Today, corporate visual identities often serve as controlled, shiny facades. Think, for example, of the visual identity of the city Amsterdam. While once used in diverse ways, the city’s historic three-cross symbol has now become a rigidly standardised “brand” and logographic logic determined within a strict house style. Tamara Hartman explored this shift in an essay. Lukas Engelhardt, Jan Egbers, and Justus Gelberg integrated this reflecting into a publication design supplemented with an archive of Amsterdam’s more porous examples collected by Mirelle van Tulder.
