Background

Logo World is a suite of 50 speculative logo designs for non-existent companies, corporations and NGOs. Employing standard marketing grammar, each of these entities is represented by a logotype, a slogan, and a cute/endearing character.

Being logos, the material manifestation of their presentation is open and flexible: for exhibition purposes they can be printed on square paper sheets, or displayed on screens as digital signage.

Credits

Logo design & vector art - Philip Brophy

2018

Development & completion

Overview

Corporate identity, institutional branding and NGO platforming all meet on the plane of the logo. They all must succinctly condense their purpose of action into sound-byte brain-friendly emo-tug labels. In the new millennium, advertising has become more the domain of Institutional promotion than Product promotion: lemonade will unpack empowering societal potential in their sippers; cars will enable their drivers to transform industry and save the planet. To not lens these media machinations in a cynical light is to somehow believe their hype. And when NGOs ape the scripted platitudes of profit-driven corporations, one can be driven to even harsher cynical telescoping.

Logo World is a wander around the contemporary world (IRL, online - the difference evaporates in the glare of screenic bombast everywhere) while being in the head of a sap addled by the onslaught of 'messages' and 'statements' of imaginary 'companies' who use advertising in this manner.

Some of the 'companies' are represented as delusional projections of their own mission-statement bullshit (eg. Corporate Positivity & Fertility Re Correction). Other 'companies' are ridiculous extensions of the general humanist/caring/sharing/empathy-driven effluvia on which so many start-ups and ethical concerns float (eg. Colonic Journalist Irrigation & Meaningful Lyrics Institute). Still others are nihilistic mockeries of such community-platforming enterprises (eg. Call-Out Mania Committee & Bourgeois Indigenous Wine Club). And finally still others are nothing but offensive dumb jokes (eg. Internet Enema Sharing & Healthy Hip-Hop Society). There is no beauty to behold in Logo World - just lots of offensiveness for the dewey eyes of those beholden to the grandstanding goodness, wellness and mindfulness propagated by CEOs, entrepreneurs and ambassadors who sleep at night in belief that nothing they do could ever offend anyone.

Technical

Philip has a longstanding interest in logos and logotypes, covering his employ as a logo designer (see the Autist Inc. logos and other commissioned logos) and the Stuffed publications Alphabets and Logos. Logo World continues this interest.

As with most of his graphic work, the ideas are first sketched in pencil, then - once he employed computers in the mid 1990s - scanned and redrawn as vector art using Freehand. An old Mac workstation (running Rosetta v.1 so that older software can utilize Mac's Intel processors) is still employed for using the last version of Freehand before it was subsumed by the Adobe/Mac take-over.

The 50 logos for Logo World were whipped up in a frenzy over 6 weeks at the start of 2018. In a manner that could be described as surrealist automatic writing while drinking clothes detergent and mainlining artificial sweeteners, 30 'companies' were imagined in one afternoon. After completing the designs and vector work for that 30, another 20 sprang to mind in as short a time. The intention was to think as little about these fictional companies as possible, and to thoroughly believe how important they are in reflecting, critiquing, celebrating and changing 'the world'.

Original sketches