I was amused, but also troubled, when I heard recently that Pearson—the education company—has a new logo, which is based strongly on the modern punctuation mark known as the “interrobang”—a combination of a question mark and exclamation mark:
Here’s Person’s logo:
It’s a clever idea to make this symbol look like a P, but it makes me uncomfortable that a brand is relying so heavily on a punctuation mark. I can see trouble down the track when others are using this symbol, and feel a bit miffed that a company can sort of appropriate a common symbol for itself to some degree. Hopefully, courts will be dismissive if copyright claims start to arise.
Here’s an article about the rebrand:
Do you think I’m being too picky about the copyright issue? I’m not the only one.
Surely they can only trademark it when it is white text in the blue oval. That shouldn’t affect anyone using the punctuation symbol even as white texton a blue background as the oval would not be present.
Yeah, it was invented to meet the need for something like that. I read a book about this and other weird marks recently. It has struggled to get off the ground, for various reasons, including limited space on keyboards (both typewriter and computer).
Yeah, I figure that’s the catch … But still, if we wanted to represent this character in a circle, we might be on shaky ground, which I still don’t think is fair.
I’m not seeing reason for concern here. A company trademarks a logo of a horse in a blue circle. That doesn’t keep you from drawing pictures of a horse, or publishing pictures of a horse, it only keeps you from trademarking a logo that looks too similar. So unless you were about to trademark the same thing, I can’t see why there would be cause for concern. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong when the lawsuit comes in though !?
Yeah, I must admit I wasn’t focused on the blue background shape at first, which I can see is what really gives this logo its character. I was more worried that people might be restricted in their use of the punctuation mark itself. For example, as you can see by googling “interrobang” and looking at the image results, there are lots of variations of the symbol. What if someone designed a font with an interrobang looking just like the one in this logo? Knowing what lawyers are like, I bet they’d be all atwitch to test the legal waters.
I was thinking along the same lines. How is it any different from any company which uses a single character for their logo? Like McDonald’s “Golden Arches” are an M. I regularly use the letter M and have not heard from their lawyers yet.
I suppose what sets this example apart is that it is such an unusual and lesser known character. But surely they won’t have the arrogance to try and claim ownership of it, and just treat it like the Facebook F and McDonalds M.
It should only be an issue if used in the context of a logo and looks somewhat similar, as in colour, shape or resembling a P, which is the essence of the logo.
