Book Review – ‘Logo’ – Logo Design and Inspiration

I have some number of books, way to many to count.

My studio has piles of books neatly arranged and stacked where ever I can find space with a varied assortment of reference books, manuals, bibles, font books, logo books, CSS and XHTML books and yes, quite literally the list goes on and on. Nothing too wild about that I guess, must be the same for everyone.

I do love books, it’s borderline addiction, and it’s only the fact that I can’t admit to myself that buying books can be an addiction that I say it’s borderline, clearly though, from a neutral third party perspective it’s undeniable, I am addicted to buying books. Frankly I would not overly care, problem is I just collect them and rarely get chance to read them all. But that’s another story.

Logo Book Review

I purchased this book shortly after it come out and was immediately struck by it’s presence in the book shelf as I jaunted up and down the book aisles in Borders.

It’s a thick book, some 350 pages and it’s all in Black and White which for a logo book initially sounds quite odd. More so when you are used to the glossy editions of the LogoLounge series. So it was this that actually want to check it out, being so used to paying for colour, my initial thoughts were that I was being ripped off. How dare someone released a single colour logo book, how the blazes will that work?

It’s a reference book, well, that’s how I see it. After flicking through the pages I was soon absorbed by the layout design, and the sheer number of logos included. There are summart pages at the ends of chapters that do have colour logos, but these are few.

Logos are grouped and categorised in sections much like the LogoLounge series, but Logos offer s a more diverse set of categories: strands, waves, concentric, ovals and ovoids, punctuation marks, single letters

I love this book, more so than the LogoLounge series in many respects. It’s a hefty book which is actually nice, the paper it’s printed on feels sturdy, they haven’t cut costs on using wafer thin paper stock.

The book cover itself is glossy and is easily removable to provide you with a huge fold-out reference poster.

Unlike LogoLounge, ‘most’ logos have accompanying text descriptions and with over 1300 logos included, you are pretty spoilt for choice. The fact that it’s not in colour can be seen as a good thing, it’s great to see many famous logos in single colour to see that they see look as powerful or recognisable in black as they do full colour.

If you are a professional logo designer, or just starting out, this book is full of stuff. There is barely a page I have skipped, scrub that, I have not skipped one page. And because it’s so damn huge, you will frequently want to revisit it, which makes the price tag laughable, around £17

If you need inspiration then look no further.

Paperback| 1410 illustrations | 352 pages | 245 x 190 mm | ISBN 978 1 85669 528 2 | £19.95 | Published October 2007

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