Logo Girls - designing logos

She sold salt for a living. She was white, tiny, and cute, and I helped make her what she is today. 1967 was the year I worked on the redesign of the Morton Salt package. Design theorists didn't call this work packaging design-- it was "point of purchase advertising," which meant: the consumer is persuaded at the moment of purchase to buy a product because of its appearance. So the Salt Girl's looks were important. She had already been revamped several times since her birth as a logotype in 1914. My first suggestion, to 86 the little girl, was met with horror from the client and a nervous, "She's a great kidder," from my boss, Ed, head art director. Later he said, "Do a lot of little girls. Make them all different; but not too different." For weeks, I churned out little girls. "Mortie," her office nickname, had long hair, short hair, straight hair, curly hair, degrees of femme-y dresses, and sockless or socked shoes--no pants, no boots. She was perpetually perky; not unlike Jane of "Oh, Dick, see Jane walk in the rain!" fame. I had nightmares where Mortie was chased by Dick and Spot through a monsoon. Very wet. When caught, she turned into a pillar of salt, her "lot" in life for spilling the goods.

The big pitch day arrived, and my bosses got stuck in New York traffic, which meant I was up, with my own hippie appearance in question. Morton's Board of Directors had been ushered into our highly polished rosewood-paneled and -furnitured boardroom. The room pulsed with a deep red numinous glow, accentuated by charcoal neutrals. The eyes of twelve men all dressed in identical black three-piece suits (the youngest pushing sixty) were on me as I stood, Vanna White--like, holding up one little girl after the other. The mood in the room was deadly; no one cracked a smile. I kept thinking of the War Room in Dr. Strangelove. After what seemed an interminably stony silence, I heard, "No long hair! She looks like a hippie!" Me? The floodgates had opened. There was no stopping the Directors: "She looks like a smarty pants!" "Too Jewish!" "No dark hair!" "She's too old!" "Looks like a dyke to me!" She looks easy."' "Not enough leg!" "No puffed sleeves! They call too much attention to her chest!" Her chest!? What was s he--seven, maybe eight years old? I fought a simultaneous need to laugh and throw up.

None of the little girls was right.

Back to the drawing board, and eventually, like Frankenstein's monster, Mortie took shape: a head from a designer, a hand from a freelancer, legs from an illustrator, the hair, dress, and shoes from--who cares?--we were all getting paid. Mortie ended up with the requisite cuteness and spunkiness, strutting her stuff in a downpour; letting all the product run out to salinate the rain water. Brackish little bitch!

I can't tell you how many guys over the years have confessed their fantasies to me about various little logo girls: the Morton Salt Girl, the White Rock Soda Maiden, the Coppertone Sun Tan Lotion Girl, the Clabber Baking Powder Girl, and more. My friend Harold spent hours as a boy squinting at the White Rock bottle's 2" high image of the nymph on the rock to see if she had nipples, while he masturbated under the kitchen tablecloth. One day he spied a White Rock truck at the end of his block. The naked nymph was huge on the side panel. Harold couldn't contain himself; he ran as fast as his little legs would carry him and caught up with the truck as it was pulling out. At six feet high, she still had no nipples. Harold never got over it ... he had drunk from her bottle daily. He deserved nipples.

There were rarely nipples--or breasts for that matter. Except for the ethnic category of logo girls: the Argo Corn Starch Maiden; the Sun Maid Girl, the Contadina Maid, and, of course, Aunt Jemima. These were substantial women with meat on their bones. They worked for a living. As a child, I was drawn to them and felt nourished by their ampleness and their warm reds, golds, rich greens, and browns. I didn't know that the images were classist, racist, and sexist. I just knew I liked them better than the little logo girls who always seemed sort of creepy.

What was with those little logo girls? What was their job anyway? To be small, cute, and plucky. And sexy? An advertising adage from the sixties listed the three most powerful visual draws in order of effectiveness: puppies, babies, and scantily dressed babes. Taking up the challenge, we had a running game in the office to see who could come up with the most successful ad of all time. Our dream ads combined puppies, babies, and bikini-clad young women in every incestuous/infantile/bestial menage a trois imaginable. Someone pointed out that Coppertone had already come close.

Puppies, babies, nearly naked women--little, helpless, easy to possess. Their perceived lack of power was their power.

Needless to say, I stared at the little Salt Girl a lot, too. The oval opening of Mortie's skirt, which seemed to mimic her umbrella, fascinated me. The stiff mushroom shape flared out from her body like an eighteenth-century pannier--those paired oval hoops that distended women's hips, making their waists look tiny. Ladies had to enter doorways sideways. Mortie's skirt also reminded me of the Mummers Day parades in my home town of Philadelphia. The mummers wore oversized, wire-constructed costumes and carried little umbrellas as they mummed along. I could never really tell if they were actually dancing or just being thrown about in some erratic pattern by the wind blowing up their dresses. Another reinforced fabrication encased the waitresses at Caesar's in Vegas--"ancient Rome" versions of vacuum-formed Playboy Bunny outfits--bras pushing up and in, thong panties slipping in and up the crack in their asses. One night, I saw a waitress simultaneously turn and bend over to pour a drink. In mid-pour, her bra-b reasts remained pointing straight ahead as her real breasts moved independently to the side. It's difficult to function in a construction.