Philippe John Richardson, of the LA design studio Laundry, says on page 289 of this chunky book "Design as art is quite strong these days, and especially with increased access to faster computers, anyone can become a designer. The volume of less crafted and less educated work is quite high, but the need for strong iconography and simple messages - even if stylised - remains." This sort of sums up this interesting logo book.
It is not a book that contains logos of huge corporations, the CBS eye, Mobil Oil, FedEx (I often wonder how many folks get the right pointing arrow in that logo?) Mitsubishi Industries or Chase Manhattan Bank. The best book I've found on these is 'Marks of Excellence' (ISBN 0714838381) by Per Mollerup. Tres Logos aims a lot lower at the solid everyday design problems that you can face: logos for an exhibition, a local retail outfit, a small record company, a children's play group or a charity. The four thousand plus designs in the book will easily kick-start some creative ideas and nicely there are a good few logos included whose style you'll most definitely want to avoid. PJ Richardson's reference to fast computers seems very apt. Without the various logo software packages available this book would be real thin..
The book (beautifully printed and designed) is divided into nine sections but I thought that many of the logos could easily be swapped into any section though the Fashion pages, I suppose predictably, have some very appropriate quirky designs. Missing from the book though are any captions to explain what sort of company the logos are for. Each has a reference number and the designers name but the index at the back of the book only reveals the same info and the designers' addresses.
Tres Logos is an interesting collection of contemporary everyone-can-design-one marks.