Does anyone else wonder, "Didn't these people know any good graphic designers?" Or am I alone in thinking these logos are uninspired?
Typophile
Seriously, what's with these logos?
Haha good point, you are so right!
But Veer is fine, kind of like Emigre and FF logos too.
hahahaha that is a very good, and scary summary.... check also ITC and there was another one that was particularly awful... escapes me at the moment.
Linotype is alright...the rest are well..awful
Speaking of typography sites' logos, after the "pixel" flips over, what is the Typophile logo supposed to be?
Asen, perhaps you're thinking of MyFonts' title font:
My sentiments exactly, MyFonts.
Speaking of typography sites’ logos, after the “pixel” flips over, what is the Typophile logo supposed to be?
It becomes a 7, the amount of years the site has been active.
MyFonts in of itself isn't horrible, but the gradient ruins it.
Linotype looks like a bad ebay knockoff.
Fonts.com would be a great logo for a counterstrike clan.
Identifont might be decent without the awful drop shadow.
The Linotype logo dates from 1996 or 1997… and may even predate eBay, I don't know. It was designed by Alessio Leonardi, and Italian designer in Berlin, who I think is quite a good designer, actually…
Ok, for points of comparison, here are some logos that, for me, actually inspire confidence in the competence of the designers:
Linotype certainly wouldn't work with any of these designs, but even setting the brand in well-worn Helvetica would be an improvement. And if there's any brand that has a reason to be in Helvetica, Linotype's it.
>And if there’s any brand that has a reason to be in Helvetica, Linotype’s it.
Well, the Linoype's logo is set in Univers. Given Linotype's history with that face, and its long collaboration with Adrian Frutiger, that isn't such a bad choice either.
"It becomes a 7, the amount of years the site has been active."
Really? I've always thought it was the top portion of a question mark since so many people come here seeking answers.
“It becomes a 7, the amount of years the site has been active.”
I knew this already, but for some reason the animated portion renders on my browser before the rest of it, so I just see two white squares in a larger red square, with the white one on top flipping to the right.
Then the full T grid appears, but only after it has already transformed into a 7.
i've always disliked the linotype logo.
it really irritates me when i see uc & lc combined within 1 word.
fonts.com logo is just plain boring.
identifont i think is not that well executed.
myfonts is the only one i don't mind, but still could be redesigned to add more character.
i think for font foundries its vital to have a good typographic logo, after all, its their specialty.
i must agree.
all of these are horrid and completely unrepresentative of good typography, but i have kind of learned to live with them, as sad as this may seem. however, i still reserve the right to be completely outraged by this every once in a while. all these logos/websites just seem to be an example of bad use of what they sell, which in my opinion is fundamentally wrong. Even Berthold's site (the one I couldn't remember earlier in the thread) is just so full of visual clutter and badly compressed GIF's, that it starts looking like a typographic vegetable stand. Tha shame.
Don't want to upset anyone here, the amassed knowledge is awesome, but type designers and graphic designers are a very different breed. Zuzana and Rudy are type designing graphic designers, Hoefler is just amazing all round. Matthew Carter is great too. But many of the great type designers I've come across can't really *graphic design* to the same level. Having said this, there is far more skill and knowledge involved in type design, and I'm far more impressed with type design than graphic.
i actually would like to politely disagree.
type design is based on the principles of figure-ground relationships, harmony, legibility and individuality (amongst others). which is why I would anticipate that a type designer would have a pretty good understanding of layout and the context in which type has to work, and how they need to create a point of differentiation. even though i understand the difference between a graphic and a type designer, i refuse to believe that their influences are isolated, and therefore I cannot accept the fact that a type designer would literally throw away the "skill and knowledge" invested in their (or anybody else's) type design as it has been done in the examples that originated this thread.
That is not exactly what I was saying, sorry perhaps I was generalising. There is an obvious relationship between graphic design and type design, and there are great designers who also design type. There are graphic design type designers such as Johnathan Barnbrook (who may or may not be so great), and House Ind. who are collectively great illustrators and designers, but I have come across many more examples of great type designers with a poorer graphic application. In fact, I have encountered this mostly through links from this website to web pages, or personal work. I think you'll find many of the great graphic designers don't do all that much type design because they are not programmed like that, although, yes, you'll find that each has designed at least one typeface, but they are usually of the graphic kind, not text faces, or faces with huge European sets!
The Typophile logo after the pixel flips is a Glider from Conway's Game of Life. I always thought it was meant to be that (it's a somewhat popular logo in geeky circles) but I did wonder why Typophile chose it.
Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton: a 2-d grid of squares, each one either "alive" or "dead" (black or white), with rules governing the birth, death and survival of a "cell" each timestep, based on the population surrounding it. If you start with a live cells in the configuration of the logo, four timesteps later you have the same configuration one cell north-east of the starting position.
yes, ditto here, I always assumed that it was the glider because that made perfect, sweet, beautiful sense to me. What I got from it was Typophile, T + glider. Like how you summarize I love New York into 'I <3 NY'
For me, it say 'hi there, we are typography nerds, and this is our home!'
Linotype is alright...
I think the problem i have is that it's "LinotYpE". It's as if there is some subtle, redeeming, hidden joke in capitalizing the Y and E that I seem to be missing. The fact that it's Univers is fine, but why promote one of the most (arguably) banal typefaces? It would be like Baskin-Robbins advertising Vanilla.
I always associated Optima with Linotype.
...Fontain will have a better look thats for sure ;) http://inde-graphics.deviantart.com/art/advent-pro-96168122 (bottom)
It would be like Baskin-Robbins advertising Vanilla...
Ah, but what a vanilla.
(Getting back on thread, the fonts.com logo is possibly the most unimaginative out of the bunch, displaying a kind of inverse relationship between likely resource and finished execution – or can someone tell me it was designed by a committee?)
It comes down to the fact that there are designers and there are desktop publishers...
Of course, it also depends on the market these folks are trying to appeal to. Perhaps they want to attract people that need to see "Wiz-BANG!" type of crap...
To MyFont's credit, it's a pretty clean site, and I use What The Font often enough as well.
daniel
Good point! I never thought about it, but those are some hideous logos.
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www.ugmonk.com
MyFonts introduced a new logo on their ad in the TypeCon printed program this year. Designed by Underware, I think.
I've definitely noticed this over many years. I just figured that it, to sell fonts, your corporate identity had to suck, perhaps so as to better show off the work of your type designers. On the other hand, a few superb examples of graphic / interface design in the service of offering great typography: Village , Process Type Foundry, TypeTrust.
i like this new logo... aren't they releasing a new website sometime at well?
and yes the other logo's are average. i totally agree and have never understood it.
I'd think a successful concept for a font publisher (like fonts.com or myfonts.com) would be to create a strong static logo image (I'm seeing a printing press or even a piece of lead type) to associate with the site, and then have a dynamic name (the beauty of the internet) that changes to showcase a different font each time the site is loaded/reloaded.
As for the foundries, wouldn't it be better to use actual fonts developed by the designer of the foundry? Much like Village, H&FJ and Emigre have done. Present the talents of the staff because a foundry can create custom type and it would be effective to showcase that in their logoface.
Since someone brought up the House logo, I had to include this.
I love a lot of the stuff that House does - I always thought their logo was great and I still do, but it did make me smile when I found this a few years ago in a circa 1978 clip art book. House has clearly redrawn the illustration, but their logo is identical in every way.
> showcase a different font each time the site is loaded/reloaded.
It doesn't change every time you reload their site, but FontShop's logo is frequently set in different typefaces when their logo used on printed materials. The only things that stay the same are the side-by-side black and white rectangles, the yellow background and the grid-based layout. Endless variations, but it always looks like FontShop.
yeah, i was just thinking that too! i think fontshop's concept is great.
I'm happy this was posted. I've often felt the same when visiting some of the most respected foundries' sites. I wonder if they ever gave a moment's thought to the fact that the majority of their visitors and hence potential customers are designers.
ITC's site especially is shockingly poor. While ITC may never reach the popularity they enjoyed when they ruled the 70's, they still have some good faces. Anyone over 45 in this business will remember the depth of brand loyalty they inspired by publishing the ever beautiful U&LC magazine.
Their current site is the exact opposite in terms of ambition. You've got to wonder about the marketing directors of all these outfits. Then again, 95% of marketing people know nothing about design, though they certainly love directing designers.
Conversely I think the most beautiful type specimen display examples can be found at http://fontbureau.com/fonts/ It reminds me of the best of the old type books. I captured about 40 screen grabs from the site, just to look and drool.
Captured from web.archive.org on 13 Feb 2018. view this capture