symbools

Its creator, Kelvin Adithya, shared some background on the project.

“I read Kuwayama’s Trademarks & Symbols as a teenager and it always stuck with me. Then I saw @Frozune’s post about it and it reminded me how good that book is. Most of these marks only live in old print and rough scans now, and I didn’t want them to slowly disappear, so I thought, let’s put the whole thing online.”

On how it was made, Kelvin said, “I started from a scanned PDF of the book. The pages curve toward the spine, so first I built a flattener to straighten them out, then a tracer to turn every mark into a clean SVG. The traces still had plenty of problems from the scan, so I picked 20 or so of the worst logos and wrote notes on what was wrong with each one. That taught Claude the common mistakes and how to fix them, and then I let it loop through the rest.”

Getting each logo right was one of the main challenges behind the project. Kelvin added, “The scans are pretty bad, and checking each mark against the original really needs a designer’s eye, like telling whether a wobbly edge is the scan or the actual design.”

The site took four days to build. Checking each logo continues, and designs from other classic books may follow.

Visit symbools. Follow Kelvin Adithya on X. Found via Oleg Coada.