More is More: The Dark Lord of Logos
And now for something completely different...
Sometimes less is just inappropriate. For instance, when you’re designing death-metal logos.
Christophe Szpajdel is the creator of over 7,000(!) logos for black- and death-metal bands. In a recent (though disappointingly sparse) interview in Vice Magazine he reveals that despite his prolific portfolio, the logos don’t pay the bills. He works a day job in support of his craft.
I am not a big fan of metal myself, but since I started watching Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse, I am intrigued by the metal aesthetic. It’s practically the opposite of what most designers aspire towards these days. Death metal logos are often very complex– practically illegible. They are not at all simple, as we are taught logos and brands should be.
Rather than achieving this complexity through mere repetition, Szpajdel creates it by hand. As a result, it’s noisy, but not random in an algorithmic way. Not to say that there is no craft in digital tools or code, it’s just that here the craft is expressed differently.
Lastly, each logo belongs to a set. This is most apparent in the first image. There is a consistent vocabulary that makes each logo belong to a recognizable style, and yet this vocabulary is played with such that they are all unique.
That is not to say that most web and UI designers are not building from a consistent vocabulary (often Apple’s). But looking over Szpajdel’s logos, the contrast between death-metal and web chrome makes me wonder what else we could do with the medium. How could it look and feel different than it does now, instead of always drawing from the same playbook?
| Tagged with: | Branding, Death metal, Logos, More is More |
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You're reading BlogLESS, a daily blog about the ethics of advertising, branding, design, social media and business. We are also fans of zen, although this itself is perhaps not so zen.
Comments on this post
1.
Interesting you should mention algorithmic generation, because the first image, at first glance, very much resembles the sets of ‘insect’ images evolved by Richard Dawkins’ genetic algorithm in The Selfish Gene.
2.
its easy to draw them out but the hard part is to make them look even and have symmetry i like your work im more just nastyness everywhere in my drawings
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