Thirty thousand logos

There are over ten thousand lakes – bigger than ten acres (that’s 40,000 m², for people who don’t understand medieval units) – in Minnesota, a state in the United States of America, and they all have a name, an incredible fact by itself. Nicole Meyer found out that if these ponds have a logo they have a tendency to be, well, fairly ugly. She decided to publish one new logo for one Minnesota lake every day. Until now she made one hundred logos which means she just has to make another 9,900 to finish. The project will be done in little over twenty seven years.

This project raises an interesting question about beauty. De Pijp is a neighborhood in Amsterdam which was built in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to accommodate the working class. The houses were not meant to be beautiful and back then they probably weren’t. If you ask people today if they like De Pijp most will say it’s beautiful though. Will people ever like this building? (I work there. When people ask me where I work I tell them I work in the ugliest building in Amsterdam).

A lot of architecture – and art too – is considered ugly at first but gains value throughout the years. Graphic design on the other hand – just like fashion – looses value rather quickly: every few years we redesign our websites and most companies change or update their branding on a regular basis. What’s so interesting about this 10,000 lakes project is that it will become a great overview of contemporary taste in logo design, if it continues and if the URL still exists in 27 years.

There’s one question that keeps popping up in my mind though: what happens when in five years time Avenue Lake (which I think is an incredible logo, by the way) thinks its logo is outdated? Will Nicole Meyer make a new one? That would mean that in five years she will have to start to make two logos a day, in ten years three logos, four in fifteen and by the time she completed all of them she will be producing more than 6 logos a day. This will amount to a total of more than 30,000! I can’t wait to see the result, is it 2039 yet?

Update:

Good logos are not outdated in five years. Paul Martens and Ron Kersic rightly pointed me in the direction – in a rather funny who-has-the-biggest converstation – of logo’s that last much longer than five years: 40 years, 125 years, 150 years and, of course, this 2000 year old logo. Paul and Ron, thanks for turning my article into a random pile of nonsensical letters!