Float on down a gentle river to the land of milk and stifling monopoly.

From Quora by way of The Atlantic blog, we were introduced last week to John Wainright, on record as the first customer of Amazon from outside of the company. John was working at a Microsoft/IBM joint venture in 1995, and was invited to a beta version of the earth-swallowing online retailer. The book he chose was, suitably enough, Douglas Hofstadter‘s Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies: Computer Models Of The Fundamental Mechanisms Of Thought. It’s nice to think of this gaping maw of a company back when it was just a little maw-let, still getting its bookstore-crushing feet beneath it. In particular, I appreciate seeing the logo, which looks as if it was finalized with white out just that morning. I decided to talk to our own designer Christopher King and get his thoughts about it.

DK: First, did you see that Hofstader book? Kind of beautiful. But that aside, what do you think would have been different if, improbably, Amazon had stuck with that logo for the past seventeen years? I like the shaky curves on that river, but to my eye it looks a bit more Midwestern insurance company, a bit less retail brand.

CK: The illustration on that Hofstadter book really is beautiful — very reminiscent of the work of Marian Bantjes. The scripty capitals are a little unfortunate though.

I don’t know whether Amazon would have been any less successful if they’d stuck with that logo; their business has never been about cutting-edge design, as even a cursory glance at their homepage today will tell you. The really groundbreaking development they made, back in the 90s when e-commerce was still a new concept, was to inspire a generation of consumers to put their trust in an invisible retailer.

That’s an important point when considering their branding. There might have been something charming about that first logo, but its apparent Xerox-and-white-out technique doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, especially if you’re considering whether to send your credit card number into the ether for the first time. By contrast, their current A–Z logo suggests friendly, reliable service with a smile.

DK: Right, I suppose the fact that they had a logo at all in this early stage inspired some degree of trust. But as they grew, it needed to be all smooth sunshine and professionalism.

What about that nature imagery? I see it as akin to early ideograms. It was interesting at first, but at a certain point they want the word ‘Amazon’ to be stripped of its referential function, right? Let it mean nothing beyond itself. And as they move further away from books as objects, maybe any reminder of the natural world and the nostalgia it entails is distracting from their brand.

At what point did they lose the “.com” from the logo, do you think? Is it quaint now, a sign of the mid-nineties bubble?

CK: Yeah, the literalness of the logo is odd and confusing, since the site obviously has nothing to do with tropical rivers. And in these matters I generally agree with the designer Massimo Vignelli, who says the word “dog” doesn’t need to bark. The word itself has an array of interesting connotations without having to call direct attention to them.

These days, of course, most people (in the English-speaking world, anyway) probably think of the retailer before the river when they hear the word Amazon, so they’ve effectively redefined the word. I can’t remember when they dropped “.com” from the logo, but it’s totally unnecessary now — everyone just knows what it is.

It’s interesting to me that they started with a monogram logo (that is, a big A). Monograms had been out of fashion for quite a while in corporate branding, but they’re starting to make a comeback now because of app icons and the need to make everything smaller for smartphone screens. The Amazon iPhone app doesn’t use a monogram for its icon, and it actually feels a little old-fashioned.