Perhaps this would have been a good place for Birmingham’s Mayor to look for inspiration/advice:
Full membership is $100 annually (no, I haven’t sprung for it – hopefully I didn’t leave the wrong impression in the previous article. I’m not a professional artist; I manage a company that is in, among other things, the design business. However, I’m just barely smart enough to have artists execute [which sometimes means: kill] my ideas, on rare occasions when I have one).
As a kid, one of the things that fascinated me about an advertising textbook my dad was studying from (he was going to night school) was the company logos rendered on the pages. Their abstract isolation from their usual contexts seemed to confer a sort of significance on them. As a college student myself, I found the same fascination in the logo books we had in our library. No, I can’t give you a sensible explanation for that.
This site, and the books spawned from it (available at most major bookstores), has the same sort of fascination, and looking at these logos gives you a great sense of vocabulary – what can be done (and is being done).
While we’re on the subject, I finally re-found a page I spotted years ago, which warned of the dangers of the then-trendy swoosh logo:
http://lekowicz.com/library/logohell/logohell.html
This was a big craze around 1999-2000. Perhaps they were all copying this beauty (below). I don’t remember exactly when I came up with it, but it was no later than 1997, which was around the time I was the webmaster for the Montgomery Bicycle Club.
