Vanity Fair Logo PNG
It may come as a surprise to you, but the name “Vanity Fair” referred to at least five 19th-century magazines. The first Vanity Fair was published from 1868 to 1914. The weekly was founded by prominent English journalist Thomas Gibson Bowles. In 1885, Bowles launched another publication, The Lady, which still exists today. But the modern magazine belongs to the Condé Nast media holding and has nothing to do with Bowles’ brainchild. The American edition was founded by Condé Nast himself in 1913, a year before the British Vanity Fair closed.
Meaning and history
So, the History of Vanity Fair magazine began in 1913, when American publisher Conde Nast acquired the men’s fashion magazine Dress, and, renaming it Dress and Vanity Fair, created a publication about fashion and high society. The magazine was headed by Frank Croninshield. He immediately abandoned the fashion elements of the magazine and helped turn the publication into a prominent literary voice for sophisticated American society. The transformation happened fairly quickly, and as early as 1913, four issues of the new magazine were published. And in 1914, after a brief pause, the magazine began publication under the name Vanity Fair.
The peak of popularity of Vanity Fair magazine came at the beginning of the 20th century. It became known for its striking covers, incredible photos, and scandalous stories. The publication was also characterized by the presence of advertising in huge quantities. However, hard times forced Conde Nast to close the project. Issues were suspended in 1936 and resumed only in 1983.
In 1984, the magazine was headed by Tina Brown, who was invited from Great Britain. The first thing the editor did was to invite famous photographers to Vanity Fair – Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, and Harry Benson.
In 2013, Vanity Fair’s 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Century was published in honor of its 100th anniversary. Designers helped the editors shape the book’s content by combining thousands of images and stories from more than 600 issues.
What is Vanity Fair?
Vanity Fair is in the name of a legendary Magazine where you can read about almost everything. Dialogues and interviews with famous personalities from different spheres of activity, their secrets, their victories, and their defeats, are supported by photos. With this magazine, you can easily embark on a journey into the world of money, beauty, energy, and style.
In terms of visual identity, like any other magazine, Vanity Fair only uses lettering for the official logo. However, the font of the inscription was c changed several times during the modern history of the magazine.
1983 – 2000
The Vanity Fair logotype, used by the magazine from 1983 to 2000, was written in the uppercase of a narrowed sans-serif typeface with elegant contours of the characters and some of the bars significantly thinner than the others. The wordmark was set in black.
2000 – 2013
The redesign of 2000 has introduced a refined logo for the Vanity Fair Magazine, rewriting the inscription in a more modern and sharp sans-serif font, with shorter characters and more geometric contours and cuts. The badge looked very up-to-date and made the magazine stand out in the list of its competitors.
2013 – 2018
In 2013 the Vanity Fair logo was redesigned again, to celebrate the magazine’s 100th anniversary. The Commercial Type agency was responsible for the new Vanity Fair style. And this time it was a sophisticated yet pretty strict serif lettering, executed in a font, similar to Mencken Std or modern 735. The color was still black.
2018 – Today
The redesign of 2018 has changed the official color palette of the magazine from black to red and vertically stretched the characters of the inscription, which made the laconic logotype look sharper and even more elegant, staying at the same time actual.
Font and color
The uppercase lettering from the primary logo of the Vanity Fair magazine is set in a bold and narrowed serif typeface, which looks quite similar to such commercial fonts as Ambroisetrade Std, Donovan Display, or Mencken Std, but with some minor modifications of contours.
As for the color palette of the Vanity Fair visual identity, the primary version of the logo is executed in scarlet red, while for the Month of Pride, the magazine uses a rainbow palette, which goes from red on the left to black on the right.
