Viva España or what?

Alexis from Spain just wrote to me about a competition the Spanish government ran to get a new logo. They just published the winning entry (out of 320) which was rewarded 12,000 euros. On the left you can see the new logo for the govenment of Spain. It is supposed to be built into a complete identity system by professionell studios. If you read Spanish, check this link.

Alexis immediately knew where he’d seen that logo before. It looks exactly like the one for the German government that also came out of a competition, but more than ten years ago. It was designed by Jürgen Huber and Lisa Eidt who won an internship at MetaDesign as part of the reward. There the logo was extended into a Corporate Design programme for all the government departments. The original typeface, by the way, was FF Transit, but later got changed to Univers Condensed by another agency working for the government.
Alexis took the German original and the Spanish clone and built his own logo for German-Spanish cooperation.

Braun Apple

Braun collectors like myself have known for a long time where some of the ideas came from that led to the perforated-aluminium-look of some Apple computers. I took a few photographs of my world receiver T1000 from 1962 (!). Radii and perforations look almost identical to the ones on a MacBook Pro or a MacPro, 45 years later.

Colleagues in Japan and after them in the USA have now discovered that the iPhone also has a precedent in Braun’s past. The electronic calculator ET33 from 1977 has pretty much the same form factor as the revolutionary iPhone. The ET33 and its successors up to ET88 featured those cool semi-spherical buttons. And they had figures set in Akzidenz Grotesk, way cooler than the boring Helvetica numbers that Apple chose.

Read more on air-port.com.