Logo Beginnings

Taschen enlisted Jens Muller to excavate the prehistory of corporate identity, resulting in an exhaustive survey of over 6,000 trademark designs spanning the 1800s through the mid-twentieth century. These marks emerged before brand strategy existed as a discipline, when companies, municipalities, and organizations needed visual identifiers but lacked the frameworks that would later systematize such work. The resulting designs possess a directness that contemporary logos often lack, communicating through pure graphic economy.

The editorial organization avoids chronological convention. Instead, Muller arranges the collection by formal characteristics: geometric primitives, letterform manipulations, pictorial symbols, abstract constructions. This taxonomy reveals patterns across industries and eras, demonstrating how certain visual solutions recur independently when designers face similar communication challenges. Vintage railway emblems share structural DNA with early telecommunications marks. Industrial monograms anticipate modernist reductions that would arrive decades later.

Production quality matches the archival ambition. Large-format printing allows detailed examination of linework and proportions that smaller reproductions would compress into illegibility. Paper stock and binding support repeated reference consultation without deterioration. Accompanying commentary contextualizes selections without overwhelming the visual content, providing enough historical grounding to understand why certain approaches emerged when they did.

For practicing designers, the volume functions as both inspiration and education, demonstrating principles that transcend stylistic trends. For design historians, it documents a formative period when visual communication established conventions still operating today. For general readers interested in material culture, it offers a window into how commerce, governance, and industry presented themselves to the world before branding became a recognized profession.