One reason for moving into book publishing was to be able to enjoy the design side of things, but inevitably you do end up being hypercritical of just about every aspect of each title. The large coffee table books needed a logo, once we’d agreed the name Stereo 33 Books (a bit of spin-off from the sleeve art blog I look after, ST33.), which came from the 1950s Polydor label output in Germany, all of which used either M33 or ST33 to designate mono or stereo.
The first logo made use of this, with just the word ‘Books’ added to what had been part of the original graphic for the ST33 blog. Wanting to put more distance between them, I moved on using one of the typewriter fonts to suggest a typed manuscript. This worked for a while but I felt the upper and lower case elements clashed a little.
Retaining the red square and grey border, I reworked this, keeping the typeface for 33 but enlarging it slightly to crop the edges of the numbers, and adding a separate line for the name above (written in a condensed Futura), with a different basic colour for each of the three parts of the name.
I also retained the five lines down the right hand edge of the red box, which had been designed to represent the pages of a book, to end up with the logo currently used.
It is readable at all the sizes we need to use it and appeared on the first ST33 book which was finally published in early 2017 after all sorts of delays. The second book is now on the drawing board…
The publisher’s web site Stereo33Books also shows the logo incorporated into a larger banner header.
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