About our logo

Author’s Note: This text is from the very first Black Riders website, circa. 1997. You can see it in its partial original glory in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Designed by Winston Pei at the 1995 Banff Publishing Workshop on Design in Publishing, the Black Riders logo expresses the company's combination of modern and traditional thinking: a contemporary background tile done in a woodcut style, a mixture of serifed and unserifed fonts, the choice of black and white in an age of neon colours.

The dominant character in the logo is neither a "B" nor an "R" although it was chosen in part because of the visual similarity. The character is known as an "eszett," a ligature designed to replace a double-s which, to quote Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style, was "once essential for setting English and still essential for setting German," another evocation of the earlier traditions of typesetting.