Paul Rand's Unused Ford Logo from 1966 | Hacker News Reader

Paul Rand's Unused Ford Logo from 1966

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Am I the only one seeing an F having sexual intercourse with a bent over person, who is performing oral sex on the d ahead?

That was the first thing I saw as well.

Great, now I can't stop seeing that.

Good thing it never became the official logo then!

this was probably what someone said at the board meeting when it was rejected. it's right there in plain sight.

No, no you are not. That's the first thing I saw.

Reminds me of the Oozinator.

or the London Olympics logo (think Lisa Simpson)

And here's me thinking the Brits were stuffy. Good logo!

first thing I saw was a tron light cycle

damn! reading your comment altered my view of the logo :D

At first, the logo looked like a car. F like the front with the steering and the "d" as the back seat. Now it looks like logo-porn.

I can see why it was unused. Looks like it says "Foid."

Lots of corporate logos give up on being readable and instead go for something stylistic, and only vaguely based on letters. Look at the LG logo in the top left of this page:

http://www.lg.com/us/index.jsp

Ford could have gone down that route as well, if it wanted to.

LG used to be Goldstar I think, until they screwed up their brand name by building lousy quality products. It sort of makes sense why they'd want a cryptic smileyface instead :-D

close. Lucky Goldstar

I think LG came from a merger of Lucky and Goldstar. Goldstar used to make low quality products, I have never used a Lucky product. Then merged and rebranded under LG.

http://www.vb.com/lg.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Electronics

This was Microsoft's second logo: http://www.solarnavigator.net/sponsorship/sponsorship_images...

It was changed to what we see now because focus groups thought it read "Micr Soft." Design can bite you when you're not looking.

I think this article is more interesting: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/the-ford-logo-tha...

More images please :-/

Looks a lot like the Durex logo. http://popsop.ru/wp-content/uploads/durex_logo_old.jpg

Do you know when the Durex logo was done? I can't find the date. I am wondering who influenced who.

Ford is one of those companies where a logo redesign would be crazy. As a company it has followers so rusted on it's not uncommon to see 'Ford' tattoos.

While Toyota, Mazda and others have fiddled with their designs over the years, I think a long-lasting company like Ford should leave things as is. It's true, the current blue oval doesn't go right back to the start of the company, but the styling of the font is well linked to the original logos.

Wow, it's really evocative of a speeding car, yet really closely mirrors the classic logo.

The minimalist in me would prefer 1 or 2 more iterations. Maybe without the strange dot off the 'd' and the superfluous flair on the 'F'.

Unfortunately Rand would have browbeaten you into oblivion.

He was a legendary curmudgeon, and would often try to defeat the client's meddling by saying something like: "you pay me for a solution. I'll make it, then you can decide whether you want to implement it."

Steve Jobs remarked as much in an interview once (Paul Rand designed the NeXT logo): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJthkRrQcfo (around 1:40).

Thanks for the link context; probably where I quoted from.

I'm not sure, but I think Rand himself indeed says that he did it quite fast in a documentary/interview.

I don't really see it. Maybe, if you use your imagination, a speeding baby carriage.

Beautiful! Looks influenced by an Indian script or maybe Thai. I wish I knew enough to be more specific.

Edit: After much googling, it looks like maybe it was inspired by Kannada script? http://www.christusrex.org/www1/pater/JPN-kannada.html

Seeing this makes me suspect that Rand had pretty strict mandate to not stray too far from the original Ford logo, which could explain the ugliness of this design when compared to the simple elegance of some of his other work.

Beautiful!

For a second I was like "Rand Paul used to design logos?"

Then I was all "That's silly, he would have been like three years old when he did that logo."

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