Logo A-Go-Go

Written language is a collection of symbols representing sounds. Those sounds form words, which in turn represent ideas. Logos are images which represent entities of some sort — commercial, political, educational, religious, whatever. You might say they’re ideograms. Sergei Eisenstein dealt with this in “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” found in his book, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Buy the book. It totally rules. So did Sergei’s hairdo.

Sometimes the connection between the image and that which it represents is pretty direct. The logo that represents la Vache qui Rit, for example, is… la vache qui rit. She’s a cow. She’s laughing. I understand it’s not zoologically accurate (in addition to the fact that I don’t think cows come in red, I remember reading somewhere, long ago, that only humans and chimpanzees laugh), but if you understand the words you can see them in the image.

Sometimes it’s a bit tougher to find the connection between the logo and that which it represents. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the logo is a failure from a marketing perspective. If the logo can be made to represent the image, it’ll do the job whether it looks like what it means or not. And a lot of the time, marketing people will announce that the new logo they’ve created represents some aspect of the company, the same way red on a nation’s flag supposedly represents the blood of those who have fallen in battle protecting that great land from evil. So you’ll see press releases stating that the big swoosh in the new logo for some insurance company represents their unique ability to initialize creativity and synergistic something-or-other. Look at the two logos below. Do you recognize what they represent? (Mousing over the images = cheating). Do you know why?

I sure as hell don’t know why. A rectangle and a slash inside a square? Bring back the laughing cow, I say.

We all know that the peacock represents NBC, right? We see and we think “NBC” or “the NBC peacock.”

And of course, by now we all get the idea of websites. If we’re watching NBC and we see “NBC.com” or “nbc.com” we think “OK, that’s where I’d find NBC’s website” the same way we think “NBC” when we see .

The question is, while the logo represents the company, and the letters represent the name of the company, does the logo… can the logo represent the letters that represent the name of the company? In other words (so to speak), does mean “NBC.com”? Does it mean “the website of NBC”? Can the National Broadcasting Company ditch the initials of its name and just use that picture? And for those that remember, would that stupid ugly gigantic N they used briefly during the 70s with a “.com” next to it also mean “NBC.com”? Would it mean “N.com,” or maybe “stupiduglygiganticn.com”?

Beats me.