Pony Books is a cooperative and community bookshop in Göteborg, Sweden, focused on independent, queer and arts publishing.

The identity is made of an unlikely herd of once lost ponies and horses, forgotten in old books and dusty corners of the internet. Pony Books becomes their new home: a wild field to be free, safe, and themselves.

All ponies are welcome, no matter how they are drawn, and every pony is set free to roam wherever it wants on a page or screen. There is no singled out pony; the identity is all of them.

See some of the herd below:

As reading and typography are at the heart of what Pony Books does, a simple logotype was drawn using a reversed pilcrow for the ‘P’. (A pilcrow is typographic glyph that is used to identify a new paragraph.) This gives us a simple word mark and icon, which contains a subtle disregard for typographic etiquette, helping represent Pony Books as a playful, alternative space.

The Pony Books pilcrow is designed to punctuate images as well as words. However, the ponies can use the logo to rub against or jump over if they wish.

The ponies are used in the Pony Books shop in Gothenburg, amongst the books on the Instagram feed, and on posters in various formats, as well as bookmarks, wrapping paper, window vinyl, bags and stickers.

Here is a selection of the second hand publications where some of the ponies came from. It’s quite sad to think of them stuck in old, forgotten annuals and reference books. Setting them loose felt liberating, and in keeping with the ethos behind the book shop. In the same way, it was essential to avoid pastiching 1970s typography. Instead, by mixing historical and contemporary illustrations, the ponies are freed from nostalgia.

Importantly, no images of ponies with (i.e. being controlled by or the property of) humans were included.