CORPORATE IDENTITY | designKULTUR :: New Wordmark + Logo > Introducing v. 2.0 ::: A Corporate ID reTHINK

Only a few weeks after its launch, the dK wordmark and logo are already ripe for some (as they say in Brazil) plástica.

The changes come from looking at the existing wordmark and realizing that I had made a huge mistake in using my blog theme’s (“Hemingway”) existing typeface, Lucida Grande, for my wordmark and logo.

LG isn’t a bad face, it’s just nice, and nice ain’t good enough.

I thought that using LG in designKULTUR’s wordmark would somehow integrate it into the rest of the blog’s text. I think I was wrong; LG is just too wimpy for something called designKULTUR.

So I went back to the drawing board and pulled Paul Renner’s revolutionary Futura out of the past (1927, to be exact). I used to love this straightforward font and used it a lot decades ago, so it’s been like “Futura Homecoming Week” on my computer these past few days.

Of course I love the font’s name.

In addition to Futura’s tie-in with the Bauhaus movement’s revolution in typography, I particularly like Futura’s high ascenders and the sharp angles on its capital “M” and “N.” The “O” is also perfect:

Although Renner wasn’t part of the Bauhaus, he is acknowledged as the leader in the New Typography movement and was a friend of that other great typographer, Jan Tschibold (of Penguin fame).

He was also an ardent anti-Nazi who lived through some pretty tough times and a childhood that would turn anyone bitter. Yet he revolutionized German typography and — thank god — tried to get Germans to move beyond their creepy Gothic script.

Paul Renner’s first designs for Futura (1924) as illustrated in Typography No. 7, 1938

So, the new wordmark’s typography comes with a pedigree, something Lucida Grande can only aspire to in its name.

I also changed the wordmark’s letter spacing — I’m a big fan of the late, great, Don Watt’s supercharged condensing of letters (e.g. the Loblaws logo), but I think that regular spacing looks better in this application; it looks more like classroom letters on a chalkboard when spaced normally:

For the logo, I’ve compressed the “d” and “K” so they form one entity, using colour to differentiate the letters:

As for the colours themselves, I have no idea where they came from. I’ve never “felt” blue before (it’s typically one of my least favourite colours), and the vermilion orange is unusual for me, too. When I see it I think of Memoirs of a Geisha and the amazing sequence Rob Marshall shot at Kyoto’s photogenic Fushimi Inari-taisha:

Greys I love, and the underlining of the wordmark is in my favourite shade of that sublime colour:

I tried out and rejected these colour combinations before settling on the dark grey underline:

During round one I thought I was channelling the de Stijl movement with my design.

Now that I think about the colour combination a bit more, it looks like I went to the Howard Johnson School of Design …

SOURCE > (G)REENWICH (V)ILLAGE (D)AILY (P)HOTO

Poolside at a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge in Austin, Texas, 1967 • 35 mm Kodachrome transparency by Hugh Mason Ayer  SOURCE > SHORPY

SOURCE > bitchabout

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… or maybe Joni Mitchell’s extremely adventurous Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter played a subliminal role in the affair:

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designKULTUR | BOOK DESIGN | Vancouver’s Most Awesome Douglas Coupland + Penguin Books :: «Speaking to the Past» ::: UPDATE: Banned from the Group!