Illegible Semantics: Exploring the Design Space of Metal Logos

TL;DR

This paper explores how metal band logos communicate genre and emotion through illegible design, analyzing a design space of such logos and providing a visualization tool to understand their semantic communication.

Contribution

It introduces a novel design space for illegible semantics in logos and presents a visualization tool for exploring logo characteristics and their communicative functions.

Findings

Metal logos effectively convey genre despite illegibility.

A defined design space captures key features of metal logos.

A visualization tool aids in analyzing logo semantics.

Abstract

The logos of metal bands can be by turns gaudy, uncouth, or nearly illegible. Yet, these logos work: they communicate sophisticated notions of genre and emotional affect. In this paper we use the design considerations of metal logos to explore the space of "illegible semantics": the ways that text can communicate information at the cost of readability, which is not always the most important objective. In this work, drawing on formative visualization theory, professional design expertise, and empirical assessments of a corpus of metal band logos, we describe a design space of metal logos and present a tool through which logo characteristics can be explored through visualization. We investigate ways in which logo designers imbue their text with meaning and consider opportunities and implications for visualization more widely.