I found this piece about well-known logos (a type of art, I suppose) interesting:
10 Famous Logos That Have A Hidden Meaning
A few samples follow. Commentary under the article argues with interpretation of some logos, especially those of BMW and Apple, as outlined.
Apple could = derivation from the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible - bitten apple represents the fruit from the “Tree of Knowledge”.....or Isaac Newton's fallen apple - with a bite (byte?) because without it Steve Jobs thought it looked like a cherry....or a reference to Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computing. He was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952, and after being subjected to estrogen treatments as an alternative to prison, was found dead from a cyanide overdose in 1954 with a half-eaten apple next to him (which wasn’t tested, but is suspected of being the source of the poison). One of the early Apple logos is in rainbow colours, similar to the homosexual flag. Take your pick!The FedEx logo is so simple yet so good, hiding in plain sight. I had to squint before I saw the arrow between the bottom half of the "E" and the left-hand side of the "X".
The well-known Chevrolet logo wasn't mentioned in the article linked above, but I'd already researched that one for myself, when preparing a post about Louis Chevrolet some years ago. Here's what I came up with:
The Chevy logo, now so well-known, came into being in 1913. Stories of its source have become muddled through time. Take your pick: it was copied from a wallpaper design in a Paris hotel room; it was copied from a newspaper advert for Coalettes; it was drawn on a dinner napkin in a restaurant by Durant [Buick owner William C. Durant, founder of General Motors]; or... it's a stylised version of the cross from a Swiss flag (reflecting the name Chevrolet's origins).
I like that cartoon!
ReplyDelete"In the eye of the beholder" comes to mind with logos. The Camel cigarette logo sports either a man with an erection or a cherub taking a leak (you choose) on the front leg of the camel. http://www.snopes.com/business/hidden/camel.asp
Then there's the Proctor & Gamble with satanic images and Christian mockery. The rumors became so persistent that P&G discontinued the logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procter_%26_Gamble#Logo_myth
The amazing, coincidental images obtained by folding American paper currency.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJIVygM4R3Y
The Walt Disney logo has three "6"s formed in the W, the dot over the i, and the y...gasp. That explains everything.
http://terrific-top10.com/2013/10/08/top-10-satanic-symbols-hidden-in-logos/
We see what we are conditioned to see. Beware the evil eye...LOL.
mike ~ Yes, cartoonist John Atkinson is brilliant!
ReplyDeleteLOL! Some of the examples of logo interpretation in those links are so flippin' silly! Reminds me of the stories of seeing the face of Jesus imprinted on a piece of toast at breakfast time.
Agreed - what one's mind has been conditioned to see will always hit the eye first.
Erm...you know there's a kind of parallel in the way I, on a bad day, see astrology - the way it can be, and is, practiced - albeit with good intention. Anything can be made/adjusted to mean anything one wishes it to mean. The astrological eye will tend to search until the right pattern is seen, using any available tool, doctrine or method. On a good day though I see astrology working, immediately and with no need to squint or delve. Beware the astrological eye? ;-)
The astro-eye isn't much different from the more respected psychologist-eye, economist-eye, poli-sci-eye, public-relations-eye, et al, with graduate and post-graduate degrees obtainable through just about any college or university. They all involve researching then forecasting trends and making the most of it, sometimes correctly, often not. Seems that anything combining humans' emotional and logical inputs has output vagaries that can't be predicted. Worse, one individual's response can drastically alter another, individually or collectively, forever change the course for good or bad.
ReplyDeleteBTW - PBS' "The Brain" concluded with episode four. E4 spent a lot of time discussing the potential of digitizing an individual's brain, part of our potential evolutionary path by eliminating the physical body. It was mentioned that we are closer to capturing the brain digitally than we are to achieving colonization of some planet. Part of the colonization process may only be achieved by digitizing our brains. Further, the digitized brain could "live" a "life" of any reality we chose. The final remark was that we may already be in such a digitized state and we ARE "living" in virtual reality right now...there are experimental results suggesting that is the case...and it fits with quantum-physics-reality.
mike (again) ~ Hmm - reading my comment again I should have written "will tend to search until the REQUIRED pattern is seen - a subtle difference. I don't know enough about those other .....eyes, but maybe you're right.
ReplyDeleteRe what you wrote about "The Brain" - that brings back memories of something I read or heard years ago - along the lines that we could possibly be the digitised (they didn't use that term though)result of experiments by highly evolved beings from elsewhere. Artificial intelligence come to life. All very sci-fi! LOL!
It also reminds me of something more recent. Netflix has a series "Continuum" - I posted about it in January
http://twilightstarsong.blogspot.com/2015/01/netflixing-continuum-bit-of-old-timey.html
Season 4 became available on Netflix last week. We couldn't remember a thing about the series, so started watching it all again, 2 episodes a night. I finally realised that, oh yes, I'd done a blog post about it! (Slaps forehead). It's very good, worth seeing again to pick up nuances and clues missed first time and very believable that the year 2077 will be as depicted. There's some digitised brain-related stuff going on in this series. The scene shifts between 2012 to 2077 by the way.