The Open Logo and the Closed History Notes of a Social History of Visual Identities

The golden age of corporate identity and logo design has always found wide space in visual communication histories as a crucial moment in the evolution of the graphic design profession in a modern direction. This focus in the last ten years has been confirmed by the publication of monographs, magazines and reprints, the launch of digital archives and publishing houses dedicated to the story of ‘logo-modernism’. If, on the one hand, this interest in the narrative of the modernist corporate identity season has made it possible to access images, information and biographies that were hitherto known little or nothing, on the other hand, they have perpetuated the presentation of this season according to a ‘heroic’ reading fuelled by the ‘formal lens’ and ‘visual satisfaction’. In doing so, historical narratives have often ended up showing graphic artefacts as decontextualized objects. Presented as ‘works of art’, logos were detached from the social context in which they lived, from the meanings they took on in the real world, and from the economic and political messages they conveyed. Starting from the reconstruction of the historiographical debate that has run through the discipline since the 1990s, this contribution proposes to extend the historical narrative of logo design and the season of corporate identity manuals, trying to also include the dialogue between the end users and these canonical artefacts of graphic design history. Analyzing the way in which public opinion during history has related to logos by loving them, contesting them, modifying them, rejecting them, memeifying them, allows us to look at the trademarks of modernism as cultural objects, as mediators of social relations. Finally, this contribution proposes the social history approach as a lens to open up history to a more inclusive narrative and to look at logos as ‘open works’.