Lindon Leader says...
At what point in the design process did you realize you could create an arrow with those letters?

First of all, by the time we’d gotten to this point we’d already created and reviewed over 200 designs; some close-in to the “old” Federal Express logo and others progressively more daring (though all the while retaining the enormous cache of the famous orange and purple (despite the fact that many respondents in focus groups thought the Federal Express colors were “red and blue”). The current design was one of six semifinalists that were being refined for a presentation to very senior management.

If you put a lower-case “x” to the right of a capital “E” (Ex) you can begin to see a hint of an arrow, though it is clumsy and extremely abstract. I thought that, if I could develop this concept of an “arrow” it could be promoted as a symbol for speed and precision, both FedEx communicative attributes. And, by the way, different kinds of arrows were utilized with some of the other semi-final candidates, though none of those were “hidden.”

Once I decided to refine the concept of the embedded arrow, I found that, to make the arrow more legitimate and identifiable, one needed to actually reconstruct the letterforms in order to make the arrow happen. This leads to your next question:

Did you have to manipulate the font in anyway to create a perfect arrow?

Yes, indeed. I was studying Univers 67 (Bold Condensed) and Futura Bold, both wonderful faces. But each had its potential limitations downstream in application to thousands of FedEx media, from waybills and embroidered courier caps to FedEx.com and massive signage for aircraft, buildings and vehicles. Moreover, neither was particularly suited to forcing an arrow into its assigned parking place without torturing the beautifully crafted letterforms of the respective faces. To avoid getting too technical here, suffice it to say I took the best characteristics of both and combined them into unique and proprietary letterforms that included both ligatures (connected letters) and a higher “x-height,” or increased size of the lower-case letters relative to the capital letters. I worked these features around until the arrow seemed quite natural in shape and location.

chris said...
the arrow is a little too 'in yer face!' in the arabic version of the logo, eh?