Master library of logos coming

Since Wichita graphic designer Bill Gardner and Catharine Fishel published their first Logo Lounge book in 2003, they have collected a lot of logos.

And about 35,000 of them didn't make the cut for the book, a compendium of 2,000 corporate logos and identities that is published every 1 1/2 years. The sixth edition of Logo Lounge is expected to be released after Christmas.

Even though those logos didn't make publication in Logo Lounge — logos that are selected by a group of designers from around the world — they still represent quality work and should be showcased outside of the logolounge.com website, Gardner said.

So the owner of Gardner Design and Fishel, an author of design books, worked with their publisher, Rockport Publishers of Beverly, Mass., to come up with another venue for those logos through the Logo Lounge Master Library series.

"It is a much deeper well of a lot of material," Gardner said. "It's still a best of, and they've (the logos) still been judged."

Volumes 1 and 2 of the Master Library series have been published and are available at Amazon.com and Watermark Books. Volume 3 is scheduled to be released next spring. There will be seven volumes in the Master Library series. The remaining volumes are expected to be published in nine-month intervals, he said.

"When you have a complete set of books... you're going to have 21,000 logos sitting on the shelf," Gardner said. "And there is no other resource like that."

Gardner would not disclose specifics of the sales of the Logo Lounge books, other than to say "hundreds of thousands" of them have been sold since the first Logo Lounge book was published.

"We can't begin to thank our lucky stars for how well these books have done," said Gardner, adding that the books have led to new corporate logo and identity work.

Gardner's firm does work for sole proprietorships, small retailers, midsize companies and Fortune 500 companies.

This story was originally published November 18, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Master library of logos coming."