No logos were harmed in the making of this film

March 7, 2010

“No logos were harmed in the making of this film.” That’s what the director of Logorama joked as he accepted the Oscar for Best Animated Short. But is that true?

Most of the logos in the film are depicted in a harmless way. Some logos even recede into the background as part of the “wallpaper” that is the landscape – they are there, but mostly go unnoticed. In this story, the characters are familiar icons. Ronald McDonald is a villian. Not sure what McDonald’s has to say about that, but they can’t be terribly happy.

Part of the reason the film works is because we have brand associations with these logos, and when a logo is used in an unexpected way, we are in on the “joke” because we know this depiction is not true to the brand. It’s really one of the reasons the film is getting attention.

The movie is the “labor of love” of a French motion graphics studio called H5. I wanted look up and see what else they had done. What I found, was something my inner design geek found even more interesting. Think of all of the product instructions, safety cards and diagrams we encounter everyday, and what it would be like if they told a story. I imagine it would look something like this.

Directed by the French motion graphics studio H5. It features a day in the life of a woman working in the London’s Square Mile solely through infographics; this includes labeled close-ups of everyday objects, product lifecycles, schematic diagrams, charts, and is generally illustrated in a simple isometric visual style.