Vimeo logo and website
Contributed by Samrad Tangestanizadeh on Apr 30th, 2022. Artwork published in
April 2006
.
Vimeo logo
From Wikipedia:
Vimeo, Inc. is an American video hosting, sharing, and services platform provider headquartered in New York City. Vimeo focuses on the delivery of high-definition video across a range of devices. Vimeo’s business model is through software as a service.
The logo is based on Black Rose, a freebie from Bright Ideas. The typeface used for website text is Neue Helvetica.
Vimeo is a very user-friendly platform. It allows you to upload all your videos easily: the front page once claimed “Your videos belong here.”
Vimeo homepage in 2022
Source: vimeo.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Vimeo homepage in 2012
2 Comments on “Vimeo logo and website”
Thank you, Samrad! Adding a post about the Vimeo logo was on my bucket list for a while.
Vimeo was founded in November 2004 and launched on February 16, 2005. The logo used in its first year appears to be in Donald Knuth’s Computer Modern Serif Italic.
On April 18, 2006, a new look (v4) including the logo based on Black Rose was introduced. The site itself was designed by co-founder Zach Klein, who wrote about it on his blog – I’m assuming he was responsible for the logo, too, but I don’t know for sure.
The first version of this logo used Black Rose pretty much out of the box. At some later point, the letterspacing was decreased.
The Black Rose font came bundled with Bright Ideas, a now defunct magazine published from Carlsbad, California in the late 1990s. It is not clear to me who authored the fonts. Type historian Luc Devroye mentions one Rick Hutchinson. I would assume their fonts have to be considered abandonware today. That doesn’t mean they’re worry-free.
The Black Rose font file is from November 1999 and includes the note “© Bright Ideas”, but no further information. On free font pages like Dafont, it’s distributed without any accompanying licensing terms. I wonder: is it OK to be used commercially? Or was it meant exclusively for personal use? For free or as shareware? Did you have to be a subscriber to Bright Ideas in order to use it legally? Personally, I’d stay away from using fonts without license in commercial projects.
Was on my list for a while too! It’s one of those cases where you’d never imagine this typeface is what is used because its signature characteristics (curly swashes) are missing in the logo.