GoKawiil
Tech News
A design archive is digitizing Trademarks and Symbols, Volume 2: Symbolical Designs, a 1973 reference book cataloguing 1,504 marks from 725 designers, 1,142 companies and 30 countries. Each mark is being manually traced from scans of the original book, and the creator says the work is ongoing, with some details not yet matching the source artwork exactly.
Apple Music has rolled out a new logo and branding, reportedly shaped using sound-wave data rendered through Apple's 'liquid glass' visual design style. The refreshed identity ties the app's icon more directly to the concept of sound itself rather than abstract symbolism.
A writer using Claude Pro tried to design a tooth-themed logo and signage for his wife's dental practice after their human designer became unavailable. Claude initially produced four workable concepts from a wordmark file and rough sketch, and after about an hour of iteration the writer's wife was reportedly impressed with the result, though the overall process ultimately proved frustrating by the writer's own account.
Pentagram partner Paula Scher, with associate partner Bruno Bergallo and project manager Olivia Ray, created a hand-drawn logo for Women+ on the Edge of Democracy, an upcoming revue featuring 10-minute plays and monologues by 36 women playwrights addressing the current state of democracy. The design deliberately compresses the title's text into a tight frame, a visual metaphor for how women are pushed to the margins of democratic life.
Illustrator and researcher Avery Robinson published an essay examining how heavy metal's iconic distressed visual style—torn flyers, gritty band logos, smudged toner—originated from the limitations of cheap photocopiers and low-quality paper used by DIY scenes decades ago. The piece argues these analog printing flaws became a deliberate aesthetic choice that metal culture has preserved even as design tools moved to digital.
A developer explored the world of stylized QR codes, noting how logos and photos are often crammed into codes at the cost of scannability due to Reed-Solomon error correction limits. Inspired by AI-generated and hand-crafted QR art examples, they built their own design tool called QRFrame, which changes how the black-and-white modules are rendered while keeping codes functional.