Penguin Logo Study - Laptop Cat Publishing Logo - Live Brief

“It started with the simple logo and name, suggested, allegedly, by a typist who was earwigging the board meeting. Allen had already hit upon the idea of an animal logo, inspired by the template offered by the contemporary publishing house The Albatross Library. “It was the obvious answer, a stroke of genius,” said Penguin’s original designer, Edward Young. “I went straight off to the zoo to spend the rest of the day drawing penguins in every pose.” The clear logo was matched with the archetypal modern, but not too scarily modern, typeface, Gill Sans, and the now classic three-band cover, with colours related to the subject: orange for fiction, dark blue for biography, etc.”

- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/15/historybooks.features

This logo is simple but classic, it has evolved over time and is completely distinctive. Often a logo's success lies in its simplicity. The process for the making the penguin logo is similar to 'Laptop Cat' as both involve animals. I hope to take a similar approach and do a lot of sketches of cats sitting on laptops, exploring a variety of poses and working on how to simplify these sketches. Another interesting characteristic of the penguin books is that they use different colours for different genres, this is mainly something seen on their 'three-band' covers but could also be something adopted by the logo.

The logo was then developed in 1946 by Jan Tschichold to be more forward facing and encompassed in an oval. Her development is seen below and then general approach to experimentation is something I hope to replicate. In 2003 it was fine tuned by Pentagram's Angus Hyland, into a slightly more modernised aesthetic. This is something which must be considered for Laptop cat. The changes appear to be an increase in thickness, size and general clarity. They have made the modern logo as clear as it can be without loosing any of it's distinctive shape or character.