A 1973 design classic goes digital: 1,504 trademarks traced one by one
Trademarks and Symbols, Volume 2: Symbolical Designs (1973)
Kelvin Adithya has digitized Yasaburo Kuwayama's 1973 book Trademarks & Symbols, Volume 2: Symbolical Designs, cataloging 1,504 marks by 725 designers for 1,142 companies across 30 countries. The archive is browsable by category, from human figures and faces to arrows and Japanese hiragana, and every mark is traced from a scan of the original, with edges still being refined.
Every mark here is traced from a scanned copy of the 1973 book, so some edges and details may not match the original artwork. I'm polishing them one at a time.
- quaddoggy
Very well organized and curated. Some of these symbols are quite…groovy. Looking through randomly it becomes clear how much variety we have lost in current branding and graphic design. The trend has been towards homogenization to the extent that you can't tell what anything is anymore. The Jaguar logo looks like a phone company. The Airbnb logo looks like a women's undergarment company. And every AI logo looks like a gaping butthole.
- yodon
Why would you put shared visual cursors on a site like this - so unbelievably distracting all these random people moving their cursors randomly.
- ryanwhitney
It’s somewhat slanderous to the original designers to represent these as the actual marks. LLMs are not up to the task of accurately recreating them.
The actual books are great to look through if your library stocks them.