Customer Reviews

The Big Book of Logos

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

David Carter's, The Big Book of Logos, is just a huge collection of excellent logos from all sorts of different businesses and organizations. It's a good place to look to find out what other artists are doing, and a good source of inspiration when your own ideas seem to have dried up. Good book!

I have yet to own this awesome book but from looking at it in my graphics portfolio class today, I have all sorts of logo ideas stirring in my brain now. There are so many amazing logos and trademarks in this big book that it is sure to spark a creative mind and get the juices flowing.

Many interesting ideas are presented, to help you narrow and refine exactly what your looking for.

This book has 2,500 of the best logos done by designers from all across America and nothing else. This book was put together so it could become a compendium of logos that one can use to see different styles and techniques and jump start their own creative juices. The book is full color and the only way to navigate the book is through the Index. There is no table of contents. Each page has a few logos with credit given to each the designers at the bottom of the page in very small print.

Every few pages, there is a full page devoted to just one company logo. But the cool part is that this full page has pictures of the logo in action - whether it is on the product packaging, bill board, or store front sign. This is very helpful as it gives you a context to judge the power of the logo. Just a graphics image against a white page background means you need to use your imagination trying to picture how the logo's going to look in its intended use.

Whether you are a designer or a small business owner that wants to get a logo done through a designer, this book is an invaluable tool. If you are a designer, you can use it to get your creative juices to flow or just admire the work done by others for inspirational reasons. If you are a small business owner, you can use it to work with your logo designer. You can point out some of the logos and just say 'I like these' and that gives the designer a place to start in creating your logo. This avoids a lot of wasted work as you are both trying to figure out what you like and what best represents your business image.

When I first started doing research on good logo design books, I was confused by the number of logo books by this author. The names are a little misleading when you try to figure out which one is the more recent version. I finally decided to use the publication date for this purpose and this book happens to be the latest (published in May 2003). We recently started offering Corporate Identity Management services to small businesses through our company and we are finding that this book is an invaluable tool in communicating with our clients. Especially if our clients are in another city, we just ask them to get a copy of this book before starting the project.

Even if you aren't a designer or someone looking for design services, this book is still fun to flip through if you are the creative type. The price is just phenomenally low for something of this high quality (I am trying to imagine the price of printing along considering it's full color). If you have to even remotely work with logos, just get the book. It's a decision that I haven't regretted even for a second. Have fun!

If you have some appreciation for good design, and want to get something worth your money stay as far away as you can from this book. If possible from any books by this guy David E. Carter. Sure it has a great numbers of examples and logos but the overall intention of this book is to show quantity over quality. The great majority of logos featured here are completely tasteless, tacky and completely ineffective and not easy to reproduce. If you're all for logos that have gradients, photoshop filters and even pictures, yes pictures! then go straight for this one. Identity books by Rockport are usually very good, that would be my suggestion instead

With 2500 logos, mostly eight to a page, well printed on good paper this book should have been a treasure. Instead with no obvious editorial input it ends up being frustrating. As far as I can see it is arranged by design studio output. It should have been arranged, I think, by style of logo, typographic, flat graphic, illustrative etc. The captions don't do the reader any favors either. Client and designer are listed but no dates or what sort of company the logo is for. This book seems very typical of David Carter's output, I have a copy of his 1988 'Logos of America's Largest Corporations', six hundred (nicely printed) marks with just the company name and city location, no designer names or dates.

As to the logos, with 2500 of them there has to be a lot of duds but that is only to be expected. The majority of them have been produced for small companies who feel they need some mark for local recognition and on this basis there are many neat solutions here. For example page 234 shows a capital D incorporating a fork and spoon, a clever idea and surely just what Dantes Restaurants Inc wanted. If the book was just going to show real clever stuff produced by super creative designer folk it would be pretty thin. For the money though I feel this is good value.

At the other extreme a logo book that I have enjoyed is Per Mollerup's 'Marks of Excellence' (ISBN 0714838381) a history of logos, beautifully designed and printed and here the logos are grouped according to their look, eyes, flags, globes, hearts etc. A brilliant survey.

another damn good book with a cover that lets it down... the big book of logos is a huge resource packed with logo designs in just about every style you could possibly imagine, david e. carter has done it again. especially good for clearing up that nasty designers block, would be great as a teaching resource or just to add to your design library.

This is a great inspirational book for logo designers! I find it to be a valuable addition to my design library. The only criticism I have is that this book was not carefully edited. There are low-resolution logos peppered throughout and logo placement does not always match logo descriptions. If you can get past this small speed bump, you have an excellent book.

This book is unique, among the many logo books I have owned or seen, for including a higher percentage of "retail" branding logos alongside the usual complement of arty and edgy graphic design identity marks. This upsets some readers who expect all edge, no cheese. But as I see it, one of the principle values of this book is supporting you when you are called back from Planet Ego to Planet Earth from time to time, to help you when you are stumped over that P.O.P. type treatment or retail branding logo that you need by tomorrow noon.

On another note, it does have some logos that are, as someone here says, ten years old, that have been in all the annuals several times already. I, too, do wish the entries were all marked by date. And further, I would love to have a collection of this scope culled from work I know to be 5 years old or less. It almost seems like a cheat to pump up the number of logos included in a non-history-focused volume by dipping back a decade.

All in all, The Big Book of Logos is a nice addition to the library of either ad agency or design house, while it doesn't at all replace the Graphis logo annuals or anything of that caliber.

Fellow buyers of design books on amazon this is the worst book i have ever purchsed . This book is a compilation of the most poorly designed trademarks. Please do not get this book!!! All the logos seem to have been haphazardly picked. If you insist on getting this book, you should definately check it out at a book store first because that will change your mind faster than roaches scurrying away from light.