Recently we’ve designed a logo for the upcoming publishing series by Jewish Historical Institute. The series, called Jidyszland (ייִדישלאַנד / Yiddishland), will be popularizing the literary heritage of the Yiddish language. The mark combines the first letters of the name in Latin and Hebrew alphabets.
This was an exciting logo to work on because it gave us the opportunity to get familiar with a non-Latin alphabet – always a fun challenge – and to work with a purely letter-based sign.
Photographer Dariusz Kula, whose work we often used for the publications of the Museum of Gdańsk, asked us to update his identity and we were happy to help.
We designed a logo which combines the letter K with the gesture of framing an image with your fingers to determine the composition. The resulting logo includes a negative space – an inside of a frame, as it were – that can be filled with various images taken by the photographer or with their fragments. More images of the applications to come soon.
Like we mentioned last time, this year marks 100 years of existence of several European countries, which is a great reason for celebrations. It’s also a good reason to design logos and most of the centenarian countries commissioned official logos for the occasion.
However, most of them are not very exciting. Here’s the list of the logos we found with our perfectly subjective ranking from our favorite to our… not favorites.
1. Estonia. This logo uses a very smart idea of creating a simple geometric shape that is both 100 and 18 and that alone would be enough to earn it first place. But additionally in applications photos are placed in two of the three shapes, which works particularly well when the color recreate the colors of Estonian flag. And another extra point: you can create your own variant with your own photo using a dedicated website.
Grade: strong A
2. Lithuania. While this logo feels less flexible, particularly because it seems to work worse in small sizes, at least it’s complex and interesting. 100 was created of letters that form the word Lietuva in patterns which feel folk-inspired. The letters are also used to design a bunch of fun pictograms used for promotional materials. Again the colors of the Lithuanian flag are used and they lend themselves particularly well to the whimsy of the pictograms.
Grade: A for effort, B for execution
3. Iceland. Now we’re entering a more bombastic territory, which we expected from logos celebrating such momentous occasions. The logo of Iceland combines the two zeros to form infinity sign and this idea is both correct and unoriginal (as you’ll see). But at least the white line inside of the number plays visually with the lines in the Icelandic flag.
Grade: B-
4. Latvia. Same idea, different execution. (And speaking of unoriginal, we’ve seen the same infinity thing in unofficial signs for celebrations in other countries.) Latvian logo also adds the literal Latvian flag for good measure. But while it is not exciting, at least it’s competent.
Grade: B=
5. Poland. This is the one we’ve been seeing everywhere for a year now and the positive thing is: it’s not repulsive (which we feared it might be). However, it plays it so safe. Instead of striving for an interesting idea, it uses a vectorized word niepodległa (“independent [Poland]”) from a letter of Józef Piłsudski, a grand political figure from that time. The idea is hard to argue with but does little to invite any kind of play with the logo. It also doesn’t work so well in small sizes and the vectorization of the handwriting feels clunky and rushed.
Grade: C+
6. Finland. (Finland celebrated it’s 100 last year but we just put it together here.) It uses the same geometry as Estonia but without engaging it in any interesting way. But the calligraphy is better than in the Polish logo.
Grade: C
5. The Czech Republic & Slovakia. Austria. These logos exist and that’s all we can say about them. They don’t even try – just state the facts and are done with it.
Grade: Participation prize
Today we start a series of posts on our fairly recent project that was created as a part of a PhD study on tangible type. You might remember – or not, no worries – that we already showed you some work on tangible type in our Theatre of Literature and Project Doolittle (to be continued, by the way) series. The newest one, called Words Matter, is actually a more academic, organized attempt at exploring the meaning of tangibility in type.
As a less academic and more designery part of this project we created a series of covers for books that have become classics of human thought so that each title is rendered in a particular material and the material treatment offers an interpretation of the book’s contents. We will be showing you those covers one by one, together with exciting stories of how it’s more fun to sculpt in soap than in your own body and how you can never count on ants. Today, however, we’re starting with the logo of the project, for which, as you may have already fathomed, we employed a wordplay.
This not only allowed us to emphasize the use of materials but also to use the W/M similarity, which made the whole logo. The logo had to be very simple because it was only an additional element that should not distract from the covers. Also, it needed to fit with all the covers, no matter (heh) what particular solution we applied. The logo functions as a unifying element of the series, appearing in the same way on most front covers and all spines. It’s also neatly constructed on a grid.
For most of the logotype we used one of our favorite typefaces (tweaked where necessary), but obviously the W and M are custom-designed. It looks simple but there were a few perplexing challenges on they way.
Alright, next week we start with an exciting book on child development and here’s a sneak peek of what’s to come:
re:blog 