For starters, a 3D Abstract Logo isn’t just a name or an icon or other visual signature on company letterhead or a billboard or other promotional venue anymore. Take that device out of your pocket or bag and swipe through the screens, as you probably do many times a day anyway. You now carry dozens of brand icons wherever you go. That’s just the latest manifestation of how changing technology has influenced identity design.
A couple of decades ago, when computers allowed designers to easily add shadows and highlights and dimensionality to logos. They did—revising, for instance, Rand’s flat UPS logo with 3D sparkle. A shift from print-oriented colour processes (responding to external light). To screen-oriented colour (lit from behind, and thus more intense) enabled tricks like transparency and gradients. MSN.com’ early 2000s logo, a butterfly with complicated colour overlaps. Raised eyebrows among designers at the time, who pointed out how hard it would be to print. “But Microsoft was saying, ‘We’re not going to print it. MSN lives in an entirely digital world,’. For all that’s changed since the days when his partners founded the business, he argues, certain fundamentals—simplicity in particular—have not.
Many of their logos, especially the 3d abstract logos, shaped partly by the constraints of mid-20th-century production, “thrive in digital media, in applications that they could have never predicted,”. These manuals may particularly important in an era when rolling out a new logo largely associated with massive logistical feats such as repainting. Thousands of trucks or aeroplanes or replacing signage on gas stations from coast to coast. Standards of course persist, but these systems are generally more flexible today to deal with a constantly changing media landscape.