Posts Tagged ‘brand design’
Monday, December 31st, 2012
The world’s least favourite logo—but for how long?
Was 2012 the year that brand design failed? Certainly the general public and a large number of designers did a heck of a lot of complaining as a long list of high-profile new / reworked logos appeared to increasing derision — so much so that you have to wonder: is a logo launch free of moan-brand misery even possible in 2013?
One by one, ever more brands joined 2012’s year-long turkey shoot culminating in October with the University of California: a logical, reasonably well-executed new device incorporating references to the 150 year-old seal it replaced (see below, or here). Yet it inspired new heights of hostility, finally being withdrawn after widespread media taunting and a 50,000-person petition. Not a work of staggering genius perhaps (the applications did seem a bit dull) but deserving of that much crazed torch-bearing lynch-mobbery?
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Tags: brand design, communication, Ebay, Gap, logo design, London 2012, Twitter, University of California, Windows
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Friday, August 10th, 2012
Barely a month seems to pass without someone, somewhere taking a pop at brand design by highlighting the entertainingly high cost of some logos.
This week it is the online enterprise (no stranger to my spam folder) that offers low-grade generic ‘professional logos’ for hundreds, even tens of pounds / dollars. I will not dignify / promote the business by linking to or naming it here, but their pitch contrasts exceptionally fortunate startups paying little or nothing for their first logo (Twitter, Nike, Coca-Cola…) with large corporations (Accenture, Pepsi, BP, Enron, London 2012…) who coughed up six to nine-figure sums for the same thing (no sources quoted of course). So far, so unsurprising.
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Tags: brand design, branding, communication, design, graphic design, logos, London 2012
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Monday, April 4th, 2011
Photo: Bernard Gagnon
Is fashion is the only design discipline with colour truly embedded at its core? The search for ‘new blacks’ notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine fashion without colour. Interior design takes it fairly seriously and like fashion, devotes significant effort to forecasting colour trends. Architecture and industrial design sometimes seem timid with colour but project leadtimes, materials & regulatory issues inhibit experiment. Somewhere in the middle is graphic design: sometimes using colour well, often not. What is graphic design’s excuse?
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Tags: brand design, branding, colour, creativity, design process, graphic design, industrial design, visual culture, visualisation
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Monday, October 11th, 2010
The increasing power of brands has also seen the rise of the logo lynchmob, pitchforks and flaming torches aloft in pursuit of another artless arrangement of a few Helvetica characters. This now routine negativity reached a new pitch last week when Gap unveiled its new logo to a tsunami of online invective, much of it from designers. Healthy debates are overheating and professional dysfunction threatens to encourage design-by-mob.
The talking-up of graphic design into rocket science always invited public criticism, but once upon a time the industry avoided attacking itself in public. Somewhere late in the 20th century that began to change. When BP (pre-pinwheel identity) italicised it’s old shield-based logo, the Sun and other esteemed UK print media ran ‘NEW LOGO COST £40m’ and/or similarly misleading headlines (the agency will have been well-paid, but the vast majority of that sum will have been ongoing global implementation costs). A bruising PR fail in itself, but there in the news story text was one of the big branding figures of the time quoted as saying how terrible the logo was—helping to fuel a popular view of designers as overpaid charlatans.
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Tags: brand design, brand names, branding, communication, crowdsourcing, design, design criticism, design industry, Gap, graphic design, iTunes, logo, logo rage, London 2012, MySpace, new logo, Twitter, visual culture
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Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
That ‘knowledge is power’ is not disputed, but acceptance of the value of information is under threat. With unprecedented budget cuts becoming ‘normal’, the cost of communicating is called into question whilst its value is ignored.
With Crazy George & chums currently riding roughshod through UK public services, machetes flailing, there is financial pressure of the most intense kind on public institutions. Used to state regulation, detached from the free market’s instant and unforgiving feedback, there is no solid tradition of objectively balancing prioritities. Forced to plan big cuts, decision-makers may already have reached the “if I cut this will the entire institution fail tomorrow?” stage. Can we hope for measured appraisal of the worth of communications design in this climate? This must be a good time for designers to argue for the value of communications and information design wherever they get the chance.
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Tags: accessibility, brand design, budgets, communication, cost-cutting, cuts, economy, effectiveness, graphic design, information, information design, institutions, language, legibility, public services, spending, value, value for money
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Thursday, June 17th, 2010
You don’t construct a building façade-first, then install services, framework and foundations. You don’t build a car by starting with the bodywork. We don’t (unless recovering from a big night out) dress coat & shoes first. So why are some brands designed from the outside-in, imposing personality at odds with experience? Outside-in brand design can set expectations significantly adrift of reality, resulting in dissonant and negative communications and an unsustainable brand. How do you build a sustainable brand? From the inside out.
Graphic design is superficial, ephemeral. Much of it ends up, if not as yesterday’s fish & chip paper (they don’t do that any more), in the bottom of the budgie cage’s (no-one keeps those any more either), binned and recycled until fit only for landfill. Pixels or paper, graphic design is largely transient, disposable. Its outcomes may be all about about the surface but there is every reason why its process should have more depth.
At Wolff Olins as far back as the 1970s a much-used maxim was “you can’t paper over the cracks” i.e. if your company/product/service is poor, a stunning visual identity will not help you long-term, it only creates a credibility gap that makes things worse. Advice that clearly never reached the ears of hapless BP CEO Tony Hayward…
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Tags: BP, brand design, brand names, branding, communication, graphic design, information design, packaging, retail, service design, signage, visual culture
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Thursday, May 27th, 2010
Artwork, print and cheap uncoated paper – 1950s/60s comics’ matchless charm (pic via Half-man Half-static).
Forty years back (in the Life on Mars era) the fashionable aesthetic is an informal, natural look. There is lingering hippy talk of ‘getting back to nature’. These are lean years for the high street hairdresser, ‘male grooming’ is a laughable concept and clothes are mostly cheap and nasty or homemade. Design is still a cottage industry but it is looking to the future: Michael English’s Hyper-real airbrush illustrations seem new and extraordinary. Robert Moog’s synthesizer is the future of music (although he hasn’t yet worked out how to keep it in tune)…
March 2010, Farringdon. I’m in a tube carriage near an extraordinary-looking young woman who appears in no way real. Her hair, nails, makeup seem somehow beyond human and her high brow and flawless surface reminds me of the actor/digital hybrid as the Red Queen from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Blankly shiny, expressionlessly ‘perfect’, she is the HD-ready paradigm of contemporary beauty. Music seeping from headphones is also soullessly bright, sampled, virtual, autotuned. All of this is in sharp contrast to the immediate noise and grubby texture of London, where illustrators, designers and musicians, bored with software slickness are increasingly going ‘wonky’ (surely the most irritating/overused phrase of 2009), working with the look and feel of handwork, crafts, ‘outsider art’ and forgotten technologies to rediscover ‘charm’….
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Tags: brand design, charm, communication, creativity, decoration, decorative type, graphic design, packaging, typography, visual culture, visualisation
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Thursday, May 20th, 2010
Why do so many brand logos appear unoriginal? Reading some press you’d think that graphic designers sit around all day either copying each other or channeling Vic Reeves: ‘that was my idea’. Are we running out of ideas? Is the media running out of stories? Are strangely familiar logos coincidences, remixes or ripoffs?
Tempting as the brand theft narrative is there are other factors at work. Designers work with the logical and the lateral seeking the ‘original’ – not just to impress their peers, but because an original and distinctive logo is more noticeable, memorable and protectable – a more effective and valuable brand property. This search for originality is not quite the free-spirited enquiry of the fine artist, being at least in part anchored at some level to brand messages and requirements of the client brief. Companies are rarely as unique as they would like to be and often want to communicate many of the same things. ‘Global’, ‘fast’, ‘efficient’, are just a few recurring themes (how many companies do not want to be seen as those things?). As global consumers we swim in an increasingly homogenous media soup (apologies for distasteful mixed metaphor), sharing the same cultural references, so perhaps it is not so surprising that brands are getting less distinct and that designers sometimes come to similar conclusions.
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Tags: brand design, branding, communication, design, graphic design
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Monday, April 19th, 2010
British Airways in a proposed merger with Iberia is to list on the London Stock Exchange as International Airlines Group. Boring! When I communicate with power utility E.on, the name always gives pause for thought (am I writing it/saying it correctly? what does it mean?). The two airline companies will continue to trade publicly under their existing well-established brands (volcanic ash permitting) and E.on is probably considered a ‘successful’ brand, but new brand names now seem to come in just two flavours: underwhelming or overwrought. When was the last time a big brand name was launched to anything other than universal derision? What’s up with brand names?
Naming strategies have evolved from simple ownership (Campbell’s), to acronym (BBC), description (Slimfast) and evocation (Breeze). Now ‘no-names’ like Muji (tr.:‘no-label’) and neologisms (or ‘stupid made up names’ as they are more commonly known) like Wii represent newer strategies that are a harder sell and demand a little more – sometimes too much – of the consumer.
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Tags: brand design, brand names, branding, communication, language, words
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Thursday, February 18th, 2010
An explosion of communication and choice in recent decades has created the global climate of information overload that we are only now beginning to find ways to properly navigate. The rise of the iPhone app and the price comparison website shows the information economy at work and there is growing recognition of the value of designing access to information. But what took us so long?
In our personal areas of interest choice can seem miraculous: I can get my favourite version of my favourite song in less than 60 seconds; we can have customised trainers designed in-store; you can get your flat white-half-caff-soy-frappe-latte-cino just the way you like it in a coffee shop anywhere in the world (a distant time it was when coffee was purchased in only one of two states: black or white). But in general, relentless second-by-second decision-making is required to navigate a deep sea of visual noise. Negotiating our choices can lead to unprecedented fatigue, confusion, stress – and disinterest. As expectations rise, consumers are increasingly losing their patience. How do we solve this problem?
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Tags: accessibility, brand design, branding, communication, creativity, design, graphic design, information design, information economy, language, typography, words
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