10 Best Books about Logo Design
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1. Logo Design Love: A Guide to Creating Iconic Brand Identities by David Airey
In Logo Design Love, David shows you how to develop an iconic brand identity from start to finish, using client case studies from renowned designers. In the process, he reveals how designers create effective briefs, generate ideas, charge for their work, and collaborate with clients. David not only shares his personal experiences working on identity projects — including sketches and final results of his own successful designs — he also uses the work of many well-known designers such as Paula Scher, who designed the logos for Citi and Microsoft Windows, and Lindon Leader, creator of the current FedEx identity, as well as work from leading design studios, including Moving Brands, Pentagram, MetaDesign, Sagmeister & Walsh, and many more.
In Logo Design Love, you’ll learn:
- Best practices for extending a logo into a complete brand identity system
- Why one logo is more effective than another
- How to create your own iconic designs
- What sets some designers above the rest
- 31 practical design tips for creating logos that last
2. Logo Modernism by Jens Müller and R. Roger Remington
Modernist aesthetics in architecture, art, and product design are familiar to many. In soaring glass structures or minimalist canvases, we recognize a time of vast technological advance which affirmed the power of human beings to reshape their environment and to break, radically, from the conventions or constraints of the past. Less well-known, but no less fascinating, is the distillation of modernism in graphic design.
3. Logo: The Reference Guide to Symbols and Logotypes by Michael Evamy
The logo bible, this book provides graphic designers with an indispensable reference source for contemporary logo design. More than 1300 logos are grouped according to their focal form, symbol and graphic associations into 75 categories such as crosses, stars, crowns, animals, people, handwritten, illustrative type, etc. To emphasize the visual form of the logos, they are shown predominantly in black and white. Highlight logos are shown in colour.
4. Logotype by Michael Evamy
Logotype mini is the definitive modern collection of logotypes, monograms, and other text-based corporate marks. Featuring more than 1,300 international typographic identities, by around 250 design studios, this is an indispensable handbook for every design studio, providing a valuable resource to draw on in branding and corporate identity projects.
Logotype mini is truly international, and features the world’s outstanding identity designers. Examples are drawn not just from Western Europe and North America but also Australia, South Africa, the Far East, Israel, Iran, South America and Eastern Europe. Contributing design firms include giants such as Pentagram, Vignelli Associates, Chermayeff & Geismar, Wolff Olins, Landor, Total Identity and Ken Miki & Associates as well as dozens of highly creative, emerging studios.
5. Symbol by Steven Bateman and Angus Hyland
Symbols play an integral role in branding programs. This book explores the visual language of symbols according to their most basic element: form. Over 1,300 symbols from all over the world are here categorized by visual type, divested of all agendas, meanings, and messages that might be associated with them so that the effectiveness of their composition and impact can be assessed without distraction and so that the reader can enjoy them as a pictorial language in their own right.
Every symbol is captioned with information on who it was designed for, who designed it, when, and what the symbol stands for. These sections are interspersed with short but detailed case studies featuring classic examples of symbols still in use, and exceptional examples of recently designed symbols.
This comprehensive volume is an indispensable resource for designers working on identity systems, and an engaging showcase of this exciting field. Now in a compact format.
6. The Logo Design Idea Book by Steven Heller and Gail Anderson
Arrows, swashes, swooshes, globes, sunbursts, and parallel, vertical and horizontal lines, words, letters, shapes and pictures. Logos are the most ubiquitous and essential of all graphic design devices, representing ideas, beliefs and, of course, things. They primarily identify products, businesses and institutions, but they are also associated, hopefully in a positive way, with the ethos or philosophy of those entities. The 50 logos in this book are examples of good ideas in the service of representation, reputation and identification.
7. Bruno Munari: Square, Circle, Triangle by Bruno Munari
In the early 1960s Italian design legend Bruno Munari published his visual case studies on shapes: Circle, Square, and, a decade later, Triangle. Using examples from ancient Greece and Egypt, as well as works by Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, and Alvar Aalto, Munari invests the three shapes with specific qualities: the circle relates to the divine, the square signifies safety and enclosure, and the triangle provides a key connective form for designers.
One of the great designers of the twentieth century, Munari contributed to the fields of painting, sculpture, design, and photography while teaching throughout his seventy-year career. After World War II he began to focus on book design, creating children’s books known for their simplicity and playfulness.
8. Marks of Excellence: The Development and Taxonomy of Trademarks by Per Mollerup
The core of this book is a full classification of hundreds of trade marks: covering pictures, names and abbreviations. The author analyses and describes the history of trademarks and shows how they have transcended barriers of language and time.
9. Logo Life: Life Histories of 100 Famous Logos by van der Vlugt, Ron
In Logo Life, you can read the short history of the logo for Apple, Coca-Cola, Nike, and ninety-seven other logos for world-famous brands, seeing all the little steps and great leaps in the visual evolution of these logos as well as some of their most iconic uses in brand advertising.
10. Los Logos 7 by Robert Klanten and Nina C. Muller
Los Logos 7, the latest edition in our Los Logos series, showcases current developments in logo design. With Los Logos 7, Gestalten continues its bestselling series on contemporary logo design that began with the publication of Los Logos in 2002. Like its six predecessors, this latest edition is a comprehensive survey of the visual languages and styles used by cutting-edge logo designers from around the world. Printed in the familiar landscape format, this new compendium resets the standard for reference books on design. Whether primarily designed to identify, inform, or inspire, today’s logos have to cover a lot of bases. Although they are often created for fast-paced digital platforms, they still need to provide companies and brands with an enduring visual. Los Logos 7 shows that less has become more. Due to the significant influence of interface design, current logos are evolving to focus on the essentials. Consequently, many contemporary designs forgo realistic images, playful forms, textures, or color gradients and instead return to classic geometric forms and clear colors. These new logos master the balancing act between respectful restraint and the deliberate shaping of an identity. Fully indexed and intuitively structured, Los Logos 7 draws connections between the applications and the fields for which the featured logos were intended. Presented on 400 pages, the work is bundled into the categories Corporate & Business, Culture, Design, Fashion, Motion/Media/Games, Music, Art, Politics, Sports, Health /Wellness, and Education & Sciences. This book not only celebrates the latest innovations in contemporary logo design, but is also a precursor to coming styles and trends Its practical examples inspire designers to create logos in line with the current zeitgeist and push their designs even further into the future.
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