White arrow

The FedEx logo is the best logo ever. I still remember the first time I saw that white arrow, the one that’s hidden in plain sight. I was working in-house for a book publisher when a parcel arrived from the US containing a piece of artwork I had commissioned for the project I was working on, an illustrated book about Ancient Rome. Midway through opening the parcel I stopped dead in my tracks: I saw the logo as I had never seen it before! The remarkable thing is that, in an office full of designers, no one else had ever seen it either. I’m not the only one who think the FedEx logo is brilliant. Designed by Lindon Leader in 1994, it has won a swag of design awards, and is used in design schools to demonstrate the effectiveness of negative space. Leader’s design philosophy centres around simplicity, clarity and understatement, where less is more. To create the FedEx logo he used a combination of Univers 67 and Futura Bold, morphed until the arrow was just so.