Laboratorios Kramer was a Spanish pharmaceutical company whose visual identity is documented as a work of the graphic designer José Santamarina Laviada. The mark, created in 1966, is associated with the designer’s early period of corporate identity work in Spain.
Design and History
José Santamarina Laviada (born in Oviedo, 1941) worked as a creative graphic designer in advertising from 1962 to 1969, before co-founding the studio Elías+Santamarina with Elías García Benavides in 1969.[1][2] The Laboratorios Kramer logo is dated to 1966, placing it within this pre-studio phase of Santamarina’s career, when he was active as an independent creative in the advertising world.[1]
Santamarina’s work from the 1960s and 1970s, including posters, anagrams and logos, has been widely recognized. Twenty-five of his pieces from this period were selected for inclusion in the second volume of The History of Graphic Design (Taschen, 2018), a major international survey of the discipline.[3] The publication placed Santamarina on its list of 118 most important designers.[2]
Meaning and Symbolism
Santamarina has described his own approach to graphic work as one of reducing an idea to its minimal expression: “With an iconic graphic, I try to summarize the idea to the minimum expression and achieve, regardless of the will of the observer, to capture their attention.”[3] He also cites geometric abstraction, constructivism, kinetic art and op-art as references for his creations, which he characterizes by “the accuracy of geometry.”[2] These statements describe the designer’s general methodology rather than specific documented symbolism for the Laboratorios Kramer mark itself.
Typography and Design
No primary documentation has been located that specifies the typography, exact color values or construction details of the Laboratorios Kramer logo. The mark is attributed to Santamarina’s 1966 output, a period in which his work was characterized by conceptual, modern and harmonious graphic solutions.[3]
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