Of course all my life I have always loved logos. However some pictures below I guess go a bit further and beyond just a passion for logos. I guess you could name it ‘corporate brand idolization’. Please understand I am not this passionate about every brand. Just a few though. When visiting my dear sister in California back in 2005, enough for my coming out though of a brand groupie idolizing some of my favorite dotcom and technology brands like Apple and Google. What better place to visit than Silicon Valley?

Below are some snapshots my dear sister has taken against her willing. Please note: my little nephew is in the picture also against his willing. This because my sister had to operate the camera and after driving through Cupertino and Mountain View for a couple of hours finding the best Kodak spots and dodging the Google great lawn guards, my nephew got fed up sitting in his Maxi Cosi. Sorry Navarre.

So much for the highlights of my California trip, I’ll spare you the complete album.

Back in Amsterdam. As a very proud Amsterdam resident, I was very happy seeing the 2005, by KesselsKramer designed, ‘I amsterdam’ logo and branding for the first time. I was even more euphoric when I saw the real life 3D logo on the Museum square. I finally seized my Kodak moment when this moving logo, making its tour through the nicest sites of Amsterdam, got placed next to the Beurs van Berlage in snowy December. My sweet girlfriend took my picture as I was standing next to the letter ‘I’.

Speaking of my girlfriend… She’s the one that got me a little Nipper statue.
Also I persuaded my sweetheart to also pose with her favorite brand…

The reason I share these pictures with you is because I really like logo usage in everyday life on signages, walls, etc. I would really like to start a collection on this and want to ask you to share your posings together with your favorite brand or logo. Don’t be ashamed, people do it with rockstars all the time

Of course you can post your comments below, but to make life easier I put up a Facebook album for it as well, please use this link to upload your photos. Please leave a little note with your picture so that we can enjoy your stories as well.

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:

• Diamond + Pointsymmetric (Columbia and Sun)
• Circle + Waves (Vattenfall and Obama ’08)
• Circle + Dot + E (Etos and ESA)
• Circle + Pepsiblue + Red (Pepsi and Korean Air)
• Pepsiblue + Person + Red + Yellow (Luba Group and Barcelona ’92)
• Elements + Multicolor (Several ‘Distant Cousins’)
• N + Nesbean (Close ‘Cousins’)

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.

Psss: Maybe this page can help you a bit in the Arial versus Helvetica Quizz….

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!

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.

Personally I think Arnell Group did a very good job. The new logo is clean, smiling at you and very well to apply on packaging, vehicles and everything else that’s brandable. I like the new thin typeface very much. Pepsi doesn’t look like a brand from the 80s anymore. In times of rebranding every single logo to a web2.0 version, I think Arnell, not conforming with these ‘new trends’, beautifully transformed the 3d Pepsi circle to a stylish flat and strong logo.

Like many others I could talk on forever about the new Pepsi logo, how it’s been differently used for Pepsi’s different products, it looks like a Korean logo, etc., or we can all just see how well the new logo is appreciated…

Of course you can also leave a comment with your thoughts about the logo right here.

After adding some score calculation and duplicating the amount of logos on file last month, I think we got ourselves a cool game. Please check it out. The basic level serves any logos, the intermediate level serves logos having at least one tag in common and the advanced having at least two tags in common. Thus making the differences between logos in the subsets smaller and smaller and for you harder to inter recognize and to remember differences.

After building this logo memory game in a flash, I felt like wanting more and started playing around with the slide puzzle featured on the Heren5 site and thought why not also brand this as a logo game. What a joy cutting up all those logos with the Photoshop shredder… I have to say Slide Puzzle is not as cool as logo memory, but maybe that’s because I can’t seem to get past level 2. Perhaps you can? Good luck!
But be sure to start with the Logo Memory first, it’s far more enjoyable.

I understand if you don’t have the time or patience to play a cool game of logo memory, in this case you can also hit the ‘surprise me’ button on goodlogo.com or whilst in the tagging section click ‘random tag’ or ‘random multitag’ links. This will also serve you with a cool subset of logos, only I can’t guarantee you it will be exactly ten logos.

Happy Gaming!

About 5 years ago on a Friday afternoon I was doing an ‘after-work-drink’ with my very good friend Leighton (from RED) in our favorite pub the Wijnhaven in Delft. As Leighton is a Welshman and just like in England, in Wales the pubs close at 11pm sharp, Leighton always sees to it, by 11pm we have enough alcohol consumed to be, as Leighton calls it, completely ‘pissed’. To achieve this goal and not to be constantly ordering drinks at the bar, we always drink pints together.

No other deal this Friday, except that it was exceptionally good weather and that everybody, included ourselves, were sitting outside at the terrace in the beautiful city center of Delft. Being served by our favorite Wijnhaven waitress and having our favorite dish served, the Wijnhaven saté, the beers tasted great that evening.

Drinking beers always makes me go to the toilet and once you start, it’s hard to stop. On my first way to the toilets in the basement of the pub, I saw a very cool poster, displaying the beer bottle label evolution of the Brand beer brand. No I did not steal it. Not immediately. Not until many drinks later and many toilet visits later, I started to think how cool this poster would serve as input on goodlogo.com…
Because it was such beautiful weather and because Leighton always makes sure we start drinking early enough, at the time I was completely ‘pissed’, everybody was still sitting outside enjoying the weather. Because of this there really was nobody in the Wijnhaven itself, and that’s where and when I saw my chance… The poster was mine.

Next Monday I took the folded poster to work and put it in our new super deluxe scanning device, this machine uploaded it to my desktop and then … nothing. For many years really nothing happened, until yesterday I came across these scans on my computer and thought about the heroic act in acquiring this super design case material. So I put it in the Photoshop shredder et voilá, we got ourselves a new Design Case, Enjoy!

I hope sharing this great Brand material with you all makes up for my theft…

Leigthon, I miss you (and our drinks) in Holland, hope to visit you soon in Italy!