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.
