What happens to logos when they meet the real world? When they leave corporate identity manuals, branding agencies, designer portfolios, brand guidelines? When they encounter memes, counterfeiting, protests, fashion, pop culture, or counterculture? What happens when logos begin to live In Real Life?

In this book, which collects a series of “Notes for a Social History of Visual Identity,” Michele Galluzzo tries to answer these questions, and tells an “other” story: the one that pits graphic design professionals against the public that consumes, uses, and reappropriates communication. In a kind of participatory archive, made up of mispronunciations, rip-offs and détournements, Galluzzo shows logos in an unprecedented guise: not as intact objects that are the result of the genius of professionals and masters, but as liquid forms, emerging from below in dialogue with the public and their own context.

Logo IRL is a counter-narrative in which graphic design icons become “open works,” and the audience participates in the evolution of the life of brands and graphic design more broadly.