I am a new fan of Louisville, Kentucky. Such a beau­ti­ful town, with great peo­ple, and a gor­geous, though under­uti­lized down­town area. Part of that has to do with how Interstate Highway 64 runs right along (and above) the water­front, cut­ting the city off from its own great­est nat­ural asset. The recent Waterfront Park devel­op­ment is a mas­sive improve­ment, but when you’re toss­ing the fris­bee by the river, it’s hard to ignore the noise from hun­dreds of cars and trucks pass­ing overhead.

So in comes a design-savvy cit­i­zens group, primed to take back the water­front, pre­vent fur­ther expan­sion of the inter­state, improve traf­fic con­ges­tion and revi­tal­ize Louisville’s down­town. They call them­selves “8664,” and they designed this spot-on logo to gen­er­ate inter­est in their cause. What impresses me the most is that, with­out using a sin­gle word, this ban­ner com­mu­ni­cates every­thing they want you to know: what they stand for and what action you can take next. Plus, this repro­duces well at all sizes, and by co-opting the Interstate’s own visual lan­guage, they cre­ate an instant con­nec­tion with the viewer. Aren’t all of us used to tak­ing direc­tion from this typeface?

Also, they have a dyna­mite pre­sen­ta­tion on their web­site.

For years, I’ve found the sim­i­lar­i­ties between these two logos striking.

At left is the logo rep­re­sent­ing the pro­fes­sional ser­vices com­pany formed by the 1998 merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand. (The designer of the logo is unknown to me.) At right is the logo for Yves Saint Laurent, using han­dlet­ter­ing cre­ated by the famous A.M. Cassandre in 1963.

35 years and sev­eral indus­tries apart, yet they both “work,” suc­cess­fully con­vey­ing either ele­gance (as with YSL) or, well, just a really long name. Actually, I’m not sure what the PWC logo is sup­posed to con­vey, although I’d assume they’re shoot­ing for sta­bil­ity, pro­fes­sion­al­ism, and hon­esty. But I’m not sure how the wig­gly “water­house” let­ters accom­plish that. Maybe they just had to squish those let­ters together to make more room.