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Chrysler's Building. "Walter P. Chrysler, an automobile manufacturer," unable to beat General Motors and Ford Motor Company "on the streets ... took them on at the skyline," as recounted by Michael J. Lewis in The New York Times. Walter knew he couldn't compete, when, in 1927, "Ford unveiled the Model A, with its revolutionary hydraulic brake system and a choice of colors as bright as neon." So Walter's idea, as realized by architect William Van Alen, was to channel the Chrysler ideal into a building. That didn't mean "making a carlike building," but rather a building that expressed "the idea of the car, and its associations: speed, excitement, liberation."
Unlike other "bulky ziggurats" of the time, Chrysler's building "was a missile, its energies surging up rather then down ... it is as if the building is jettisoning weight and picking up momentum as it rises. The culmination of this is the building's crown, a superb allegory of mobility, not merely of cars but of all mobile modernity: passenger liners, dirigibles, even Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis. The crown is composed of seven radiating arches outlined with zigzag patterns, which creates an effect like a cascade of fireworks, mounting upward in quick succession." The look is what most would call Art Deco; Michael J. Lewis calls it "rhapsody in chrome."
Call it what you will, it certainly projects "a striking sense of personality -- idiosyncratic individual personality." William P. Chrysler's personality ... "a billboard for a family business." That kind of "strut and swagger" didn't survive World War II and the Great Depression. By the 1950s, "the flat-roofed steel-and-glass skyscrapers ... like the Seagram Building and Lever House were just as assertive and arrogant ... But they presented an entirely different image of capitalism ... a kind of sleek anonymity, that the modern efficient and rational boardroom." The "joyous freedom" and "soaring lift" of Chrysler's building, in contrast, reflected a time when "the entire nation was engaged in a mighty act of collective rule-breaking ... and too many rules have been broken since then for rule-breaking to ever seem so exhilarating or delicious again."
Font Soup. If you haven't already, check out Joey Katzen's "Retail Alphabet Game," as reported by Sarah Boxer in The New York Times (5/16/05). "You, the player, are given an alphabet cut from 26 famous logos: Kellogg's, Mobil, Zenith, etc. Your mission ... is to identify which logo each letter comes from ... It's harder than you think." You can find the game at joeykatzen.com/alpha.
Joey's site is actually only one of many typographic-oriented websites. You might also check out fontifier.com, which "tells you how to turn your handwriting into a font." Or an article called "The Scourge of Arial," by Mark Simonson, marksimonson.com, who derides Arial as "a bad imitation of Helvetica." And then there's Ban Comic Sans, bancomicsans.com, a site dedicated to stopping "the spread of this childish font in inappropriate places," urging "the proletariat around the globe ... to rise up in revolt against this evil of typographical ignorance." Serious business, apparently.
Actually, it can be -- for marketers, anyway. Consider the typeface "Futura Bold Italic, which the artist Barbara Kruger made famous ... Since the 1970s it has been linked with Kruger's feminist, anti-consumerist message." Might not be the best choice for your logo ... then again, maybe it is. Another question is, can you use it legally? As Mark Simonson observes, "only the names of fonts are really protected." Or as a blogger named Nat notes: "It doesn't matter if (Kruger) owns the style or not, because the association is there." Other brands should be so lucky.
Tim Manners, editor
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