After spending some time recreating the Vintage VW Logo Specification Sheet, the Montreal 1976 Olympics Logo Grid Guidelines and Logo Design Sheet for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, my interest was piqued for this vintage Carl Zeiss Jena Logo Specification Sheet.
Finding versions of this online had been somewhat fruitless, but my luck soon changed after picking up one of my logo design reference books.
→ View 2240x2668px High-Resolution Version of the Carl Zeiss Jena Logo Specification Sheet on Flickr.
After glancing through this book for reference for a logo project, a whole-page version of the Vintage Carl Zeiss Jena Logo Specification Sheet stared back at me.
Clearly only one thing I could do at this point.
* Book in question is Marks of Excellence by Per Mollerup—as a side note I would highly recommend getting this book for your logo design book collection—and the Carl Zeiss Jenna image can be found on page 180.
I initially took a quick photo with my phone, and did a Google image search to see if the image was referenced anywhere online, but nothing at all showed up.
I also did some searches for “Carl Zeiss Jena logo specification”, “Carl Zeiss Jena logos” etc which didn’t result in anything appropriate for this little project.
You can see the original Carl Zeiss Jena logo being used on products: Zeiss Corporate History
During the search I did manage to find this nice Carl Zeiss Jena logo History Sheet, below.
This shows how the logo has changed very little over the years, with the notable change in name to Zeiss Ikon; now just called Zeiss.
After trying to locate an online source for the Vintage Carl Zeiss Jena logo, and not having any luck, the only other option was to photograph the page from the book which is what you see above.
There was some tight cropping done on the book version which meant some of the imagery like the logo and table information were cut off so I did take a small liberty to recreate these lost little bits on all 4 sides.
The next step, when I have some time, is to recreate this sheet just as I did with the Vintage VW Logo Specification sheet.
I can see this taking considerably longer due to the handwritten nature of the text and other hand drawn details, but this will be a nice little project to further the digital life of this bit of brand history before it all gets lost in the ether.
If anyone can provide further details on who originally designed the Carl Zeiss Jena logo then I would be very grateful.
I have done some cursory searches on Google and Wikipedia, but nothing is obviously popping up. Would be great to be able to assign proper designer credits to this.
To wrap up this is how we now know the original Carl Zeiss Jena brand…