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.

Logorama is a short movie entirely made out of animated corporate logos and mascots. Protagonists include Michelin’s Bibendum as a cop, Ronald McDonald as the bad guy and many others. Some of the animals in the zoo are the Lacoste crocodile, the GOP elephant, the WWF pandas and the MGM lion.

The movie was produced by French collective H5 and explores the extent to which logos are embedded in our daily existence. Coming Sunday it is nominated for an Oscar in the animated short movie category (UPDATE: it won the Oscar).

You can watch the complete movie on garagetv.be. It is loaded with detail and funny references, some of my favorites:

• Coffee spills into the old Nickelodeon logo,
• the bluetooth logo as a microphone in the pilot’s headset,
• Mercedes logo steering wheel and
• the peanut rolling out of Mr. Peanut’s headless body.

What are your favorites? Let us know in the comments!

More info:

• Logoroma official website
• Logorama page on Wikipedia
• Logorama page on IMDb

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….

Graphic design website Creativebits has a nice interview up with Rob Janoff on his design of the iconic Apple logo.

I specially liked his answer to the question on the meaning of the bite that is missing form the apple:

From a designer’s point of view and you probably experienced this, one of the big phenomena is having the experience of designing a logo for whatever reasons you design it, and years later you find out supposedly why you did certain things. And, they are all BS. It’s a wonderful urban legend. Somebody starts it and then people go “oh yeah, that must be it”.

Go check out the complete interview.

(found via the The Unofficial Apple Weblog)

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.

Real Madrid revealed their new shirt for the coming 2009-2010 season last week. In itself business as usual: on the left side is the club badge, but the badge on the right side is an interesting new addition.

The badge represents Real Madrid’s famous Bernabeu stadium. It’s a stylized top view of the stadium on which the monogram ESB (for Estadio Santiago Bernabeu) is superimposed. The E and B letters end in the four access towers to the stadium, which contain the letters RMCF (for Real Madrid Club de Futbol).

Finally the year 1947 also appears on the badge. This was the year the stadium was finished and first put into use.

According to the Real Madrid website:

The symbol, which represents the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium, is a tribute to Real Madrid and its football sanctuary. It is a stage that has witnessed Real Madrid’s glorious accomplishments in sports and it reflects the essence and grandeur of the club.

Realmadrid.com has a special on the new shirt, including the new ESB badge.

Which one is your favourite? I quite like the TAP logo, as well as the logo for Sri Lankan Airlines.

See also all airline logos at goodlogo.com.

I got 27/36 & 26/36.

Share your scores in the comments!

[found via Coudal]