Logomotion

*The views in this blog are that of Rusty Kugler, and are not necessarily the views of Mid-Continent Public Library.

This is the logo of the place where I work.

It's a 7-color logo, with an abstract open rainbow book above garamond and gill sans type. At first I HATED this logo. It really was a big pain to work with, but as a monochrome logo, it's WAY easier to use, and just became part of my daily work.

The Library held a contest in 1988 for someone to design a new logo, with a VCR as the prize. Wow. Yep, a VCR. Pictured below is Brent Harris, an Associate Art Director of Hallmark, who designed our current logo. Poor guy.

We've slapped this logo on all kinds of things, and now I've appointed myself the unofficial "Keeper of the Logo." I've written a visual style guide about how the logo should be applied and when, and I sometimes feel as though I'm caring for an endangered animal who's living out in the wild. "Out in the wild?!" What am I talking about? Well, I'm talking about the internet. The digital wilderness of the world, and our logo is out there running free. I recently did a Google Image search of our logo, and was astonished at the findings.

First, I'll show the "designers" who take our logo and pass it off as theirs:

And it's bad enough that someone "designed" East Chicago Public Library's logo with stolen parts, they totally don't even know their logo is really ours.

BUT WHY WOULD YOU TRY TO PUT SUCH A COLORFUL LOGO ON TOP OF ANOTHER COLOR?! ARE YOU GUYS DUMMIES?! YOU CAN'T EVEN READ YOUR STOLEN LOGO!!!

But I digress...

Even the US Government has stolen our logo, re-worked it, and called it their own:

Horrible acts of font treachery have been acted upon our dear logo, like this chop-shop job from a library in NJ:

Or yes, even Jokerman from Brampton Library's FB page. NOOOOO!!! NOT MY BABYYYY!!!

Now I'm just going to post some of the more insane ones I found as I scrolled through the Google Image search. This is just the first 30 pages of them:

So this brings me to wondering just who this Brent Harris is... Random designer?

Or visionary logo designer of the world?