According to technical requirements
Otl Aicher's logo for German lighting company ERCO.
The genesis of the name ‘ERCO’–a family-owned lighting company located in Lüdenscheid, Germany–stems from its founder Emil Reimann’s vision and aspirations for the company. Derived from his initials, and partner Dr. Schmitt providing the ‘and Co.’, the name ‘ERCO’ embodied the company’s collaborative and entrepreneurial spirit since its founding in 1934 and set its course as it grew to become a pioneer in architectural lighting in the 1960s.
The origin of the company’s 1976 corporate identity stemmed from the usage rights of the pictograms devised by Otl Aicher for the Munich Olympics. In the autumn of 1974 Aicher met with Klaus Jürgen Maack, managing director of ERCO, to sort out questions regarding the copyright of these pictograms as the lighting company wanted to use these in an illuminated signage system.
During this conversation further issues were raised by Maack around the ERCO corporate identity, and specifically, the trouble faced when attempting to use the company's logo with Helvetica, the corporate typeface at the time. Aicher suggested that the issue stemmed from poor typographic principles. This would mark the beginning of a nearly two-decade collaboration.
The criteria for developing ERCO products were based on ‘vision’, ‘efficiency’, and ‘economics’ rather than fashion. Norms and standards were seen as a ‘precondition for creativity’ that aesthetic form should be derived from the necessary; and the usual and banal should not be decorated and made special. Instead it was important to make the normal, such as illumination, be understood as essential and to present it as self-evident. Even before Aicher began to work for ERCO, the company and its managing director were concerned with objectivity, which was well-suited the designer’s approach.
