Deciding on a corporate image for Little Sphaeroid Press has entailed a bit of trial and error, and much of what we now employ for graphical design elements were steps along the way to our first product, Steven Hammer's Mesemb series. I thought it would be interesting to describe how we came to have the logo we now use, and what the logo means to us.
My first sketches of the LSP logo involved both typographic approaches and graphical ideas. Typography is pretty common in logo design. Many companies, such as IBM, have famously turned the name of their company into a recognizable image. LSP, however, could never carry quite the cache as a multinational like IBM, or Coca Cola, and Little Sphaeroid Press is a bit to long to logo-ize. Still, here are a few early attempts, by myself and Catherine Arthur, at typographic logos and company-name layouts. Endless choices of fonts and arrangements are possible. None seem to carry any particular meaning, other than whatever degree of refinement might be suggested by the typeface.
The
graphical approaches centered at first on what I considered to be a cute,
simplified profile of a mesemb. In my mind it's a gibbaeum with a gaping smile.
The image appeals to me even now, and I originally envisioned it set in a
rectangle, something like the aspect ratio of a book, bringing together the
mesemb–book concept. Later the design morphed into a square, for better or
worse, and I could not decide how to set the company name, either below, above,
next to, around, or on top of the image.
My friend and mesemb grower
Catherine Arthur, and English subject who lives in southern Spain, graciously
helped move this idea along, providing a series of design options based around
my original drawing. One of her designs became the original logo that we used
in the fundraising prospectus for the mesemb series. She was able to combine
the text and image in a variety of ways, and together we came to a suitable
starter logo.
Still, I was never entirely satisfied
with this design. The squares-within-squares design meshed poorly with the
company name, the book aspect notwithstanding. And the image was unlikely to be
recognized. But Catherine had also pursued another idea. She began with an
image of a Gibbaeum album fruit:
And after a few
clicks in Photoshop, obtained something like a charcoal drawing, which we both
really liked.
I worried that the fruit was too
restrictive as a symbol for a book company that hoped one day to branch out
from mesembs to publish books on other botanical subjects, and imagined that a
more abstract approach might be better. Catherine had this to say:
"Having given it some (brief) thought, don't think it's necessarily too restrictive. It's utterly botanic, and it's a real little sphaeroid borne of a real little sphaeroid (Gibbaeum — my faves!), and it even contains littler sphaeroids within! It's also a super natural star-shaped design. Besides, Penguin doesn't only publish books about flightless aquatic birds! Abstract would of course be good, too, but in any event I do think it's worth trying to represent a 'Little Sphaeroid' somehow."
She also thought that the square logo format was
"nicely ironic", and she continued to delve further into abstractions
of the mesemb-fruit theme.
Though clever and
fanciful, I had to reject these extensions toward cubes. My fixation on the
relationship between 'Sphaeroid' and our logo wouldn't reconcile the two. And
it also became clear that the digital hand-drawn version was not going to work,
either. I considered pursuing a true hand-drawn mesemb fruit, but I had also
become convinced that a good book-company logo should be fairly simple. After
all, it has to exist in many contexts, including one serious restriction: foil
stamped and small on the spine of a book. Perhaps each book in the series, or
the series as a whole, could be represented by a detailed, hand-drawn mesemb
fruit, but the company needed something more refined, distilled, and elemental.
When
it came time to build a website, I leaned heavily on my good friend and
designer Vassil Vassilev. We agreed on several aspects of the website design,
including colors, but I also set him to the task of improving upon the logos
Catherine and I had come up with. After several rounds of overly 3-D, busy, and
heavily digital attempts, Vassil began to home in on some suitable ideas. It
was at this point that he also recognized that our archaic use of the
"ae" spelling in Sphaeroid brought with it a delightful typographic
ligature, which has become a permanent part of our corporate identity. It
connects us with a history of linguistic and typographic traditions, and the
archaic nature of the ligature reflects in my mind the nearly archaic nature of
the book itself. Here are some of his best designs:
The
chosen design came out of the image at the lower left. Combined with the elegant serif typeface, Adobe Trajan Pro,
we decided the text should not go around the image, but to its side, or below it. The glyph is a play on the mesemb fruit we started with, but
the reference is fairly obscure, so it doesn't box us in. It's simple, and it
looks good in one, two, or three colors. It reproduces well at any size and
will survive being foil stamped
into cloth. At larger sizes its subtly wavy outline is more apparent, with
nested shapes that remind me other succulent plants. It's perfect.
