Ocean Textures
October 20, 2007
New Jersey oasis.
A few years ago, you may remember MoMA’s logo redesign effort. After Bruce Mau talked them out of a completely new design, the museum hired well-known typographer Matthew Carter to “refresh” their Franklin Gothic No. 2 letterforms. The goal was creating a more accurate digital translation of the letterforms from the original metal type circa 1902. For 8 months he slaved away on a redesign that few will notice or appreciate, but served as an important exercise in keeping a 40 year-old logo contemporary. It also illustrates how really easy it is to be bothered by things that just aren’t quite right, no matter how small.
Although nowhere near this size or importance, I recently went through a similar exercise to hone my personal logo mark. This version originated a few years ago and for the most part, I’m still quite happy with my mashed-up “MjM” initials. However, there were just a couple lingering annoyances I had with it: the too-subtle gaps between the vectors at the humps and my haphazard placement of the diagonal cut. At small sizes, the gaps between the vectors quickly and easily bled together. This became even more painfully obvious when I printed some personal business cards earlier this year. The Mr.French Dur-O-Tone stock gently incured some dot gain, but it was enough to kill my gaps. As far as the diagonal cut in my mark, I can’t remember my logic for creating it’s position, but it just looked too random to me now.
I took an embarrassingly large amount of time to hone this logo mark than you may think. I created four or five new versions, most by varying the weight of each vector shape. This not only increased my gaps, but also lightened the whole mark. They were refreshing, but seemed to lose some solidity that I felt was imperative, especially in the environment of my web site (bonus trivia: the right side of the first vector in my logo mark inspired the green column design element you see to your left). So I kept the weight of the original mark, but just got the to heart of the problems and made some alterations there. My gaps have been expanded, and my 45° cut now intersects with the baseline of the “M”s. Lame, I know, but enjoy.
