Removing the Logo

The Problem

An external mark does two jobs at once and they are not compatible.

It tells a stranger what the object is, which is worth something commercially. It also tells the owner what to think about the object every time they look at it, which costs something that is harder to measure.

For most of the first two years the first job won by default, because nobody had articulated the second one.

Creative Exploration

The exploration was mostly subtractive and mostly done by covering things up.

Pieces were photographed with the mark masked. Then with it reduced. Then with it moved inward, to the lining, to the underside, to the inside of a closure where it is only visible when the piece is open and empty.

Each step made the object quieter. The step that changed the argument was the one where it went inside: the piece stopped looking like a product with a name on it and started looking like something that had been made.

Design Decisions

The decision that took eight months was not whether to remove it. That was obvious within a week.

It was what to do about the fact that the mark had been carrying the authentication burden. Take it off the outside and you remove the thing a stranger uses to identify a genuine piece — which matters, because a piece that cannot be identified cannot be verified, and verification is most of what the archive is for.

The resolution was to move the burden onto the number instead. The number is stamped, not printed; it is inside; and it resolves against a record. It is worse than a logo at signalling across a room and better at everything the signalling was supposedly for.

Hidden Details

The mark still exists. It is struck into the inner face of the closure, at a depth of two tenths of a millimetre, and is invisible unless the light is oblique.

It is there for one reason: struck metal survives fire and water better than paper records do. If everything else is lost, the piece can still say what it is to somebody holding it under a lamp.

Nobody was told this for the first year. It was found by an owner, who wrote to ask whether it was intentional.