The creation of the Love Symbol occurred after a long, conceptual brewing process that started as early as 1984 with the release of the hugely successful album and film Purple Rain. Prince and his creative team introduced many combinations of the male and female symbols prior to creating the final Love Symbol. In 1992, Prince and his creative team engaged Mitch Monson, who was then creative director and one of four partners of the Minneapolis firm HDMG, to complete the design. Prince and Sotera Tschetter put together a complete visual brief for the Love Symbol, and Mitch and Lizz Luce spent a couple late design nights before landing on the final symbol design that was selected by Prince.
The original symbol artwork that was created was hand-drawn, but the technical process that took that design through development and final execution was unique. Macs did not have the graphic horsepower that the proprietary Video Paintbox Systems had at the time, so the team used a DF/X Composium Paintbox System (then $200,000 to $300,000) to work quickly and efficiently on symbol exploration. Also, since the primary use of these paintbox systems was for animation and not print, they were not ideal for large, high-resolution print output. So the designers had to default to traditional transparency output technology to create final print artwork for the symbol, album cover art, and so on.
It got even more archaic than that for presenting “approvals” to Prince and Sotera. For those reviews, all print artwork was output to VHS tape. Those tapes would then be reviewed by Prince along with the tapes that were routinely presented for music video approvals.
We talked to Monson about the development process and about the significance of the design.
When you look at a lot of [Princes] previous designs, they started more clean and refined and slowly evolved into more curved and organic shapes. The final Love Symbol design included a lot of these more organic, hand-crafted and human forms. Over time, people commonly asked why these imperfect shapes were not more refined and transformed into perfect vector art. The answer: they were never intended to be that way.
We believe all the hard work was worth it because the final Love Symbol design really fit Prince. Its masculine, but romantic and sensual. It reflects his music and who and what he was, even as the king of reinvention.
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