iancul

Markwald&Neusitzer are a design office based in Frankfurt, Germany. And one of the first reasons I eventually became an identity designer. Their Stadt Wuppertal identity—their hometown, I guess—made me choose a similar topic for my diploma project and hope of working one day on such complex and challenging projects.

I remember that I was enchanted by the clearness of their design, of their layouts. Little did I know at that time of Muller-Brockmann, whose influence is so obvious now :) Take a look, it’s surely worth it:

And the culprits, at their diploma exhibition:

(via September Industry & AisleOne)

Just as always, when it comes to doing something for personal use, I am clearly my own worst client (as Mrs. Marian Bantjes very well describes). I’ve been planning on a new layout, new logo and new domain for some time now, but procrastinating seems to be a designer’s deep-rooted habit. I managed to buy the new domain just after the RoBlogFest competition, but the logo was still a sketch on paper while the blog’s layout was a more-than-vague idea in my head.

The credit for changing the domain name and showing the new logo today goes only to Globehosting, my hosting providers, who promptly responded to my last night’s questions and moved the whole website to the new domain (I only wanted the information, but they really did a good thing going further, this kick in the butt sure helped :D).

In short, the new name is iancul (I will explain it when everything’s finished), the old bookmarks will still work as ibarbar.ro is mine and redirects to the new domain, but please update your links with the new name—thank you. I hope I’ll finish the new layout soon (sooner than before, hopefully :D). For now, you can admire the new logo. Comments, critics, ideas are welcome, as always.

Later edit:
- feeds seem to be working well now. If you have any other problems please let me know. Thanks.
- I’ve managed to make a reversed-colour favicon as well. Neat :D

After The World Of Logotypes book, here’s another great resource, still from the 70’s.“Top Symbols And Trademarks Of The World” was published in 1973, written by Franco Maria Ricci & Corinna Ferrari. There were actually two volumes. The books themselves are very hard to find now, maybe if you’re lucky you’ll find them in some old bookshops (like AceJet was, with a similar book - preface by Paul Rand).

Fortunately, you can view all the pages on the TypoGabor website (along with other great examples of design). I’ve made pdfs to save you the clicking: download volume 1 and volume 2 :) (8 and 17 megs).

Here are some images to make you drool:

(thanks Alin for finding the TypoGabor website)

In spite of the plethora of logo books nowadays, good ones are but a handful (there’s a paucity - smallness of number, quantity - of good design books, contrary to what Amazon would let you think). Al Cooper’s World of Logotypes is one of these, first published in 1976, then several years later, now unfortunately out of print (still available here and there, if you’re lucky). It seems that it had 2 or 3 volumes.

The logos are all in black and white, most of them have been replaced or redesigned since then, some just “passed away” together with the corresponding companies. Some of them are easily dated, but most are ageless, strong, showing that those years’ designers where thinking more about what a good logotype is. Not to mention that the majority are designed by grid, something less and less used now in the age of online photo and vector editing software. The book proves once more that good logos don’t need no “web 2.0″ effects. It seems that with the easiness of Photoshop and Illustrator comes great responsability (glows and shadows weren’t exactly easy to ink on the drawing board), or tempting the path to the web 2.0 flashy design it is, as wise Yoda would say :P

Eric Carl kindfully scanned the book (not sure which volume this is or even if it’s the whole book) and posted it on his Flickr. The guys at Logoblink helpfully made a pdf. You’ve got to download it (you can find other mirrors on Logoblink’s site).

Here are some images as appetizer:

Funny take on the Warner Bros logo:

Get your tshirt here.

New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual (1970) (photo set on Flickr - Swiss design proves to be unbeatable once again - wonder why the weird spacing though) contains some clear rules:

No littering - No spitting - No smoking.

I sure wish we had such plates every 100m in Romania.
Especially against spitting.

(via Subtraction)

Old logo for an old shoe company, Guban (ro wiki) (and self portrait):

Nice nike-ish underline :)

I remember drawing this Robocop’s “manufacturer” logo many times when I was little (as a colleague said, it seems we don’t get to do what we do just by chance :) ). This logo and a few others from other great old-school movies, like Terminator, Alien or Predator, are available on tshirts here.

(thanks Alin, via Design Observer)

GK Graphics have been doing design for almost 40 years now. Packaging, identities, wayfinding, you name it, they’ve done it.

(via PingMag)

This must be it, japanese are aliens. Otherwise they wouldn’t come up with crazy stuff like this, website, work, everything. Very interesting how each photo has its own color-strip presented. Take a look at Kashiwa Sato.

Their eye-popping site:

and some of their work:

(via Pingmag)