Too busy for any of this nonsense today. Got people coming and going, kinda all day.

The logo up above is something my buddy Mark Welsh came across. He’s pretty hot for it. We feel the same way.

Here’s the story on it:

Factory Communications Limited logotype
251 x 160mm
Peter Saville & Brett Wickens, 1981.

Mechanical artwork for the Factory Communications Limited logotype. The letter F can be seen in the head of the calipers, the C in the gear wheel, and the L where the calipers meet the anvil. Like much of Saville’s work at this time, these graphics embodied a mixture of romantic associations. Living in Manchester in the late 1970s and 1980s, the atmospheres evoked by European Modernist aesthetics – whether specific connotations of Futurism, Constructivism or De Stijl or simply for a post-war Europe of faded grandeur and chilly technocratic progress; city names on radio dials (Paris, Berlin, Moscow); cafes filled with radical intellectuals; doomed lovers on the overnight Trans-Europe Express to Vienna; David Bowie recording Heroes in the shadow of the Iron Curtain – seemed both a world apart from the grim, post-industrialist realities of North-West England, and also strangely familiar. For those associated with Factory, the appropriation of European avant-garde imagery was, in Saville’s words, about “changing the here and now instead of going somewhere elseâ€.

Sure, that sounds about right. Dig it.

- - - -

RECOMMENDED BY DALE: If you are on the clock right now lookin’ to waste some of yer employer’s loot, well, here’s a nice little documentary about gravestone lettering: Final Marks: The Art of the Carved Letter.

They are still at it today: The John Stevens Shop.

Let that documentary fill up some of yer time today. Think about it some, too. Craftsmanship, people. Be it chiseling out a letter out of stone, or kerning up a piece of type, that kind of attention to detail and respect for who came before you applies to everything we do. It better.

- - - -

ON THE PLAYER:

01. Bonnie “Prince” Billy & Matt Sweeny - Superwolf
02. Steven Malkmus & The Jicks - Face The Truth
03. Archer Prewitt - In The Sun