There has been some criticism that what was recently the most favoured suggestion, a bold typographic design, was too anonymous and could belong to ‘any multi-national company’. Perhaps it could, to the older breed of corporation, like IBM, but more recent multinational companies, like Nike, look to their logos to be anything but anonymous. The modern logo is essentially odious in that it is a deliberate attempt to manipulate the public perception, so different from the printers’ or publishers’ colophons, from which it is partly descended, where the emblem was chosen from a sense of attachment or appreciation possibly unapparent to a public, which nevertheless came to recognise it. See for example the early twentieth-century colophons of the once independent British publishers, Jonathan Cape or Chatto and Windus, now both part of Random House but still thought to be ‘brands’ worth preserving.
