What if you could explore more than 1,500 beautifully designed logos from the golden age of graphic design?
No generic AI-generated symbols. No random logo templates.
Real trademarks created by professional designers more than 50 years ago.
Meet symbools, a remarkable digital archive of Trademarks & Symbols, Volume 2: Symbolical Designs, compiled by Japanese design researcher Yasaburo Kuwayama and originally published in 1973.
And honestly, this is a little treasure chest for anyone interested in typography, branding, visual identity, and design history.
Here's what's inside:
1,504 original trademarks and symbols
725 credited designers
1,142 companies and organizations
30 countries represented
SVG and PNG files available individually
Searchable metadata identifying designers, companies, and industries
And here's what makes the collection particularly interesting.
The symbols are organized by visual form and subject.
Explore human figures, animals, birds, flowers, trees, geometric shapes, arrows, circles, typography, and Japanese characters.
You can browse by category, search for a designer or company, and inspect individual designs.
Find a symbol you like?
Open it, examine the details, and copy or download the vector artwork.
The archive was digitized by Kelvin Adithya, who carefully traced the original designs from a scanned copy of Kuwayama's book.
And the project is still being refined, with individual symbols corrected and polished over time.
But here's what I find fascinating.
Look at these designs.
Minimal geometry. Clever negative space. Strong proportions. Simple forms that communicate entire ideas.
Many of them still look remarkably contemporary.
And they were created in an era when designers didn't have Figma, Illustrator, or an AI agent capable of generating 200 logo variations before lunch.
Just research, geometry, experimentation, and an extraordinary amount of visual judgment.
This is why I love historical design archives.
They remind us that great visual ideas don't suddenly become obsolete because the tools change.
You can study how designers simplified complex ideas, balanced shapes, and created memorable symbols using very little visual information.
One important licensing detail.
The archive is free for noncommercial use, including research, teaching, mood boards, and design inspiration.
The original trademarks remain the property of their respective owners.
So you can study the designs and learn from them, but you can't simply download one and use it as your company's new logo.
And that's probably for the best.
Because the real value here isn't copying a 1973 trademark.
It's understanding what made those designs work in the first place.
More than 1,500 symbols. Fifty-three years of design history. And a lifetime of visual inspiration.
Definitely worth bookmarking.
Explore the complete Trademarks & Symbols archive:
https://symbools.com/kuwayama-trademarks-symbols-vol-2
About the archive and usage rights:
https://www.symbools.com/about/
Original book: Trademarks & Symbols, Volume 2: Symbolical Designs
Compiled by: Yasaburo Kuwayama
Published: 1973
Digitized by: Kelvin Adithya
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