Logo Design: An Ancient Way of Communicating
Wilfried Haest Wilfried Haest Design 505.983.7076 companylogodesign.us whaest@hotmail.com
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ogo design is a form of visual communication. It is perhaps the oldest way of transmitting messages from one person to another. The practice goes back before there was any knowledge of a written language. Remember the Egyptian hieroglyphs? They date back from 3100 BC, and were a writing system based on logograms (signs that write out morphemes) and phonograms (signs that represent one or more sounds). In a similar way, in North America’s Native Indian culture, we find petroglyphs from centuries before European immigrants arrived. Although written languages have rapidly developed, the logo language has maintained its uniqueness through history. The Copts developed the Coptic language, the Greek the Greek alphabet, the Romans the Roman alphabet, not to
Photo by Kerri Cottle
mention the Chinese, Japanese, Russians, etc. But in all these different cultures and regions, there always remained the need for visual communication. In the Roman army, ranks and legions were indicated by visual symbols, a tradition that still exists in modern day armed forces. In the 1600s in Paris, the homeless people, or “clochards,” developed a secret visual language to mark ways for survival. The symbols were painted and/or scratched on walls, doors and sidewalks to leave messages such as ‘potable water,’ ‘free food,’ ‘gentleman lives here,’ and ‘safe place to sleep,’ to mention a few. While written languages further diversified, logograms experienced a similar development. With the growth of the automobile industry and the network of roads, there emerged a need
for universal road signs, particularly in Europe where there are so many different written languages in a relatively compact continent. Road logograms are designed to be easily read, both from a distance and while moving. In this regard, the road signs in North America are too often indicated as white boards with a written message on it, instead of a universally understandable symbol. In a culturally diversified country such as the United States, you cannot expect all road-users to understand English. The advertising industry has long recognized the power of graphics. As corporate image development has become an integral part of today’s marketing, the ancient way of visual communication becomes of interest again. The graphic industry, however, has gone a step further. Due to the increasing demand on graphics — logos need to be recognized in a flash on TV or on billboards — graphic designers have developed ‘integrative logos,’ a highly sophisticated and effective technique of communication. Written words and/or names amalgamate their typefaces with the shape of the product or service itself. This way, you can see what you read at the same time.
In the 1970s, Wilfried Haest designed a logo for Ghent Grain Terminal, a Belgian grain elevator. He merged the initials GGT with the shape of an ear of grain. In this way, the logo says GGT but shows at the same time it has to do with grain (instead of airlines, beer or any other product). Following the same reasoning, Haest designed a logo for COSFUR Shipping and Agency, a joint venture between China Ocean Shipping Company and the Dutch Furness Shipping. The letters of ‘COSFUR’ appear in the shape of a vessel with a bow, a Plimsoll mark, a bridge and a rudder. In 2014, Gallery 901 — a new art gallery on Canyon Road — needed a logo. Haest replaced the ‘0’ of 901 with a painter’s pallet. Doing so, he made sure
the logo represented an ‘art’ gallery and not any other kind of gallery.
Wilfried Haest is a Flemish/American graphic designer who lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has a Master’s Degree in visual arts from the Higher Saint Lucas Art Institute in Brussels. Haest has worked in Europe, Canada and the United States. All his corporate logos are custom designed, and not simply generated from computer images. In designing corporate logos, Haest follows strict rules: First of all, according to Haest, a logo should image the intrinsics of the company (or person) it represents, and not the style of its designer. A logo for an Italian restaurant will therefore look different from a logo for a lumberyard. Second, a good logo should be flexible. It should be readable or recognizable at all times, whether you blow it up to the size of a billboard or you reduce it to a lapel pin and all applications in between. Therefore, it should be bold and avoid fine details, which disappear when reduced. For example, when Austrian Airlines decided on a new logo, it submitted a selection of five proposals to an ‘unsharpness’ test and a ‘movement’ test. The idea behind this was the logo on the tail of an airplane should be readable from the control tower in the fog as well as during takeoff and landing. One of the five clearly stood out among the others and was chosen. The same principle could be applied to logos and symbols that have to appear on cars, trucks and/or trains. Third, effective logos should be easy to reproduce. A limited amount of colors make the printer’s job a lot easier. Finally, while most logos are twodimensional, some can be designed as a three-dimensional concept that also can be reduced to two dimensions. In doing so, the logo can be fabricated as a statue in front of a building but yet be printed on stationery.
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