Lisa Lenovitz designed the logo.

Detail from Lisa Lenovitz’s logo studies

Lisa Lenovitz (now Lisa Eaton) graduated from the prestigious Cooper Union, was a key member of Tibor Kalman’s M & Co. in New York, and leads the design team for chef and restauranteur Mario Batali. She is very talented.

Lisa and I went to high school together in Huntington, New York, and she was a girlfriend of musicians in my bands, and one of a number of wonderful artists I knew. We both went to college in Manhattan, lived on the Upper West Side, and liked each other, so we had a lot of reasons to stay in touch. When we started Oblivion Lisa was artist who popped in my head to design our logo. Tom and I had no idea what a logo actually was or what made a good one. Or anything else about graphics whatsoever. We just knew a record company needed a logo, right?

Lisa Lenovitz’s Oblivion logos studies

So, when Lisa handed us a bunch of sketches from her notebook I’m not really sure what made us choose what we chose. Maybe it was Lisa’s favorite? I don’t know.


The final logo

Anyhow, we chose the chosen one and we still didn’t know what to do with it. So, we took Lisa’s hand inked and lettered one inch square version from a regular paper sketchbook and had photostats copy made of it. The fact that the ink spidered out on the paper, the holding lines I drew with a flair tip pen were uneven (I cut it out with a single edge razor blade), was completely lost to our untrained eyes. So, absolutely no fault of Lisa’s, that funky edged art served us as the logo for the life of the company.

Lisa continued to help us in a number of ways over the years, including the design of Tom’s album.