You Could Do Almost Anything Part 1

It might be informed by the name of the company, but certainly doesn't need to achieve a one-to-one association with the visual letterforms--we don't expect the reverse after all.

Memorability and distinctiveness is the end goal, and if your brand is strong enough that a simple mark will be sufficiently distinctive, then it's to your advantage to adopt a simple mark.

No one will forget that Microsoft is four boxes, and that the Internet is a blue e, even though these marks are visually panned, and in a context-free environment, only loosely associated with their parent brands.

I'm not sure that's the point. I think the MITP logo communicates plenty - just not the letters MITP.

But then the MITP itself is redundant. Once you know a book is from MITP, you'll know it's from MITP whenever you see the logo.

Meanwhile the logo includes a selection of visual puns and allusions - machine rhythms, digital precision and predictability, books on a shelf, book pages, and so on.

It's not that modernism is ambiguous, it's that modernism has consistently tried to move past literal single-view single-meaning interpretations to condensed abstractions that suggest multiple views simultaneously.

It's actually about implying and suggesting as much as possible with as little as possible.

This is fine as far as it goes, but you now have a problem - instead of making a single straightforward statement that can be read by almost anyone who's literate, you're relying on a viewer's ability to read an abstraction in a way that makes sense of at least some of the same associations.

If you do this properly, you've packed in a lot more information, at the cost of making it inaccessible to many viewers.

It's now more visual haiku than plain talking, and it only works for some of the potential audience.

What happens next is worse. You have a situation where less adept talents claim to be able to pack in meaning when really they don't. They produce a cargo cult knock-off of a successful design, they decorate it with explanations written in text in a supporting document to sell it, but they don't truly manage to include the allusions they claim to be including.

This is where modernism stops working. You get something that's really just been converted back into a single-view statement or object in a naive and superficial way, and it completely fails to have the depth of a genuine rich abstraction.

It looks minimal, but it's all surface and imitation with no creative compression. That's when the communication stops and you have something that's likely to be annoying and useless, and probably ugly too.

You're required to be pedantic if you want to examine something with any rigor. And yes, I'm asking that the designers provide justifications that logically cohere with the logo they are selling.

> A logo is successful if it generates results, not if it is consistent with whatever principles the critic determines a good logo should adhere to.

This is weak. It's a sort of argument to immensity–that if a company is big enough, it can "almost do anything" at all. It's the same argument that Bierut made, and I don't buy it. It's an essentially anti-critical position. One cannot judge a logo by a large company because by sheer weight, they will make that logo stick.

Moreover, I'm not providing the criteria for judgment–I'm pulling them straight from Cooper's mouth.

> is basically the complaint of either unrecognized talent, or the untalented, against the institution for failing to recognize someone whose work follows all the rules, but lacks spirit.

Tu quoque fallacy.

> This, for me, betrays the true roots of this critique -- unexamined appreciation for all things old, and refusal to recognize merit in new interpretations or to, even temporarily, suspend judgment.

This is invalid on its face. Half this essay is devoted to critiquing a logo from 1964.

> The author's own logo fails many of the standards that he holds for these other logos.

Tu quoque again.