For an ugly logo, I have already mentioned one for a fertility center that I pass on US-95 north of Boston, going towards New Hampshire. It has a pink THING for a logo that for the longest time I couldn’t interpret. The closest thing I could get was that it looked like a squid, sort of, with three or four tentacles dangling under it. What that had to do with fertility, I have no idea. It was only when I looked them up online that I could tell what the logo was supposed to be. With all the separating lines in place, it was a man and woman embracing, but the sign by the road didn’t look like that at all. It looks like it’s offering roadside calamari.
And I’ve complained before about the Chessie System railroad logo. When I first sa this, in Rochester NY, I again had no idea what it was. I thought maybe the paint had blistered and cracked on a painted circle, but when I saw that all the railroad cars had the same “cracking”, I realized that it was deliberate. It looked sort of like a cat head and upper body, but a weirdly distorted cat, and in an unnatural, gravity-defying pose. I made a sort-of “C”, which was the point. It’s at the top of this page:
If you scroll down the page, you can see where it comes from – it’s the silhouette of a kitten sleeping on a pillow, which explains both the gravity-defying part (it’s lying down, and they don’t show the supportting pillow) and the distortion (parts of the kitten are covered by the pillow and blanket).
If you were familiar with the old logo, which actually SHOWED the image, you’d get it, and think that the silhouette was kind of cool, but if you’d never seen it (like me), you simply wondered what the hell it was supposed to be. Other logos, after all, that streamlined and modernized are perfectly comprehensible to the unintiated, like the late 1960s MGM logo that was used for 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the 1964 Bell Telephone “schematic” Bell logo.
Good one. Speaking of railroads, following a wave of mergers from the '60s onward, it has been increasingly difficult to relate the railroad’s name to where it goes or what it does, as these names used to represent, and today without even an attempt at an actual graphic logo. Worst among them are BNSF (which at least refers to the former Burlington Northern and Santa Fe lines) and the Chessie’s successor, CSX (which, far as I can tell, means nothing at all).
Speaking of bizarre and disconcerting sports mascots, I have to nominate the hydrocephalic Mr. Met. Conan O’Brian did a bit on Mr. Met’s suicide attemptswhen he didn’t make it into the Mascot Hall of Fame.
I can’t believe that nobody has mentioned the ColoGuard symbol / mascot yet. It’s practically a picture of a butt with a turd hanging halfway out of it.
Lately the local furniture chain Bernie and Phil’s has started running an ad with an animated box coming up to the front door. It’s meant to illustrate that they now have Free Home Delivery. But when the woman opens her door and picks up the box and hugs it (with a big smile on her face) i swear it looks as if she’s greeting her ColoGuard box. And a little too enthusiastically.
Oh, christ, I remember when those ads came out. My friends were circled, passing around a bowl, and we all just stared at the TV in speechless horror and bemusement.
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