James I. Bowie

As November dawns, the world’s attention turns to mustaches. In recent years, movements such as Movember and No-Shave November have turned this month into an opportunity for men to raise money for charities concerned with men’s health issues by growing facial hair. The popularity of these events can certainly be tied to the larger trend of men increasingly sporting beards and mustaches (or, to use the hipper British spelling, moustaches).

A 1976 study in the American Journal of Sociology found that, although both beards and mustaches had enjoyed periods of high levels of popularity among Englishmen over the previous century and a half, both had fallen out of fashion by the 1970’s, as illustrated in the graph below.

By the late twentieth century, facial hair had taken on negative connotations, becoming associated with villainy, stodginess, and deviance. An early-seventies researcher for CBS Television went so far as to say that “there were four leprous castes that viewers would never accept as lead characters: divorced people, Jews, New Yorkers, and men with mustaches.” That line of thinking was soon to be obliterated by shows such as Magnum, P.I. Contemporary observation, as well as recent market research, shows that facial hair, whether worn earnestly or ironically, is making a comeback, particularly among younger men.

Culturally, facial hair, and the mustache in particular, has taken on a new symbolic presence, one that is reflected in the logos of United States businesses and products. Analysis of data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office shows that the percentage of new American logos featuring facial hair of some sort as a design element has shot up over the past decade.

Looking back through older U.S. trademarks, it becomes apparent that the way facial hair is used in logos has changed as well. A famous early mark that incorporated facial hair was that of Smith Brothers Cough Drops, featuring portraits of the bearded “Trade” and “Mark” Smith, which was first used in the 1870’s. A 1931 article in the trade publication Printer’s Ink called it “one of the most utterly distinctive trade-marks in existence…This is partly due, no doubt, to the almost diabolical skill of the artist who made the original drawing of the bewhiskered visages of Trade and Mark Smith.”

While not very impressive by modern standards, the Smith Brothers mark’s appeal is probably similar to that of Duck Dynasty today: many people seem enamored by families with abundant beards.

The used of bearded and mustachioed trade characters in logos continues to this day. Because facial hair is an particularly distinctive personal characteristic, especially during times when relatively few men have it, it makes for an effective design element.

As logos in general began to become less realistic and more abstract, the mustache took on the role as stand-in for a man’s face. When used in conjunction with a hat, a mustache could often represent a man in an abstract way that was consistent with contemporary trends.

A related use for mustaches in American logos has been as a somewhat unfortunate and lazy way to communicate Italian or Mexican identity, particularly among marks for restaurants. In these more culturally sensitive times, this trope would seem to be on its way out.

In recent years, the mustache has escaped the confines of the male face to emerge as a stand-alone design element in logos. The “olde-timey” stylized mustache shape, as exemplified by the pink, furry mustaches on the front of Lyft cars, the hipster finger mustache tattoo, and the Lexington Legends minor-league ballcap, has become almost ubiquitous, and, dare I say, iconic.

The beard, on the other hand, while becoming much more prevalent on male faces and in popular culture, has not yet had a big impact in the world of logo design. As a design element, the beard cannot match the mustache’s ability to stand on its own.

Without connection to a face, the beard seems adrift in space, floating disembodiedly. Perhaps some intrepid designer may be able to solve this problem; the next fortune to be made in graphic design might lie in the harnessing of the symbolic potential of the beard.

James I. Bowie

The Southeastern Conference, or SEC, has dominated America’s most popular college sport, football, in recent years, winning seven of the last eight national championships. It features fourteen members from across the football-mad South, including such traditional college football powerhouses as the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Georgia Bulldogs. On Thursday of this week, the SEC will parlay its on-field success into a lucrative television venture as the SEC Network, a cable channel operated under the aegis of ESPN, debuts.

While the popularity of the SEC may be attributed primarily to its victories on the gridiron, the conference has also benefited from branding efforts that have resulted in a strong visual identity. Specifically, in 2007 the SEC began using, as part of a celebration of its 75th anniversary, a new logo featuring the conference initials confined within a circle. But in fact the logo was not exactly new; it was a variation of a mark used by the conference for years, a “pinwheel” with banners for each of the conference members emanating from the central circular monogram.

The old SEC “pinwheel” logo

This pinwheel logo dated to a time when branding efforts by college athletic conferences were not afforded much concern. Indeed, the SEC circle mark was generic, derived from a common monogramming technique that produced many company logos (see above), and is still in use today for monogrammed personal items.

In 1988, the SEC attempted to adopt a contemporary image, implementing a new logo with its initials in a somewhat futuristic typeface over a diamond-shaped background of stripes.

The SEC’s “Diamond” logo, in use 1988-2007

This “diamond” logo was used until 2007. Its replacement represented a realization by the SEC that its image and appeal were based not in the present, but in the past. Although college sports, and football in particular, have become multimillion dollar businesses, what differentiates them from professional sports is a stronger sense of passion and loyalty among their fans, and a great concern with the long-held traditions surrounding the teams and the universities they represent.

Analysis of logo design data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office clearly shows that the SEC logo is most closely associated with the period before 1960. US logos featuring a circle containing letters have fallen out of fashion since that time; in the most recent decade, they made up less than .01 percent of new marks.

The genius of SEC branding is that it wholeheartedly embraces a logo with such an antiquated style. Doing so allows the conference to project an image steeped in tradition, heritage, and authenticity, one that resonates with its fans, particularly in the South, where nostalgia for an idealized past remains strong. As the song says, “old times there are not forgotten.”

The logo might best be characterized as “antimodern,” rejecting as it does contemporary design trends in favor of datedness. The SEC is not the first organization to adopt such an antimodern logo: the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s Wimbledon Championships and NASA both abandoned modern-looking logos in favor of more dated-looking marks after concluding (rather bizarrely, in NASA’s case) that their images were better linked to the past than to the modern day.

Modern Wimbledon and NASA logos and their antimodern replacements.

The SEC logo has achieved distinctiveness in a roundabout fashion. At the time of its first use, the SEC pinwheel monogram would have appeared quite mundane, bearing a strong similarity to many other marks of its day. Today, however, the great majority of those similar monogram logos have died off, as shown in the graph below.

As a result, the resurrected SEC monogram is left with a quite distinct appearance, particularly in relation to its fellow collegiate athletic conferences, many of whose logos have in recent years taken on a similar hyper-italicized, pointy-serifed, futuristic look.

Contemporary college athletic conference logos

In fact, today the SEC logo bears less resemblance to the symbols of fellow American college sports conferences and more to the crests of many Brazilian soccer teams. These clubs likely adopted their emblems when the circular monogram style was in vogue and retained them ever since, avoiding the need for the type of antimodern about-face done by the SEC.

Brazilian soccer team crests

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Interested in reading more about college sports logos? Here is a history of the Texas Longhorn logo from Emblemetric’s James I. Bowie:

Longhorn Logo Turns 50

James I. Bowie

Fifty years ago, on April 22, 1964, Trademarks/USA, the first national retrospective logo design exhibit, opened at the National Design Center in Chicago’s just-completed Marina City towers. The exhibition, hosted by the Society of Typographic Arts, featured 193 American trademarks from the period 1945-1963, chosen from over 1,600 entries by a seven-member jury that included Lester Beall and Egbert Jacobson. The fourteen marks shown above were chosen for particular distinction by the jury.

This event was perhaps the high point of a period in which logos were receiving unprecedented attention from both the business world and the public at large. “Today’s corporate logo or trademark is almost as important as the balance sheet,” gushed the Chicago Tribune in its coverage of the exhibition. That logos would be exhibited in the manner of fine art would have seemed ludicrous only a few years before, yet in the Mad Men mid-sixties, as the field of corporate identity emerged and the importance of a company’s image to its marketing became heightened, logos had acquired a hip, modernist cachet.

This was reflected in the marks selected for Trademarks/USA, as 69 percent of them were from 1960 or later. (Almost as interesting as the logos chosen for the exhibition are the familiar ones not picked, including Paul Rand’s ABC and UPS marks, Lippincott and Margulies’ Steelmark and Chrysler Pentastar, the Coca-Cola script, Raymond Loewy’s Nabisco triangle, and the venerable General Electric logo.)

Exhibition chairman Larry Klein characterized the logos on display as “simpler, blacker, more geometric and formal and sometimes more even in color and weight of line…marks–both good and bad–are growing very much stronger and bolder.” These trends are obvious in a casual perusal of the exhibition catalog, published in 1968.

In tallying up selected design characteristics of these 193 marks and comparing them to all US logos filed for registration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office since 2000, further trends become apparent.

The Trademarks/USA logos were, in comparison to today’s logos, more abstract, far less representational, and much less likely to contain human design elements or those related to nature. Geometric shapes such as circles, squares, and triangles were in abundance, and unaccompanied symbols were the norm, as logotypes, either with symbols or alone, were much less common than they are today.

Spirals were a particularly trendy element among the exhibition’s logos, perhaps inspired by Paul Rand’s 1948 Helbros Watch mark. And while representational marks were rare, fully 12 percent of them featured birds, compared to less than five percent of modern representational logos. Perhaps the most striking trend among the Trademarks/USA selections was the tendency to portray, often through clever design, an initial letter or letters; nearly half (45.6%) featured such a graphic element.

One such logo was the Books Unlimited mark (below), which seemingly used a side view of three books to form the BU initials. Yet, like the old joke about no one noticing the modern abstract painting hanging upside-down in the gallery, this logo appears to have been inverted in the Trademarks/USA catalog.

This blunder might be seen as prescient, as, in the years following Trademarks/USA, the shine came off the clean, abstract, modernist logo to some extent. Critics of this style of logo became louder over the remainder of the 1960’s and into the 1970’s as the overuse of simple, stark, geometric forms in logo design led to a glut of indistinct, meaningless, and look-alike marks. Still, the Trademarks/USA exhibition was a clear sign of the growing importance of logos and graphic design in American business and culture.

“Banal and trite” logos, from The Corporate Personality, p. 188

James I. Bowie

Corporate identity legend Wally Olins died Monday at 83 after a brief illness. Here at Emblemetric, we remember fondly his 1978 book The Corporate Personality, in which he unleashed a scathing criticism of the clichéd logo design trends of the day:

Why are graphic designers still busily scribbling away at stylised flasks symbolising the powerful modern chemical company busying itself with Man’s Future but human enough to remember its Humble Origins? Why are they still producing stylised sheaves of some unspecified grain for food companies, indicating that the organisation has an involvement of however remote a kind with agriculture and Dear Old Dame Nature Herself by whose Bounty we all live? Above all, why are they still churning out these symbols consisting of initial letters tormented into a bizarre shape and ending with an arrow, preferably pointing upwards and slightly to the right, indicative of Progress, Dynamism and a controlled but powerful thrust towards what is clearly a Better and Brighter Future?

Why is it that the design idea that ultimately emerges is so often banal and trite? Is this naïve rubbish the best that we can do?

— Wally Olins, The Corporate Personality: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Corporate Identity, page 188

In honor of Mr Olins, let’s take a look at how those logo design trends have shown up in US logo design over the years, by analyzing logo design data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

When Olins launched his broadside in 1978, the laboratory flask logo design trend was already on its way out, and such flasks are rarely seen in logos today. Arrows formed with letters were similarly on the decline in 1978, although they saw a resurgence in the last decade. Sheaves of grain were seemingly never as common as Olins seemed to think, and are also on the rise among today’s logos. Hopefully, they are being used in a way that is neither banal nor trite.

James I. Bowie

The new incarnation of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website made its ESPN-affiliated debut last week, to the delight of data nerds everywhere, including here at Emblemetric. The site promises to expand FiveThirtyEight’s data journalism beyond politics and into the worlds of sport, economics, and popular culture. With the new website came a new logo, a stylized fox head, known in house as “Fox No. 9,” that Silver says is intended to be emblematic of FiveThirtyEight’s pluralistic approach, as expressed in the old saying “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” While the choice of a fox seems somewhat curious given that one of the biggest hedgehogs in Silver’s sights is Fox News, and while some have questioned whether Silver got the fox/hedgehog analogy correct, the new fox logo represents a big step up from the one used during FiveThirtyEight’s New York Times days, a calculator spewing out an American flag:

The new logo, designed by Michael Meyers under the guidance of FiveThirtyEight creative director Kate Elazegui, is a handsome one, and has the added bonus of looking like a pencil, a tool that holds a nostalgic resonance for the nerd. Let’s turn the tables on FiveThirtyEight and subject Fox No. 9 to some quantitative analysis, using data on trademark design from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

While the use of foxes in US logos has tailed off over the last several decades, fox heads in particular have enjoyed a bump in popularity recently, and logos featuring pencils are also in vogue. The fox head logo trend has resulted in a number of recent trademarks that seem to anticipate the look of Fox No. 9:

A deeper understanding of how FiveThirtyEight’s logo fits with recent trends can be gained by measuring the “trendiness” of particular design elements. This is done by calculating the share of an element’s use in new logos relative to the share of its use in dying logos. If a design element appears in the same percentage of new and dying logos, its ratio is 1, meaning that it is not at all trendy in a positive or negative way. However, if an element were used 80 percent of the time in new logos and just 40 percent of the time in dying logos, its ratio would be 2, meaning that it would be very “hot.” For the period 2005-2011, the trendiness measure for fox heads is 1.72; for pencils, it is 1.77. FiveThirtyEight seems to have hit upon a couple of very hot logo trends in its design.

Aside from the logo, an interesting choice in the new site’s branding was the decision to stick with the “FiveThirtyEight” name (which comes from the number of members of the US Electoral College) over the shorter “538,” which Silver occasionally uses (his new Twitter handle is @NateSilver538).

Since 1990, there have been almost 1.1 million wordmark logos filed as trademarks in the US. Of these, 3.3 percent have been wordmarks that are three characters in length, like 538, and 3.2 percent have been wordmarks that are fifteen characters long, like FiveThirtyEight. Of all of the post-1990 wordmarks, 44.1 percent have survived in use to the present day.  Of the three-character wordmarks, 49.4 percent have survived, while only 42.1 percent of the fifteen-character wordmarks are still in use.

In sticking with its fifteen-character wordmark, FiveThirtyEight has thrown caution to the wind, disregarding the sort of quantitative insight that is its bread and butter. Here’s hoping the site will prosper nevertheless.

James I. Bowie

In April 2009 Michael Bierut wrote on Design Observer of a “plague” of “sexless, blankly cheerful little people” in contemporary logo design. The piece, titled “Invasion of the Neutered Sprites,” struck a chord among designers, many of whom lamented the ubiquity of the abstract figures and vowed to abstain from what they viewed as an out-of-control, hopelessly clichéd logo design trend.

Five years later, it is possible to analyze data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office to assess the impact of this trend. Was it really as widespread as Bierut and others made it out to be?

Yes it was! It turns out that Bierut was writing in the veritable heyday of the Neutered Sprite, as the innocuous logo design elements were rocketing to previously unseen levels of popularity. Their use in US logos shot up in 2006 and 2007, before peaking in 2008, when they could be found in 1.15 percent of all new logos, and they made up 11 percent of all logos featuring human figures.

Bierut asserted that “the traditional habitat of the Sprites today, of course, is Nonprofitland. Finding them isn’t hard. Look for logos for organizations dedicated to community-building, or health-supporting, or any kind of relentlessly positive thinking.”  Indeed, analysis shows that sprites are most common in the medical field, as well as in the personal services industry, and in education. They have yet to invade the firearms business, however.

What is behind the Neutered Sprites trend? We can only speculate. It may have to do with the increasing propensity in recent years of nonprofit organizations to adopt the branding and identity strategies that were already well-established in the for-profit world. The Neutered Sprite represents a handy graphic peg on which these organizations can hang their new identities.

Another factor may be a pent-up desire for more humanity in logos. Since the sixties and seventies, when modernist logo design had, in the eyes of a number of designers and critics, devolved into a meaningless amalgam of cold, abstract forms, many have called for a return to a warmer, more personal style of logos. In an age of economic and political uncertainty, as companies seek to appear less foreboding and more approachable, the Neutered Sprite may represent an attempt to inject a human element back into logos. Yet it is an unsuccessful attempt, as the design cannot escape the overly-abstract tendencies of its predecessors.

In fact, in looking again at these Sprites, it seems possible that they have evolved from the “swoosh” logos of the late-nineties dot-com boom. They are perhaps nothing more than anthropomorphic swooshes.

Essential to both the swoosh and the Sprite is the notion of curvedness:

Analysis shows that Sprites are far more likely to be curved than are other logos depicting humans or logos in general. As Emblemetric recently discussed, rounded and curved logos have been replacing angular marks, and Neutered Sprites live on as a big part of this movement.