A logo to stand the test of time

If there’s one thing I love as a movie fan it’s movie logos, especially being someone who came of age in the era when they were a real art form in themselves.

Not the logos of companies in the fictional worlds of movies (although I love them as well), the typographic treatments of the movies themselves.

Even if I didn’t know how to read, I (and millions of my contemporaries) would immediately recognise these graphics;

In fact my love of movie logos, my previous and ongoing career as a graphic designer and my ‘real’ job as a journalist have combined more than once into excited curiosity to learn about how some of those iconic artworks came about, including overtures to some of the people behind them to learn about the stories behind their creation.

In fact I wrote about the best movie logos right here just recently.

Part of the mystique for some of them is that we’ll never know more than we do now. When it comes to the iconic Star Wars logo, San Fransisco advertising artist Suzy Rice spent so long defending her work on it she wrote a blog post on her website explaining the whole situation and saying she’d never address it again.

And Michael Gross, the illustrator of one of my favourite movies ever,Ghostbusters, died in 2015.

All of which means that when it came time to publish or try to sell Falling using various methods at various times, it was a given I’d try to come up with a logo that would one day adorn movie posters and billboards and be the subject of articles about great entertainment logos like the one above and be on original one sheets collectors would pay hundreds of dollars for at Amoeba Music years in the future.

The first iteration was on the website I built to try and sell the ebook version myself circa 1998, the effort of which I detailed in a previous post.

Having done it in around 1997 and not maintained digital filing systems faithfully enough in the years following (unforgivable for a graphic designer), I don’t have the separated elements of that artwork anymore, but it consisted of the novel’s title in a classical version of the Garamond font, extended vertically and with fading effects at the edges, intended to make it look like a huge object slowly emerging from the darkness.

In this case I had it appear over the Sydney skyline at night, in photos taken by a friend of a friend as we stood on the foreshore at Kirribilli, one of the Harbour Bridge and another of the CBD, later combined in Photoshop (all one pixel at a time, in the years before the ‘photomerge’ feature).

Second came a logo I made during one of the periods where I decided self publishing was a fool’s errand and resolved to submit it to traditional publishers and agents.

Intended to appear unobtrusively against a white background because it was appearing on a synopsis and sample, it was simply the title, this time in a light condensed version of Garamond, a ghostly fading shadow falling forward across a surface as if lit from behind by something ethereal, unseen and mysterious.

Then, after meeting with no success whatsoever doing that, I decided trying to get it published traditionally was a fool’s errand and resolved to publish it myself when the technology and methodology existed thanks to the whole ebook/tablet ecosystem.

This time the typeface was a thin, tall and spindly san serif font called Venus Light.

The current cover shows the type in red against a black background with plenty of space around it, which hopefully makes it a quiet yet impactful statement – just like ghosts often are. Just like in previous versions it’s also emerging from the dark and denotes everything we associate with the colour red; heat, high passion, danger, maybe blood.

Whether the above creative efforts have been successful in conveying the spirit and aesthetic of the novel is (like all art) highly subjective, and there’s only one person in the whole world for whom they work perfectly and make perfect sense – the artist.

But wherever else Falling goes in the annals of history, it’s not only got a logo, it’s old enough to have evolved. I like that.