It was created in 1908 by Theodor Tobler and Emil Baumann in Bern, Switzerland. To this day, it is manufactured solely in this I imagine magical town. (Actually, it's not a town at all, it's a huge, thriving metropolis - the fourth largest in all of Switzerland) It is allegedly named after a bear that the duke who founded the town had killed, and is known as the city of bears. Which is the reason for the hidden image in their logo. I hadn't noticed it for years, but it's been there since 1908, when Tobler and Baumann trademarked the logo. Did they mean for it to be a hidden image, or did they hope everyone would see and understand? It's like an inside joke - you don't get it at first, but when you do, you suddenly feel clever.
Can you see it? Look closely - "hidden" in the Matterhorn is the city's namesake.
Whether it was intentional or not, logos that work on different levels like this make me happy.

This next one was definitely thought up by nerds! Eighty20 is a marketing firm in South Africa. The fact that they are a marketing firm means that for sure they have to have a clever logo. I was pondering one day why they have the different colored squares in their logo - what possible meaning that might have. Did they like the colors? Is it code for how many people founded the company? Is it mimicking an office building? As I was pondering this logo, our computer tech was walking by and remarked how clever - and simple their logo was. I turned around inquisitively and asked for an explanation. What he said has given me new respect for the amount of thought that goes into many of these logos. "dark squares are “1’s” and light squares are “0’s”. It’s binary code. Top squares= 1010000= 80 Bottom squares= 001010 = 20"

I'm not going to make an impassioned plea for simplistic logos, or black and white only, or ones with hidden pictures and meanings. I like what I like, and all clever logos are clever in their own way. Share some of your favorites with me - I'd love to know what you think.

Next week, I'll share my most favorite negative space logos. They are the most simplistic, complex and surprising logos out there.
Have fun logo-ing!