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NFG’s Amazing World Famous EDGE logo
A long time ago I was digging through a bin of Atari ST games and came across Garfield. If I remember correctly the game was rubbish, but the title screen caught my eye. It featured a logo for a company called Edge, and I looked at this logo and I thought gee, that almost looks the same upside down!
And so I took the logo and sketched it out and made it work upside down and right side up and I was very proud of myself. So proud, in fact that I submitted it to my high school art teacher when it came time to get evaluated. He gave me an A++, if I remember correctly, scrawling on the paper that he thought it was excellent. And I think, largely because of that, I aced the whole year.
I loved that logo. I used it for everything, and even briefly sort of went into a half-assed graphic design business with a friend on the strength of it. We never got a paying job, but we got these fantastic business cards:
Wasn’t that clever? It was reversible! One side was my name and phone number, the other side was my partner’s.
I used this logo on my resume:
Yeah, that’s how my resumes actually looked. It got me some very interesting jobs, I tell ya.
Anyway, later on I found that someone else was using a logo very much like mine. Rather a lot, actually, and I wondered if I could stop them. I actually sought the advice of a lawyer who basically thought we had no hope but asked for fifty bucks to draft up a letter anyway.
Well shit, I had no money. It was all I could do to pay for gas to go see the lawyer! So the idea kind of died… The guys using my logo were never scared of me: AT&T was no small empire and besides, the product was never released. The EDGE-16 modem, seen here for the Sega Genesis:
Image swiped from here
Later I found another company used it, a large computer company though I forget who. Gateway, or perhaps Dell. They ran newspaper ads with my logo on it for a new EDGE computer line…
And then, years later, this Tim Langdell dickhead made a reputation for himself by suing everyone who ever used the word Edge on a game-related product. Turns out he was behind the original software company that made the Garfield game, but even though he wasn’t making games anymore he was suing anyone else who dared use the name Edge: Mirror’s Edge and Soul Edge and Edge of Twilight, the developers all got letters. Dickhead. He eventually lost the trademark and was booted out of the International Game Developers Association for being a dickhead.
And now you know the story! Wasn’t that fun?
A little update on the logo saga…
Techdirt reports that Tim Langdell, the aforementioned dickhead, has lost his court case rather spectacularly. He invented people, lied about all kinds of things, and was basically perforated rather magnificently by the judge.
At one point Mr. Langdell presented proof he designed the logo in 1991, on a floppy disk with timestamps from 1991, but with content created in Windows ’95.
lol etc.
UPDATE again: there’s an entire blog devoted to tearing apart Mr. Langdell’s Edge. Rather successfully too. =D
Another update!
In Australia, there’s a new student promotion card, Student Edge and they’ve got my logo on their everything:
It’s sort of remarkable how this gets around.
--NFG
[ May 28 2020 ]
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