The Role of Trademark Law in the History of US Visual Identity Design, c.1860-1960

摘要

Most design historians agree that visual (aka graphic or corporate) identity design began in Germany and/or Austria at the turn of the twentieth century, and that it was a flourishing field in the USA by the middle of the century. But design historians do not always agree on who the first US clients and practitioners of visual identity design were. Nor have they convincingly explained 1) why US businesses did not commission visual identity designs in the 1900s, 1910s and 1920s; 2) why a small but significant minority of US businesses simultaneously commissioned visual identity designs in the mid-1930s; or 3) why the vast majority of national and multinational US businesses suddenly opted to commission visual identity designs only a decade later, in the years immediately following World War II. Design historians have usually credited these changes to shifts in tastes, in designers' ambitions, or in the size or character of US businesses. In contrast, I argue that shifts in trademark law provide a far more concrete and convincing explanation for the limited adoption by US businesses of visual identity design before World War II, and their rapid embrace of it thereafter.