Drawn

Chris Gardner, who drew our beautiful Drawn logo, shows some sketches and preliminary work for a logo he drew for a new iOS word game called Letter by Letter that launches today.

I’ve been playing a closed beta of the game for the past few weeks, and I’m complete addict. Its the perfect mix of Scrabble, Boggle, and Risk with short, but challenging turns that require some crafty strategy and a healthy vocabulary.

Help Ray Fenwick inch further towards having infinite variations on his logo (examples).

lemoatjuice:

Will you help me make more variations of my logo? 

Hello? Will you help me reach my target of “near infinity” logos? Will you help me populate image searches with these, my perfect language? It is starting to seem as though I may never realize this dream alone.

If you can use illustrator, and have 15 minutes to pump out a variation (examples) , I will send you a postcard in thanks. Then I will post your variation with credit.  

E-mail hello AT rayfenwick.ca if interested.  I will send you a template file with “instructions”.

Yrs infinitely,
Ray

Even though I still had to go to their (not updated since 2008) website to figure exactly what the Juice Agency does, I liked this clever promo that uses playful iterations of their (I’m guessing new) logo.

Edit: Mea culpa. I originally linked to the wrong Juice Agency. Correct Juice Agency here. 

Custom Letters at the Antique Shop. via LetterCult.

While the original hardcover edition was limited to 1,000 copies, I just snagged a copy of a the more affordable and just as useful paperback edition of Pentagram Marks.

The book comprises four hundred logo marks from nearly four decades of branding from the Pentagram design company. It’s a great look at a single company’s design output, even if it isn’t the best logo source book out there because of some of its datedness.

The logos are presented in (somewhat) alphabetical order, in black and white, and I will say that this spread is perhaps the finest among them. It’s like they’re about to have a little feathered showdown:

Brand New offers up a look at the most relevant identity work of the decade. Not simply a best-of list, this look at the last ten years of corporate branding includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. I’m looking at you, Pepsi.

Searching for some retro logo inspiration, I stumbled upon Depression Press’s Flickr stream, which has retro logos in spades along with other old printed goodies, including plenty of illustration:

Artist Juan Salas has been creating characters from the logo on the packaging of Arturo’s, a fried chicken restaurant in Venezuela. He has currently created 100 variations, but plans on reaching 1000. While I cannot vouch for the healthiness of eating a thousand fried chicken dinners for one’s art, I can at least applaud his creativity: Transmutation: Los Primeros 100.

Via The Ministry of Type comes two Flickr sets devoted to showing the different between the original English and the resulting translation into Arabic of several retail identities and examples of consumer packaging.

I was struck by the playful and clever ways in which the originals were faithfully adapted to meet the restrictions of the Arabic letterforms.

Interesting interview with Sol Sender, who led a design team for the Obama 08 logo, about decisions that went into the design process.

“There was an idea of unity that emerged, particularly when we began to look at the red and blue, and how they intersected.”