B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

The logotype is the contemporary means by which complex meanings and identities can be distilled into graphic symbols. It has its roots in a process that pre-dates written phonetic languages. The early scripts, cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters, began as systems of pictograms, which have a strong claim to be regarded as the ancestors of the logotype. Some signs are designed to be understood only by initiates. Others look for universal recognition.

While Christianity was still a persecuted religion, its followers used the sign of the fish to communicate their shared faith to other believers. When Christianity got going in earnest, the cross emerged as one of the most enduring symbols that there has ever been. It is one with such extraordinary power that it has come to be understood not only as a symbol for the Christian religion but as a physical embodiment of it.

This is very like what the most ambitious brand managers aspire to achieve. A few have managed it. The Coca-Cola bottle is both a logo and a product. With Levi jeans, you wear the logo. This is the graphic designer’s version of transubstantiation. The Coke bottle prepares you for what the contents will taste like. The massive investment over many decades in advertising pre-programmes the emotional triggers. Drink Coca-Cola and play your part in making the world a more peaceful place, in making a festive family Christmas, in being modern. With Coke and Levis, the key has been a single-minded focus on the essence of the product, and a robust and easily identifiable logo, or set of trademarks. It’s not just the bottle, and the can, it’s the script, and its association with the colour red. With Levis, it’s the name, the way it is written - which has been modernized over the years much more freely than Coca-Cola - the patch label, the copper rivet and the tag on the back pocket.

But it is not just quality and a strong identity that makes a logo. The financial stakes are high enough now for the legal system to become closely involved where logos are concerned. When London started planning for the Olympics of 2012, a number of remarkable pieces of legislation were enacted in the UK Parliament. Laws were passed to allow tax exemptions not just for visiting athletes but also for all official sponsors too. There were measures to outlaw what was termed as ambush marketing, but which in other circumstances might be called freedom of speech. An outrageous set of rules was put in place to prevent the use not only of the Olympic rings, but also of the words ‘Olympic’, ‘London’ and ‘2012’, in any permutation, without the consent of the International Olympic Committee and the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games.

An early casualty of these new laws was the author of a children’s book with a title that fell foul of the rules. LOCOG’s fearsome legal team went into action to try to stop publication. This was followed by the Brazil Olympic Organizing Committee trying to have a book they disapproved of pulped, because it had the word ‘Olympic’ in the title, a word they claimed to have the right to prevent anybody else from using. This was a preposterous idea, but the fact that it was entertained even for a moment shows the over-reaching power of the Olympic ‘family’, as they call themselves.

The Olympic rings have become a logo, and the new laws were an intimidating display of the extent to which the ownership of a logo has led to the privatization of certain words, and even of some meanings.

If a group of elderly men of questionable ethical standards, who fly the world in six-star luxury, can claim ownership of a word, can they, or those who claim to act on their behalf, also stop you from using the word not only on the cover of a book but inside a newspaper too? As I discovered myself, they could certainly threaten to take you to court to stop you using it as an exhibition title. And if you wanted to make the Olympics the subject matter of an exhibition, they were equally well equipped with the means to stop you. LOCOG claims the copyright for every design that they have commissioned; so don’t try to show the architecture of a stadium or an Olympic mascot or even a poster without their approval. And do not expect that the approval will be granted easily: these are privileges reserved for the commercial sponsors, even if their donations are just a fraction of what has gone into the staging of a games from a national government. It is the IOC and the organizing committees that benefit most directly from the commercial sponsors, and their commercial interests come first.

The embrace of the logo by commerce over the last two centuries has made logo design into an industry if not a science. Its adepts get uncomfortable about outsiders who gloss over the differences between marks and brands, between logos and corporate identities. But this is to split hairs about what can only be understood as a kind of alchemy. It is one that has astonishing values attached to it. When Ford needed a financial bailout at the end of 2006, the company mortgaged, among its other assets, its blue oval trademark in exchange for a $23.5 billion loan.

Names may change, but logos linger. British Airways has at various times been called the British Overseas Airways Corporation, British Airways and plain British. It is now once more called British Airways, but is owned by something called the International Airlines Group. When the airline decided that to be inextricably associated with the national identity of the United Kingdom was off-putting to its international customers, it dumped the union flag and a single style applied to the hulls of all its aircraft in favour of multiple identities. It invited a number of artists from all over the world to come up with motifs that were used to ensure that no two aircraft were identical. Then it changed its mind again, not least because of a notorious incident involving Margaret Thatcher, when she descended on the British Airways stand at a Conservative Party conference and used her handkerchief to suppress what critics described as the ethnic tail fin on a model of a BA jet. But whatever the name of the company, the speed bird has been painted somewhere on the hull of its aircraft for all of the last seventy years, even if in recent incarnations it has been made to look more like Nike’s swoosh than the elegant device that goes back to the 1930s.

This vaccilation is the sign of a corporation that does not know what it is. Coca-Cola, on the other hand, has never flinched. It may be an ugly American, but it is still an American, and not shy of admitting it, even if the logo has been rendered in Thai, Mandarin, Hebrew, Arabic and Cyrillic scripts.

Corporations are as susceptible to fashion in the way that they choose to name themselves as the rest of us are when we come to look for the names that we give our children. Twenty-five years ago, there were very few companies with names that ended in ‘ia’. Now, despite the abject and costly failure of the attempt to rename Britain’s Royal Mail as Consignia, it’s hard to find any corporation with a name that doesn’t sound as if it is the product of a computer programme. There is a generation of deliberately synthetic-sounding brand names that do all that they can to filter out every trace of a linguistic inflection and any specific meaning. They are placeless, being designed to be inoffensive in any language, and to have no immediately obvious connections to any particular country. But often they drop hints about their origins. Consignia was meant to be a subliminal reference to the idea of insignia, and so brought with it a faded memory of the crown that distinguished the Royal Mail, and perhaps also the idea of the trustworthiness of the postal service to which we consigned our most precious messages. As was pointed out when the Post Office revealed just how much its rebranding project had cost, no brand could have carried more implicit value than that of the Royal Mail, a brand that the company already owned all the rights to, with no further payment necessary.

The company that provides my pension plan used to be called the Norwich Union. Now it is Aviva. Capita was once a sideline of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy. Accenture grew out of Arthur Anderson Consulting; Ivensys was once the British Tyre & Rubber Company.

Previous fashions in brand names included the fondness of computer, technology and communication companies for naming themselves after varieties of fruit: Apple, of course, but also Apricot, Tangerine, Orange and BlackBerry.

Logos have similar trajectories. In the first half of the twentieth century, they still owed a lot to heraldry. In the second half of the century, modernism pushed them towards abstraction, as in the case of the double arrow with which British Railways supplanted the rampant clutching a wheel lion that had once been emblazoned on the side of every locomotive, in a deliberate attempt to suggest that rail travel was the equal of the drip-dry modernity of air travel. British Rail has vanished, but the double arrow lingers on as the generic sign of rail travel rather than of any specific provider. The geometric abstractions of the mid-twentieth century have been replaced by rather less assertive identities. Hard-edged geometry and abstract symbols have given way to softer, more representational symbolism.

It is at points of crisis - marriage, divorce, birth and death - that the logo becomes most visible. It is the subject of half-measures, or else of radical surgery.

It is the logos that are now counted as among the most valuable which cost the least to create in the first place. The Coke brand, Ford itself, Nike and Apple were all graphic devices originally created with remarkably little ceremony, and for very little investment. As they have matured, and the more valuable they have become, the more money has been poured into the hands of consultants charged with nurturing them. The most powerful examples have remained all but identical despite endless and costly creative effort. It is a narcissistic process, a corporate version of psychotherapy, which ends in endless navel-gazing, and very little resolution.