A-Style's Logo is Not a Mistake
A few Friday's back, I showed off a blunder London's Office of Government Commerce stumbled into when designing a new logo. Choosing to go with a just the letters of their office, OGC, the logo became an Internet meme of sorts when it was pointed out that OGC tilted 90 degrees could be interpreted as something else all together.
This Friday, a new logo was being passed around the Internet, this time when someone snapped a picture of Italian clothing manufacturer A-Style's logo and put it up on Flickr. (In case you're not seeing it -- one of the BNET editors didn't at first -- think about stick figures.)
The difference this time? This is no mistake. In fact, according to an account in PezCycling News by Duncan Steele, the logo came before the clothing did:
The A-Style logo was invented and patented by Marco [Bruns] 1991, then 4 years ago, yellow A-style stickers were placed on all the traffic lights around Milan. A-Style is very much into "gorilla" marketing! Being a curious logo, it was spoken and written about lots, GQ, Men's Health, Cosmopolitan, the largest Italian newspapers and more got on the trail to find out what this Logo was and where it came from.For this particular outing, Duncan Steele, A-Style's Marco Bruns, and professional road biker Andrea Peron decided to get some free advertising by stencilling in A-Style's provacative logo onto the road where a staging event for the Tour de France was due to be held the next day:At this time there was no income as A-style was just a Logo, nothing more. Some T-Shirts were printed and sold in a friend's shop in the centre of Milan. Two years ago Marco was presented to Massimo, a real gentleman that worked in the clothing business, who saw the real potential of this Logo in the "Streetwear" clothing market. There are now 2 factories that make only A-Style products. Marketing is still done in exactly the same way, Gorilla, Abusive, or call it what you like but very effective and a HUGE success.
