Graphic Design

I’ve always wished I could be better at logo design. I just tend to open Photoshop and play around with fonts to create anything these days. Luckily logo design is merging with technology more and more and the ability to create stunning designs on your PC is becoming easier. Maybe it’s time to buy Adobe’s Illustrator. There’s a great article at Graphic Design USA highlighting the current fashion trends in logo design.

One of the most memorable and unchanging logos of all time must be the IBM logo created in 1972 by Paul Rand. For a blue chip company this is amazing longevity and they’ve saved quite a few quid on expensive rebranding exercises.



This was an update of his earlier IBM logo which had exactly the same City Medium font. The new logo contained eight lines which are meant to represent “speed and dynamism” but I also hope that it represents eight bytes, which in binary can store numbers from 0 to 255.

On the IBM website you can take a look at all its previous logos, including many when it was called International Time Recording. ITR eventually merged with the snappy sounding Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and eventually became International Business Machines.

So I’ve been told, the computer ‘HAL’ from 2001 A Space Odyssey was named by replacing each letter of ‘IBM’ with the letter alphabetically before it.