Ok everyone, has anyone noticed the arrow on the Fed Ex truck. Heres the story behind it. Read it its very interesting. The FedEx logo is legendary among designers. It has won over 40 design awards and was ranked as one of the eight best logos in the last 35 years in the 35th Anniversary American Icon issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Nearly every design school professor and graphic designer with a blog has at some point focused on the FedEx logo to discuss the use of negative space. I wanted to hear the full history of how it all went down, not to mention impressing my daughter, so I called on Lindon Leader, the designer who created the mark in 1994 while working as senior design director in the San Francisco office of Landor Associates, a global brand consultancy known for executing strategy through design. Lindon now runs his own shop in Park City, Utah, where he continues to work the white space in creating marks and logos for a wide array of organizations. We spoke at length about visual impact, his creative process, and his story of the FedEx logo development. I began by telling him how my daughter points out FedEx trucks when she sees them. It’s those kinds of stories that are the most gratifying for me, most rewarding, he says. I’m always asked what it’s like to see your work everywhere, and does it ever get old. It never does. When Lindon graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, his very first job was with Saul Bass, the iconic Los Angeles designer perhaps best known for creating the AT&T logo. Lindon remembers Bass telling a story much like mine toward the end of his career. Someone asked him in an interview whether after an illustrious 40-year career in design in which he won every award under the sun, he still got a thrill out of design. Bass answered the question by explaining how he’d been driving recently with his five-year-old daughter, who suddenly cried out, Daddy, look, there goes one of your trucks! Saul told the interviewer that seeing that truck on the road still made him proud. I shared my interest in subtraction, specifically the use of negative space and emptiness, and asked Lindon to describe his design philosophy. I strive for two things in design: simplicity and clarity, he explains. Great design is born of those two things. I think that’s what we all want from design, and from business, from our work, even from our friendships. According to Lindon, seeing the original Smith & Hawken catalogs in the 1980s made a significant impression on him and influenced much of his early approach to design. It was an experience like taking this leisurely stroll through a garden, everything so clean, refreshing, uncluttered. You got this sense of the simple, healthy outdoors life. Simple and clear. It was my first aha into what design needs to be. Lindon begins a design project in a fairly typical way, generating a long string of designs. Those early sketches always have too much going on, too much to think about, and too much extraneous stuff, he says. He labors over the work until the simplicity and clarity he’s looking for begin to emerge. I slowly begin to remove things. The more you pull out, the clearer it gets. Not everyone gets that; most people don’t. But it’s always the final one that’s far more simple and far more clear than the more elaborate ones I labored over at the beginning. It is inevitable, he says, that when he creates something composed of 30 to 40 percent whitespace, his clients ask why they can’t fill up the space and make use of it. Lindon’s invariable reply: Understatement is much more effective, much more elegant. Elaborating on the theme of understatement and how to craft a memorable experience through something as apparently limiting as graphic identity design, Lindon explains to me that what he’s after is what he calls the punch line and that he’s delighted when something isn’t what it appears to be at first glance: You look at something, then you look at it again, and you say, ‘Hey, wait!’ and ‘Oh, I get it!’ Lindon is after what he refers to as one plus one equals three. For Lindon, that addition is actually subtractive. You’ve eliminated the third one and had not just the same impact but greater impact because of the surprise of the missing one. If your name is Global Air Supply, for example, the last thing you want is an airplane flying around an image of the globe. That’s one plus one equals two. The FedEx logo without the hidden arrow is just plain vanilla—one plus one equals two. With it, it’s one plus one equals three. If you look at the original Northwest Orient Airlines logo that Landor Associates did, Lindon continues, it’s maybe the best logo I’ve ever seen. It’s one plus one equals three, maybe four or five. The logo he is referring to is shown on the next page. It is a circle with a clearly visible N. But if you look again, you see it’s also a W: part of the left leg of the W is removed. And it’s even more than that: the circle represents the compass, and the white space simultaneously creates a little tick, a pointer, pointing northwest.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 23:33:46 +0000
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