Trademarks and Symbols of the World

While there is scant biographical information I can locate in English on Yasaburō Kuwayama (桑山弥三郎), his work has stood out since the early 1970s as a visual reference for designers of logos, trademarks, and symbols. The photo above is from my copy of volume I in his series, published by Dover in 1973, still available used on some sites for about $80 (note the free e-pub link below).

I would often flip through my copy before starting a project to get a little direction on what’s been done and to procrastinate — to thoughtfully, artfully procrastinate. There is nothing new under the sun, but sometimes avoiding well-known and likely trademarked symbols was a good starting place. From there, I’d freehand sketch ideas and sometimes fax (yeah, back then we had those) them to clients to get early feedback on what worked and what didn’t. I’d then take the top five and work them out in Illustrator without fine-tuning too much or using colours, and send those in PDF form. By process of elimination and tweaking, we’d eventually hit on their organisation’s new or updated identity.

Early pages in the book delve into the history of Western and Japanese symbology. For Japan, that includes pottery maker marks, family crests, sake brewer marks, and match-box labels.

Yasaburō Kuwayama was associated with Musashino Art University and passed away in 2017. I did manage to find (and have my browser translate the following from the publisher, Kodansha):

1938 - Late Showa - Heisei period typeface designer. Born on January 14, Showa 13. In 37, he and Shoichi Ito and others published the new photo type “Typos” series, and the design of its novel system was appreciated. Logo types, symbol marks, etc., are also handled. He presided over the Kuwayama Calligraphy Design Office. From Niigata Prefecture. Graduated from Musashino Art School (now Musashino Art University). His works include “Lettering Design”…

Some of Kumayama’s trademark and symbol collections (vol. 1) work can be viewed on archive.org.