Great logos, shame about the book
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With 2500 logos, mostly eight to a page, well printed on good paper this book should have been a treasure. Instead with no obvious editorial input it ends up being frustrating. As far as I can see it is arranged by design studio output. It should have been arranged, I think, by style of logo, typographic, flat graphic, illustrative etc. The captions don't do the reader any favours either. Client and designer are listed but no dates or what sort of company the logo is for.
This book seems very typical of David Carter's output, I have a copy of his 1988 'Logos of America's Largest Corporations', six hundred (nicely printed) marks with just the company name and city location, no designer names or dates.
As to the logos, with 2500 of them there has to be a lot of duds but that is only to be expected. The majority of them have been produced for small companies who feel they need some mark for local recognition and on this basis there are many neat solutions here. For example page 234 shows a capital D incorporating a fork and spoon, a clever idea and surely just what Dantes Restaurants Inc wanted. If the book was just going to show real clever stuff produced by super creative designer folk it would be pretty thin. For the money though I feel this is good value.
At the other extreme a logo book that I have enjoyed is Per Mollerup's 'Marks of Excellence' (ISBN 0714838381) a history of logos, beautifully designed and printed and here the logos are grouped according to their look, eyes, flags, globes, hearts etc. A brilliant survey.
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