About Hasselblad Historical's logo

The logo was chosen to reflect the subject matter of this site: Hasselblad - the history of the man, the firm, and their products. Accordingly, the logo is a slightly modified version of the "winged-V" logo that was used by Victor Hasselblad since the late 1940s.

The original Hasselblad winged-V logo. Part of the cover of the Hasselblad Flash Instructions booklet, supplied with Flash Contact Bar; 1952; 1.5152, Printed in Sweden.

The Hasselblad Historical logo is not a perfectly smooth graphic, but instead shows the characteristics (flaws) of the way graphics were produced and printed half a century ago.
In this respect it is very close to (the winged-V part even a copy of) an 'original' as it appeared on a Hasselblad product box.

	The "HASSELBLAD SWEDEN" winged-V logo as it appeared on the box of an "EXTENSION TUBE No. 20", dating from the mid-1956 to 1957 period. Over time, discolouration of the box has changed the original background colour to a greenish tint. The original colour was a medium blue, though probably not the exact shade of blue used as background for the Hasselblad Historical logo.

The lettering is a modification of the "HASSELBLAD SWEDEN" text that occasionaly, and during a certain period replaced the circle in the original winged-V logo.
The typeface used in the Hasselblad Historical logo is not identical to the one used in the original Hasselblad logo. It was chosen as an intermediate between the fat typeface that appeared in the original Hasselblad logo, and the somewhat slimmer typeface used by Hasselblad today. And, of course, a slimmer typeface was needed to fit the longer text around the V without it becoming too small.
The extended horizontals that are part of the Hasselblad trademark were also added.

"Hasselblad Historical" as it would appear set in the typeface used by Hasselblad today.

The Hasselblad Historical logo's background colour is one of the three major colours used on this website. The shades of these colours are not necessarily the exact same colours that were used by Hasselblad. They are however chosen to indeed 'echo' the three basic colours that appear in most Hasselblad publications, on Hasselblad boxes, etc.: a light middle blue and a golden yellow ("ljust mellanblå och guldgult": the colours of the Swedish national flag), and a neutral grey.

The Hasselblad Historical logo was created by Q.G. de Bakker in 2005.

More detailed information about the original Hasselblad graphics will appear elsewhere on this site.