Quote:
Originally Posted by bigsanta11
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They know. I wrote about
Phorm’s logo, on BadPhorm. I’m not sure if
phorm design mind all of us asking them, “do you know that your logo looks like…?†It’s certainly raised their profile though.
At that time, I thought they were both using variations of the Horatio typeface. That’s a fairly common font; it was a standard for Letraset’s dry-transfer letters. Having taken a longer look, I realise that both of them are significantly different to Horatio. The relative letter widths differ noticeably and Horatio has much longer ascenders and descenders.
phorm design’s logo seems to have been inspired by Bloomindales’ in-house font, with its particularly wide ‘m’. Phorm’s logo is vaguely similar to Bayer Sans, with the narrow ‘r’ variant. But, once again, the letter widths don’t match. The ‘p’ is unnaturally narrow compared to the following ‘h’ and ‘o’. Because of this, I don’t think it’s any standard typeface. As soon as you get a word with ‘po’ in it, it’s going to look odd. But, I’d be grateful if any one can tell me otherwise.
However it came about, Phorm’s logo
looks like an adaptation of
phorm design’s. The major difference being the narrower first and last letters and the idea of taking a chunk out of the ‘m’, originally to accommodate the ‘©’, copied to more places.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at any copying. When Phorm first made an appearance, it seemed like a shocking and completely new concept. It turns out that Phorm are just one of a number of companies who have been planning their onslaught of very similar technologies, for the past couple of years. Following a New Jersey court ruling that
IP addresses constitute personal information, NebuAd may find it necessary to copy Phorm’s cookie trick.