Even as a young child, Ludovic Houplain's life was ruled by logos: his father worked as a racing driver and his uniform and car were covered in logos of various sponsors; his grandfather owned a factory in which everything, from the letterhead to the door, was emblazoned with the company logo and he had a puzzling fascination with the Carrefour sign that he encountered every day on his way to school.
As he grew up, Houplain found himself surrounded in a world made with logos while working on different projects. Logobook (ed. by Julius Wiedemann, Taschen) is the story of his passion for logos, but also of the making of the Oscar-winning short movie Logorama by H5 (2009).
In 1999 Houplain made a film for Alex Gopher entitled The Child that was set in a typographical environment in which words represented the urban environment. After developing projects based on logos for music videos that were never released for legal reasons, Houplain realised that logos had become for him "Lego bricks", as he states in the volume, and that time had come to work on a bigger project.
Together with H5's François Alaux and Hervé de Crécy, Houplain started developing the background research for a film entirely based on logos. The team went through a painstakingly long process, doing a sort of "casting" of logos, listing which ones would have been better for characters, objects, animals or vehicles and which ones could have been used as props.
The result was Logorama, a 16-minute thriller full of car chases, shootings, kidnappings and apocalyptic adventures in an imaginary world created employing around 2,500 logos. The film treated logos in an ironic way, using them for their merely aesthetic function rather than as cult objects.
While working on the film, Houplain realised that brands have overshadowed products in our world, and that logos are designed to follow fashion and trends. This is the main reason why artists were often enlisted by specific companies to design logos, adapting them to the aesthetics of the decades through which they operated.
Philosopher and sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky states in one of the essays included in the volume that we are literally bombarded with logos through different media: according to surveys, each of us is indeed exposed to 1,200 logos a day. In a nutshell, we live in the society of hyper consumption in which products are less important than the brand that offers not just goods, but the possibility of buying into a dream, a myth and an image, and this is valid in all industries, from food to fashion, from transport to computers.
Yet, Lipovetsky argues, while young people can name more labels than saints, poets and philosophers, living in a society of brands has made our buying trends unpredictable and impulsive, and, though, certain brands are exerting a greater control on consumers, the latter are actually searching for more individualistic experiences.
It's unlikely that brands will die, though, as foreseen also in the apocalyptic Logorama, and, to prove the point, this weighty tome (it's over 700 pages long), feaures an extensive survey of all the most popular logos around, arranged in alphabetical order and taken from different industries including airlines, apparel, computer software, electronics, food, music and retail, just to mention a few ones. Highly recommended if you're a graphic designer, but also if you're just an obsessed and impenitent fan of logos.
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