Dr. Seuss is the pen name of American children’s author and cartoonist Theodor Seuss Geisel. He is one of the legendary American writers who created such popular characters as The Grinch, The Lorax, Horton the Elephant, and The Cat in the Hat. The writer has published around 60 books throughout his career.
Theodore Geisel was born on March 2, 1904, in Massachusetts to a family of brewers. When America introduced a dry law, Theodore’s father was hired at the local zoo. Therefore, the childhood of the future writer passed near the work of his father. Little Theodore all day long drew the inhabitants of the zoo, changing them beyond recognition.
After graduating from high school, Seuss enrolled at Dartmouth College. Dr. Seuss’s real name was Theodore Geisel. The pseudonym “Dr. Seuss” the future writer invented himself just in college, taking his mother’s maiden name – Seuss. Dr. Seuss is not really a doctor. He did not have a medical degree, and the doctorate he went to Oxford for never came – after two years, Ted Geisel dropped out of the prestigious university and returned to the United States.
The first children’s book Dr. Seuss wrote in 1937, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was rejected by more than 20 publishers. Only an old friend of the author’s who worked as an editor at Vanguard Press (later Random House) agreed to publish it – he met him by chance on his way home when he was about to burn the manuscript. All subsequent Dr. Seuss books were also published by this publisher.
Dr. Seuss is the best-selling children’s author in the English language today. People learn to read from his books, and his work is still very popular.
A real icon of American culture was the book “The Cat in the Hat”. Its peculiarity is that when writing it, only 220 words were used, which Dr. Seuss was provided by the customer. This book opened a series of works for the very young. And the eponymous cartoon “The Cat in the Hat” was made with the participation of Dr. Seuss himself.
The best-selling book was a friend of the writer – “Green Eggs and Ham”. And his book “Places You’ll Go” is given to almost every American child for a school graduation party.
Dr. Seuss wrote more than 40 children’s books. He had no children of his own: only in 1968 he became a stepfather to the two daughters of his second wife, Audrey Geisel. Dr. Seuss died in 1991, and two years later his wife Two years after his death, Audrey founded the company Seuss Enterprises, which owns the rights to all the works of the great writer.
Who is Dr. Seuss?
Dr. Seuss was a writer and cartoonist working in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. His books “The Cat in the Hat”, “The Lorax”, and “Green Eggs and Ham” have become classics for young children not only in the United States but all over the world. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. Dr. Seuss Enterprises, a company dedicated to the writer’s legacy of owning franchises, was founded in 1993.
In terms of visual identity, the Dr. Seuss logo is super recognizable and stays with the franchise for decades without any changes. Throughout the years, the famous writer only had two official insignias, and this says a lot.
The first Dr. Seuss books contained a modest inscription with the name of the author on their covers. It was a black handwritten “Illustrated by Dr. Seuss” lettering in a slanted serif typeface with no graphical additions or any framing. The simplicity of the logo balanced the bright images you can see on the pages of the Dr. Seuss books.
The new era of Dr. Seuss’s visual identity started with this bold and friendly logo, which is known to kids and parents from all over the globe. The logo is based on a hand-drawn light blue lettering in bold lines, accompanied by a graphical emblem, which is a link to Dr. Seuss’s most famous book — The Cat in the Hat. It is a black paw in a white glove holding a tall cylinder hat in white and red horizontal stripes. The paw is coming out on the first letter, and the hat is placed above the capital “S”.
The bold playful lettering from the primary logo of Dr. Seuss is set in a custom typeface with heavy sans-serif characters featuring arched bars and straight cuts of the lines. The letters look cool and jump above the line, with the thin black outline and a delicate shadow adding distinction to the wordmark.
As for the color palette of Dr. Seuss’s visual identity, its main shade is bright blue, which usually stands for trustworthiness and excellence, but in this particular case, it is also a symbol of creativity and imagination. The additional colors here are red, black, and white, perfect shades for strengthening and elevating the composition.