Trademarks and Symbols, Volume 2: Symbolical Designs (1973)

Trademarks & Symbols, Volume 2: Symbolical Designs is a 1973 reference book by Yasaburo Kuwayama, presented here as a searchable digital archive. It gathers 1,504 trademark designs associated with 725 designers and 1,142 companies across 30 countries. Rather than organizing the marks by industry, the collection sorts them by visual subject and form: human figures, animals, birds, plants, tools, heavenly bodies, geometric shapes, arrows, numerals, and Japanese writing systems. The catalog’s breadth makes it useful for tracing how designers turn simple shapes and recognizable subjects into compact identities.

The volume also opens with three essays addressing how trademarks change, how to judge whether two marks are too similar, and how design competitions select winning proposals. The catalog entries identify marks and, where available, their designers and clients; examples range from abstract human figures and accessibility symbols to logos for cultural, commercial, and public organizations. Its emphasis is on the practical and visual language of identity design, showing varied ways to convey ideas through silhouette, contrast, framing, and abstraction. The digital collection was transcribed from scans of the original book, so some details may differ from the printed artwork; the reproductions are still being refined, and use is limited to noncommercial purposes.