Saks Logo

As a graphic designer working for a large corporate company, there tends to be limitation after limitation on the use of the company's logo. Branding Guidelines are more sacred and closely followed then the Ten Commandments. "don't use the logo as a graphical image" "only use pantone color so and so" "never shrink the logo smaller then 13mm"...on and on. Which is why I have been shocked and curious by the 2007 use of the Saks Fifth Avenue logo on the company's shopping bags and marketing collateral, ads, and signage. I did some investigating...

Michael Bierut, a Graphic Designer for Saks Fifth Avenue, worked with a Yale physicist to chop up the logo into 64 squares and rearrange them into different combinations. Technically there are 98.14 googols (100 zeros after that number) of different possibilities using 64 different squares. This idea is called a "dynamic visual logo," in other words a logo that looks different every time you see it. Think MTV and Google. Bierut believes a person is more likely to remember a logo that is "consistently inconsistent." But lets not forget that the Saks Fifth Ave logo had a good 34 years to it before it was chopped up.