Wednesday Blog Watch: Colophonics

How many MIT Press colophons can you find on this page?  The word colophon, in publishing, can be used to describe a publisher's logo.  The MIT Press colophon (shown here on the left) is a series of vertical lines representing the letters MITP.  It was designed in 1963 by pioneering graphic designer Muriel Cooper.  Read a bit more about Muriel Cooper in this 1994 Wired tribute or these notes from David Reinfurt, who is currently researching her work. 

Our colophon is occasionally mistaken for the logo of the band Black Flag - read this comment from author Jeffrey Lewis, or this story about a T-Shirt mix-up from Larry Hosken's blog (scroll to the middle of the page). 

The Black Flag logo:

Brett L. thinks the colophon looks like the Manpower Inc. logo.  That's a good point.

One of our designers has likened our colophon to that of the fire hose reel symbol.  Here's an example of one of those:

Let's hope we avoid confusion with that one!

But today our hats are off to Takashi Okamoto, the blogger of MudLog (presumably no relation to Mudman) who has created a web tool called MITPTyper. Type in any word or phrase, and it will convert it into your very own MIT Press-like colophon! 
Here is the logo it created for the Wednesday Blog Watch.  Perhaps a bit too unwieldy?

The answer to how many MIT Press colophons are on this page:  11.  Let us know if you find a different result.

Oh, and if you're interested in buying a black MIT Press colophon t-shirt ($9.95), you can contact the MIT Press bookstore here.

Comments

[Rebecca]

Haha great post! I never realized there was so much to your logo.

[Ian Bogost]

It's worth pointing out that historically, a colophon meant something different from a printer's mark, although that is indeed what it usually means today. Printer's marks date from the very earliest times in modern printing -- many readers here might be familiar with the anchor and dolphin mark of 15th c. printer Aldus Manutius.

Anyway, a colophon is also a description of the production of a book, usually notes about its typesetting and layout. It's a practice that has fallen somewhat out of favor save for small presses and bookmaking snobs (Edward Tufte's Graphics Press qualifies as both). But there does seem to have been a rise in colophon use of this kind as more authors, editors, or publishers are interested in communiating the use of renewable emergy or materials in the paper and printing processes they might use.

[Phil]

There are 12 colophons:
10 in the header pic +
1 shown on the left +
1 as the favicon in the web browser.
God bless,
Phil