Logo Cities Symposium (2007)
Logo Cities: An International Symposium on Signage, Branding, and Lettering in Public Space took place on Concordia’s downtown campus in early May 2007. The event marked the culmination of several years of research and research-creation activities by Matt Soar and his phenomenal team of research assistants: Cecilia Chen, Grant Collins, Anne Marie Ennis, Lisa Gasior, F. Gabriel Gosselin, Michael Lithgow, Frances Millerd, and Ezra Winton. We hosted an international roster of over thirty speakers, including highly memorable keynote Professor Johanna Drucker (UCLA), scholars, critics, designers, planners and signmakers. In tandem, we staged a gallery show of photography, media installations, and old signs in Concordia’s VAV Gallery.There’s some wonderful photo documentation by Flickr user Elidr.
The event closed out with the Québec premiere of Helvetica (2007 US), the documentary film about a font, with an audience of over 500 people, door prizes, and a Q&A with the director, Gary Hustwit. The program for the entire symposium can be downloaded right here. More documentation from Elidr.
The Logo Cities team’s (and especially Grant Collins’) interactive inventory of highrise logos on the contemporary Montréal skyline, is sadly no longer accessible. (Thanks Adobe.) As an initial phase of the project, this elaborate Flash piece focused on mapping and identification. Through the interface, the Montreal city skyline of 2007 could be viewed from four vantage points around the city, in daylight and at night. Key logos and signs could be investigated in terms of their locations, origins and histories by floating the cursor over the logos. This interactive project, and indeed most of Logo Cities, was funded in large part through a research-creation grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.)
Our experience with sourcing and handling old signs while preparing for the Logo Cities gallery show, and indeed the incredibly positive public response to seeing Warshaw letters, the Monkland Taverne sign, and the painted sign panels from the Simcha’s grocery store in the gallery, provided much of the inspiration for what became the Montréal Signs Project. Indeed, Warshaw and Monkland Taverne were among the first five signs we put on permanent display on the Loyola campus.
Finally, several of the papers presented at the Logo Cities Symposium were published as a special issue of the scholarly journal Design & Culture, guest-edited by Matt Soar.
Header image: public domain via Good Free Photos.
