

Society moved away from self-sustaining agrarian ways of life to more specialized and diversified trade. In the High Middle Ages (900 – 1300 AD), the population started to grow, leading more and more people to move to cities. Outside of the aristocracy, most of the population was illiterate.


Design elements took on meaning and helped people identify their favorite “brands.” enemy army while at war-the result was the same. Though the original purpose was a little different-identifying the friendly vs. This set of imagery was combined to create a unique coat of arms. A certain set of colors and shapes would represent a certain noble family. Heraldry is a system of assigning design elements societal meaning and status. Jumping forward in time, and looking to medieval Europe, we see two distinct visual languages appear: heraldic crests and symbolic signage. Here each word or idea had its own symbol, and this foundation influenced later languages, even those that were less visual (like English). During the same timeframe, the roots of calligraphy in the form of characters developed in China. Not to say that the Egyptians had a monopoly on using images symbolically. This development is essential to logo design, because it ensures that artists effectively maintain proportions and ratios-and guarantees a uniform reproduction of the same design. Via the Houston Museum of Natural Science.īetween 21 BC, grids appeared in Egyptian designs. Ancient Egyptians used a grid system in their design, much like many logo designers do today. Their paintings and sculpture included specific symbolic images and colors that held specific meanings. Not only did the Egyptians develop hieroglyphics, a formal writing system, where images represented words or sounds, but they were also prolific artists. Nowhere was that more apparent than in Ancient Egypt, starting around the fourth millennium BC.

Around 8000 BC, people in Assyria, Egypt, Carthage, Persia, Media and Sumer created pottery that communicated aesthetic, ethical, cultural, socio-political and religious information.Įven in these distant, primitive stretches of history, people and cultures were representing themselves and their ideas with symbols and illustrations. Via Guity Novin.īetween 70,000 BC and 7000 BC, primitive peoples from all over the world laid the foundations of the graphic arts by painting animals in caves. the white nefer-sign, black neb-sign and the wedjat-eye can be read as “all good and healthy things”. Ancient foundations of symbolism in graphic arts Read on for a quick guided tour through the history of logo design, that will highlight the historical connections, and help anyone hoping to design a logo to create something more powerful and effective. The first modern logo designs were created in the early 1900s, evolving alongside mass printing. Early versions of logos developed in the Middle Ages (around 1300 AD), as shops and pubs used signage to represent what they did. The history of logos goes back to ancient family crests, hieroglyphs and symbolism. In fact, much of the symbolic design work throughout recorded history is all about communicating identity visually. But humans have been identifying and differentiating themselves using emblems and signature marks for hundreds, even thousands of years. What we think of as logo design-simple, iconic images that represent individual brands-is often considered a modern phenomenon.
