Ten Years of One Logo

Idris Calloway: I'm Idris Calloway and this is Last Call. Since 2016 one designer has redrawn the same logo every January, for a regional bakery chain of forty shops. Hardly anyone has noticed. Henrik Solberg is that designer. Henrik, who asked you to do this?

Henrik Solberg: Nobody, at first. I drew the mark in 2015 for their thirtieth anniversary, a loaf in profile that also reads as a lowercase a. The next winter I saw it printed on a paper bag at a train station kiosk and the counter of the a had filled in completely. It looked like a bun.

Idris Calloway: So you fixed it.

Henrik Solberg: I opened the counter by about four percent and sent the founder a new file with a one-page note. He paid my invoice for half a day and said, do it again next year if it needs it. That has been the arrangement for ten years. Half a day, one page, every January.

Idris Calloway: What has changed in total?

Henrik Solberg: The counter is nine percent larger than the original. The stroke at the base of the loaf is lighter by about a fifth, because phone screens render it heavier than paper does. There is a separate version for the oven-proof stickers on their frozen range, which get printed at sixteen millimetres on a thermal printer. That version has almost no detail left.

Idris Calloway: And the wordmark?

Henrik Solberg: I redrew the r in 2019. The original r had a ball terminal that clogged at small sizes on their receipts. I shortened it. Nobody wrote in. The founder's daughter, who runs it now, said she thought it had always looked like that, which is the best compliment the job can give you.

Idris Calloway: How do you stop it drifting into a different logo altogether?

Henrik Solberg: I keep every year's version on one sheet of A1, side by side, and I compare the new one to the 2015 drawing, never to last year's. If you only compare to last year you can walk a very long way in small steps.

Idris Calloway: Is there a change you made and then undid?

Henrik Solberg: In 2021 I tightened the spacing in the wordmark because it looked loose on their app icon. On the shopfronts, eleven metres wide, it looked cramped. I put it back the next January and wrote in the note that I had been wrong.

Idris Calloway: What does the client get out of this, honestly?

Henrik Solberg: A logo that never needs a rebrand. They have never paid an agency, never had a reveal, never had a week of people complaining online. It costs them less per year than one shop's flour.

Idris Calloway: Henrik Solberg, thank you. That's Last Call.