Australia Post — Huveneers's Postal Mark
A postal horn and a letter share one compact sign.
Branding
- 41
- briefs
- 1:20
- average
- 55 min
- in total
- 8
- designers
All briefs
Bang & Olufsen — The B&O Monogram
A compact signature gives changing audio products a point of continuity.
Bell System — Saul Bass's 1969 Identity
Simplifying a familiar bell allows continuity across a very large organization.
Braun — A Coordinated Design Identity
A shared approach connects products that perform very different tasks.
British Leyland — The Circular L
A repeated circular badge gives a diverse industrial group a common signature.
Lufthansa Visual System — Otl Aicher and E5
A crane, a typeface and a printing grid make an airline recognizable across different surfaces.
MUJI's Product Philosophy — Kenya Hara
Hara's idea of emptiness leaves room for the user to decide what an object becomes.
Olivetti Corporate Identity — The Red Books
A revised wordmark becomes one part of a documented identity spanning many kinds of communication.
Mexico 68 — Olympic Identity System
An expandable graphic language also carries the political tensions of the event it identifies.
Pentagram — Naming a Shared Practice
A name can hold together independent practices without prescribing one visual style.
CD Bund — Swiss Federal Identity
One administrative signature makes many offices identifiable as parts of the same government.
Swissair — Karl Gerstner's Identity Revision
A national emblem becomes a graphic sign of movement.
Volkswagen — The 2019 Flat Logo
Reducing dimensional effects makes an established monogram easier to move between media.
1972 Munich Olympics Identity — Otl Aicher
Pictograms, colour and typography coordinated a large international event.
AEG Identity System — Peter Behrens
Behrens connected a company's graphics, products and buildings within one design practice.
Apple Logo
Rob Janoff's bitten apple retained its outline through changing colour treatments.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation Logo
An oscilloscope-derived curve gives a broadcaster an abstract, technically grounded symbol.
BMW Logo
Bavarian colours came first; the propeller interpretation came later.
British Rail Identity System
A symbol, typeface and colour scheme made a railway organisation visible as one system.
Coca-Cola Logo
Frank Mason Robinson connected a product name with the flowing forms of Spencerian script.
FedEx Logo
Lindon Leader's FedEx wordmark makes the space between two letters carry an arrow.
IBM Logo
Paul Rand's eight-bar IBM mark makes reproduction part of the design problem.
Mercedes-Benz Logo
A three-pointed star carries an engineering ambition through badges and a corporate merger.
Playboy Logo
Art Paul's rabbit-head silhouette developed from a magazine endnote into a brand emblem.
Porsche Logo
A constructed coat of arms combines the company name with Stuttgart and regional heraldry.
Random House Logo
Rockwell Kent gives a publisher's arbitrary name a concrete image.
Renault Logo Evolution
The diamond survives as its construction changes from a vehicle grille to animated lines.
Shell Logo
Raymond Loewy's 1971 revision gives Shell's scallop emblem a strongly defined graphic form.
Gotham (typeface)
Tobias Frere-Jones · 2000
Gotham is a geometric sans-serif typeface family designed in 2000 by Tobias Frere-Jones with Jesse Ragan and released in 2002. It was commissioned by GQ magazine to display a sans-serif with a 'geometric structure' that would look 'masculine, new, and fresh'. Its letterforms were inspired by examples of architectural signs of the mid-twentieth century, especially the sign on the Eighth Avenue façade of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Frere-Jones based the font on lettering seen in older Manhattan buildings, and characterised the simplification as 'not the kind of letter a type designer would make. It's the kind of letter an engineer would make.' The letterforms Gotham was based on were geometric yet did not look like Futura; their widths were more uniform and less classical, bowls were larger. Reviews of Gotham focus on its identity as something both American and specific to New York City.
Jonathan Anderson (fashion designer)
Anderson’s career is not a style but a logistics platform — built on speed, sponsorship, and layered appointments.
Swoosh
Carolyn Davidson · 1972
The Swoosh is a 1971 graphic design solution to a specific client request: motion, differentiation from Adidas, speed of execution. It succeeded not as an expression of personality or craft, but as a functional answer to a narrow constraint — and its longevity reveals more about brand consolidation than design innovation.
Eiko Ishioka
Surrealism anchored in historical form—not abstraction—gave her authority across Olympics, film, and advertising.
Gill Sans
Eric Gill · 1928
Gill Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by Monotype in 1928, based on Edward Johnston's 1916 Underground Alphabet and Roman inscriptions, with lowercase forms derived from old-style serifs and uppercase proportions drawn from Trajan’s Column.
Helvetica
Max Miedinger · 1957
Helvetica is a deliberately constrained sans-serif, made to erase voice — not to express it.
Herbert Bayer
Bayer didn’t simplify type to look clean — he cut capitals to speed up writing, and his fonetik alphabet failed because English refused to relearn itself.
IBM Plex
IBM Design · 2017
IBM Plex is a corporate typeface designed to replace Helvetica across IBM’s global communications. Its rationale is financial and ideological: open-source licensing eliminates licence fees; typographic decisions reject expressive or historical categories in favour of functional clarity. It delivers a coherent, documented system — but only within the narrow frame of IBM’s internal brand requirements.
Muji
Kenya Hara · 1979
The work is Kenya Hara’s 2001 appointment as Muji’s art director — a strategic, graphic-led recalibration of a brand adrift from its 'No design' principle. He treated every object as designed, not neutral; replaced myth with method; and tightened coherence across 5,000 products and 250 stores. His posters — 'Horizon' (2003) and 'Natsure, Naturally, MUJI.' (2018) — are artefacts of that stance. Nothing in the sources supports claims about product design, architecture, or influence beyond Muji itself.
Paul Rand
Rand didn’t sell logos — he sold the idea that design could change business thinking.
Peter Behrens
Peter Behrens didn’t invent modernism — he built its first operating system.
Virgil Abloh
Abloh didn’t design clothes — he designed permission slips for other people’s designs.
Vivienne Westwood
Punk was not a style Westwood sold — it was a system she jammed from inside a shop.