Logos - Part II

10 - Pan Am: Ever since 1927, when it started off with one route from Key West, Florida, to Havana, Cuba, Pan Am had sported a winged globe logo. By the early 1960s, its founder, Juan Trippe, wanted a new symbol to take his airline into the jet age. He called in Edward Barnes, a Manhattan architect whom Trippe's secretary remembers as "very young, rather good-looking and always late." Barnes produced the famous "Blue Globe" that Pan Am pasted on the tail fins of its first Boeing 747s. After Pan Am went bankrupt in 1991, a consortium paid $1.3 million (U.S.) for the name--and the now famous logo--to start up again.

9 - Coca-Cola: For an icon of American consumerism, Coca-Cola's symbol came about in a remarkably amateurish way. The name was dreamed up by Frank Robinson, a business partner of Dr. Pemberton, inventor of the Coke formula. They persuaded their colleagues that the double "C" would work well in advertising, and Robinson wrote it out in elaborate Spencerian script. His lettering was registered as a trademark in 1887. Coca-Cola has modified the logo over the years--most recently in 1995--but it remains, as judge Jasper Morrison puts it, "a masterpiece of freehand exotica."

8 - Penguin Books: Having decided to publish cheap editions of good contemporary fiction, Allen Lane asked his secretary to think of a "dignified, but flippant" name for his company. She suggested Penguin, and Lane sent an office junior, Edward Young, to sketch the penguins at London Zoo. When the first paperbacks came out in 1935, Young's sketches were on the covers. After the war, Lane hired Jan Tscichold to define a new design style as Penguin's art director. For judge Vittorio Radice, Tscichold's penguin motif is still
synonymous with "consistency and expertise."

7 - Woolmark: In the early 1960s, when the clothing market was flooded with new types of man-made fibres, the world's wool growers decided that they needed to find a way of differentiating their pure new wool products from man-made ones. The International Wool Secretariat, the industry's representative body, commissioned the Italian graphic artist Francesco Saroglia to produce such a symbol. His answer was, literally, to draw a ball
of wool. "Like all the best ideas, the Woolmark is simple, elegant and memorable," says judge Melanie Clore. "It is so tactile, I can almost feel the wool!"

6 - Shell: Question: Why would an oil company call itself Shell? Answer: Because it began in business in late 19th-century London by importing Oriental seashells to decorate Victorian trinket boxes. When it started
shipping kerosene to Asia in 1891, the company chose Shell as its trademark, and later formed the Shell Transport and Trading Company. A monochrome sketch of a Pecten seashell became the corporate logo in 1904. The colours, red and yellow, were introduced in 1915, when Shell's Californian subsidiary sought to liven up its petrol stations. A red and yellow corporate logo bearing the word Shell was launched in 1948, and modified in 1961. Ten years later, Shell asked Raymond Loewy, the veteran U.S. designer, to modernize its symbol. He created a bolder, starker version of the shell motif, with the company's name spelled out beneath it. By 1999, the Shell logo was so well known that the company felt confident enough to erase the name. "This logo not only communicates the values of the brand, but does so, remarkably, without saying Shell," says John Hegarty, one of the judges.

5 - Volkswagen: No one is certain who designed the Volkswagen logo. We know it was introduced in 1938 by Ferdinand Porsche, who, having failed to persuade any manufacturer to produce his designs for a mass-market "people's car," foundedhis own company. He then asked a designer--Franz Xaver Reimspiess and Martin Freyer are the usual suspects--to devise an emblem. "It's an elegant symbol, but the juxtaposition of the 'V' and 'W' is also very witty," says Rolf Fehlbaum. "So many logos are pompous--it is refreshing to see one as intelligent and humorous as Volkswagen's."

4 - Nike: Little did Carolyn Davidson know, when she accepted $35 from a fledgling company in Oregon to design a logo, that the result would become one of the world's most famous symbols. The only guide from Phil Knight, the running-coach-turned-shoe-maker, was to create something that represented speed and movement. She offered 10 symbols--and Knight chose the swoosh. "It's a beautifully drawn symbol," says Terence Conran, "and it conveys the sensation of speed, which is just brilliant for Nike."

3 - Red Cross: One of the principal problems faced by the 19th-century relief societies seeking to provide medical care on the battlefield was that it was too dangerous for them to treat the wounded because their doctors and nurses were so often mistaken for soldiers. In 1863, an international conference in Geneva voted to adopt a red cross on a white background as a globally recognizable symbol of medical care for the armed forces. Over a century later, judge Jasper Morrison describes the Red Cross as "one of the most widely recognized and understood symbols of all time."

2 - London Underground: One of Frank Pick's first jobs when he joined the London Underground as a traffic officer in 1906 was to provide platform signs for the stations. The signs had to be easily understood by people on the move on crowded platforms, and to stand out from the ads. Pick modelled his sign on a train wheel, and asked a favourite calligrapher, Edward Johnston, to redesign it as a symbol for all the London Underground's publicity. Man Ray once painted the symbol as a planet circling Jupiter on an Underground poster; judge Norman Foster sees it as "original, bold and direct."

AND THE WINNER IS...
1 - Michelin: While walking around an 1898 trade show, the Michelin brothers spotted a pile of different-sized tires stacked high in a corner, and realized that it looked exactly like a man. Not long afterward, they were
leafing through the work of a poster artist, O'Galop, when they spotted a cartoon he had drawn for a German brewery, in which a rotund Bavarian was drinking beer from a tankard engraved with the words "Nunc est Bibendum." The Bavarian beer drinker bore a distinct resemblance to the man-shaped pile of tires, and the Michelins asked O'Galop to sketch a new version of the figure, whom they called Monsieur Bibendum.
At first, Monsieur Bibendum appeared on posters. Sometimes he carried Michelin tires, but often he was cast in cartoon adventures, bicycling through France, driving into the country for a picnic, or heading for the
Alps to ski. Soon, Michelin employed actors to dress up like him at promotional events and festivals. "The Michelin Man is an iconic logo that touches me in a very emotional way," says advertising executive John
Hegarty. "It's a simple, easily recognizable, but very powerful design that communicates so much."
As Michelin diversified into additional products--maps, travel guides and other ploys to encourage its customers to drive more--Monsieur Bibendum played suitably sybaritic roles to promote them. He smoked cigars, quaffed champagne and celebrated his arrival in various countries by donning the national costume: a Stetson for the U.S., a fez for Turkey, and so on. For graphic designer Peter Saville, he's "a fabulous piece of corporate iconography, and probably the first example of a liquid identity. Whatever he does or wears, you always recognize him as a Michelin Man." Industrial designer Marc Newson, another of our judges, admires Monsieur Bibendum's ability to adapt to three dimensions. "He's always so cute," says Newson. "Whenever I saw him as a kid, I wanted to own one."