Some Good Uses of Type in Logos

I quoted Adrien Frutiger in a previous blog entry. He essentially said that good type is type that you don't notice or remember. I think that can be a function of type but I don't think that being invisible is the quality that can make excellent type. I believe that type can be simple and memorable and can be elevated through innovation and creativity to draw the reader in. Here are some logos I found that are examples of type that make me stop and look and make me remember the information. That is the true power of typography - excellent typography can supplement the power of the information contained in the text. 

This is a logo for Killed Productions. The type looks like it's probably AG Book which was designed by Gunter Gerhard Lange in 1980. Lange also designed Akzidenz-Grotesk which was the precursor to Helvetica. This font is a very simple font and in a large block of text it would be fairly "invisible" like Frutiger likes but here it's the way the designer has used the type that makes it special. The way the 'i' has been flipped on its side like a dead person, elevates the type from simply invisible to supplemental to the text's meaning. The design of the type makes me want to stop and look which is far better than if it just looked totally normal.

The logo below appears to be set in Clarendon font, which is a slab serif. It's more complex than a sans serif but it's still fairly simple. The designer has used the same concept here by flipping a 2 to replace the 'n'. Again this simple but smart design choice makes the type contribute to the meaning of the text. 

The designer of the logo below for Goodduck has actually changed the letterform to add a layer of meaning to the advertisement. The designer has taken a serif 'g' and changed the ear of the g to look like a duck's bill and the descender on the loop to look like a duck's tail.

These are just some examples of how type can still be simple but contribute to the over all effectiveness of the ad instead of just being invisible. I think that if the type can ad an extra layer of meaning and depth to the ad it is far more powerful than type that you forget the second after it's read.