Fendi

By the start of the new millennium I was asked by an Italian agency to participate at an unofficial logo design competition that Karl Lagerfeld seemed to have initiated. The task was to do something really new for the famous traditional Roman fashion griffe. Something that would turn around the way to look at their logotype. There was a vague briefing limitation as it should be something around an experimental way to let “explode” the old famous double F logo in a photographic or video style look.

After having done researches I came to the result for me personally that I couldn’t achieve something notable in that area. So I put aside this briefing at least for the time being. This kind of liberated me and very soon I came to a very simple but significant solution. To wipe out the tradition of the old logotype design I reconstructed its design basis, that of two countered F’s, and introduced the bar element to strike out that construction. This bar should be kept as a strong and nearly ironic new fresh sign. The agency seemed to be disappointed about my results at first but finally agreed to present them nevertheless.

I was very pleased that it got the second place from a vast variety of gathered solutions! And even more thus a half year later I found the new big Fendi campaign endowed with all kind of colored cross bars as backgrounds to their photographs. Even a cross bar was incorporated in the ‘N’ of their companies name as part of their new main logo design.

Here some excerpts of the Fendi Logo Guidebook pages I did to accompany the new design idea.