Logorama is a short movie entirely made out of animated corporate logos and mascots. Protagonists include Michelin’s Bibendum as a cop, Ronald McDonald as the bad guy and many others. Some of the animals in the zoo are the Lacoste crocodile, the GOP elephant, the WWF pandas and the MGM lion.
The movie was produced by French collective H5 and explores the extent to which logos are embedded in our daily existence. Coming Sunday it is nominated for an Oscar in the animated short movie category (UPDATE: it won the Oscar).
It is striking to see how much some logos look alike, not to say are identical. You could wonder; are these logos designed independently not knowing of its twin counterpart existence or are they just bold copies. Sure there are many copycats around when it comes to logo design. Most times this kind of copying is limited to certain elements of a logo: say a swoosh, sphere or crown element. Not that often you come around logos that really show more than two to three elements in common; for instance color, figure representation, number of elements and style (e.g. the Luba Group logo and the Barcelona ’92 Olympics logo) or logos that are a copy of the complete concept (f.i. the total pointsymmetric ambigram concept of the Sun Microsystems logo and the Columbia Sportswear logo).
I always thought the more-than-just-an-element-copying was not really something the logos of big multinational companies were or could be based upon. Sure small companies get big and sometimes you just don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the globe. But, since I got some element tagging up and running on goodlogo!com, I was really surprised to see how many (well not that many, but quite a few though) logos look alike.
The most obvious cousins, or should I say twins, I put next to this post. Some other less striking logo similarities I put below in some element links to the tagging section on goodlogo!com:
I am very curious if anybody knows more examples of close cousins or even better twins!
Also if you have any info on which of the twins was first, trivia or other stuff, please post it below.
Ironic Sans has just put up a great Quizz in which you have to specify whether the typeface in the presented logo is either a Helvetica or an Arial.
As a lot of you might and even should know both Helvetica and Arial are almost equal typefaces, but show really tiny, though significant differences. The Arial typeface is the default font of various Microsoft applications like Windows and Office. They reason they look stronger related to one another than identical twins is because Microsoft thought Helvetica was too expensive to put in their software and had their ‘one’ typeface Arial ‘developed’.
For more background information on the creation of the Arial and the Helvetica please check out this great article.
Psss: Maybe this page can help you a bit in the Arial versus Helvetica Quizz….
I specially liked his answer to the question on the meaning of the bite that is missing form the apple:
From a designer’s point of view and you probably experienced this, one of the big phenomena is having the experience of designing a logo for whatever reasons you design it, and years later you find out supposedly why you did certain things. And, they are all BS. It’s a wonderful urban legend. Somebody starts it and then people go “oh yeah, that must be it”.
Ever wondered what your logo-IQ is? I don’t think you have. I think right now you’re thinking my ‘logo-what?’. Well, in fact it’s really not that important nor interesting to know. There are companies though that do find it very interesting and important to know how well their logos score in a logo-IQ test like this. That’s because tests like this don’t really tell you how good or bad you are. Instead they serve as a test to see how well the recognition of a company, brand or in this case logo is. In other words, you’re not the test-case, the logo is.
Well, with this quizz, at the end of every test you can indeed see what the brand recognition value for each logo is, but I promise you I’m using it only to compare scores and to calculate a meaningless logo IQ-value. Why? Because a quizz like this is a lot of fun to play and the highscore table listing definitely makes you wanna win it! So come on and play logiQuizz and enjoy the thrill!
Please check this great website with a World Mosaic created from not less than 1001 Web 2.0 logos (what are these anyway?).
Another great way of not only putting logos on a world map, but also transforming well-known brand logos to country logos is this world map of logos by a well-known UK graphic designer I should know the name of (sorry, I’ll have to look up his name on my computer at home).
I might not know the name of the designer of this excellent graphic, but in my quest of finding his name and some of his great other work, I did come across some other form of graphic world map.
Not exactly logos, but also an elegant graphic display of the world, now being composed of top level domainnames, for short: tld’s. Please click the image so that you can do find the author of this work.
If you have any other cool logo or excellent graphic forms of world maps, please post a comment below or drop me line! Of course you can also turn the whole thing round and might have some additions to this collection.
Every year before the new season begins football clubs all over Europe (and I assume elsewhere in the world as well) change their kits. Reason behind is is of course marketing. This leads (hopefully) to more sales as loyal fans dutifully upgrade to the new shirt each year.
Real Madrid revealed their new shirt for the coming 2009-2010 season last week. In itself business as usual: on the left side is the club badge, but the badge on the right side is an interesting new addition.
The badge represents Real Madrid’s famous Bernabeu stadium. It’s a stylized top view of the stadium on which the monogram ESB (for Estadio Santiago Bernabeu) is superimposed. The E and B letters end in the four access towers to the stadium, which contain the letters RMCF (for Real Madrid Club de Futbol).
Finally the year 1947 also appears on the badge. This was the year the stadium was finished and first put into use.
According to the Real Madrid website:
The symbol, which represents the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium, is a tribute to Real Madrid and its football sanctuary. It is a stage that has witnessed Real Madrid’s glorious accomplishments in sports and it reflects the essence and grandeur of the club.
Ever wondered what your logo-IQ is? I don’t think you have. I think right now you’re thinking my ‘logo-what?’. Well, in fact it’s really not that important nor interesting to know. There are companies though that do find it very interesting and important to know how well their logos score in a logo-IQ test like 
Every year before the new season begins football clubs all over Europe (and I assume elsewhere in the world as well) change their kits. Reason behind is is of course marketing. This leads (hopefully) to more sales as loyal fans dutifully upgrade to the new shirt each year.
