Seeing Stripes

Nature has striped the zebra. Man has striped his flags and awnings, ties and shirts. For the typographer, stripes are rules; for the architect they are a means of creating optical illusions. Stripes are dazzling, sometimes hypnotic, usually happy. They are universal.They have adorned the walls of houses, churches, and mosques. Stripes attract attention.

The stripes of the IBM logo serve primarily as an attention getting device. They take commonplace letters out of the realm of the ordinary. They are memorable. They suggest efficiency and speed.The recent spate of striped logos in the marketplace attests to their effectiveness.

Visually, stripes superimposed on a cluster of letters tend to tie them together.This is especially useful for complex groupings such as the letters lBM, in which each character gets progressively wider, thereby creating a somewhat uncomfortable, open-ended sequence.