Which typeface for facelift?
The Global Village logo is ten this summer. It has served us well for all those years and become an easily recognizable local graphical landmark, incorporating both the school’s idea and people behind it.
The origin of its present shape is anything but special. It all happened round the kitchen table and took two open minds, about two hours of brainstorming, two litres of Żywiec beer, and evidently just these two words ? global village.
The problem to solve was this ? how to go about a company logo whose core idea was a logo itself, one of the most cliched verbal logos of the 20th century, like Hollywood, Concorde, or Unix. No matter where they appear, they all drag the baggage of their extended, metaphorical meaning. An attempt to add a distinct, purely graphical element to ‘global village’ seemed like a vialotion of its essence. Hence, the final shape had to be simple, if not austere ? the white, densely packed lettering on the burgundy and dark navy strip.
But today, ten years later, when the global village around plays an ever important part at Global Village in Nowy Świat, the idea of re-adjusting them in the logo seems reasonable and tempting.
Let’s play then. If you were to choose a typeface to replace the original, condensed Haettenschweiler, and allow a 21st-century feel, which of the three numbered typefaces below would you go for?
