Fitness America Books is a logo designed by Lanny Sommese, an American graphic designer, educator, and longtime professor at Pennsylvania State University. Sommese maintained his own design office, Lanny Sommese Design & Illustration, which specialized in corporate, print, packaging and poster design. In 1988, when his wife Kristin joined him, the firm was renamed Sommese Design. [1]
Design and History
The Fitness America Books logo is attributed to Sommese and is cataloged among his corporate identity work. His papers, held at the Pennsylvania State University Special Collections Library, include art portfolios, design files, posters, logos and corporate identities created and kept by Sommese. [2]
Sommese joined the Penn State faculty in 1970 and was professor in charge of the Graphic Design Program there. [3] He was a founding member of the Philadelphia chapter of AIGA and received the AIGA Fellow Award in 2010. [3] He was also a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), joining in 1998. [1]
His work was celebrated in the 2010 monograph Lanny Sommese: X-Ray Vision, edited by Fang Chen, a 252-page collection of his posters and logos. [4]
Meaning and Symbolism
No official documentation has been located that describes the intended symbolism, color palette or typographic construction of the Fitness America Books logo specifically. The mark is identified in design archives as a book-industry logo created by Sommese, but detailed design intent has not been published in accessible sources. [5]
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