If your vendor or client has a logo like this . . .
. . . you can more or less be assured he's an arsehole. Here's a bit via Josh Marshall about a lobbying firm that sent mail to congressfolk purporting to originate from the NAACP and Latino interest groups. The stuff was fiction, forged by the lobbying firm. Nasty. But look at the lobbying firm's logo: it's 100% nutz and no finesse: a speed line and a starburst in ultimate letter of the founder's name. (Jack Bonner, we might add, looks like a cross between Freddie Mercury and Skeletor, and yes, you're welcome). This is arseholery in design: no competent designer would have proposed such a solution to a proper client; and no client worth its salt would have approved it. Graphic design is shorthand for a whole range of human experience: if you understand it, it can serve you (viz. Our President). If you can't be bothered to give a shite about it (viz. McCain), well: it may not lose you the election, but it won't help.
Posted by Adam McIsaac in BrandPolitics | 31 July 2009 | Permalink | Comment on this post
Fishburne revisited.
Go ahead and call me a creative critic. I've never been a Tom Fishburne guy and it has everything to do with his illustrative style. It just doesn't appeal to me. But with that baggage checked, I must admit, the man knows the business inside and out. And no, the irony is not lost. So, this panel made the rounds a couple of years ago as I was contentedly reminded this morning when I linked to an unnamed blog of great promise (which, apparently had been moth-balled for nearly as long). I really must give Tom his due; he delivers amusing reminders of our daily struggle in much the same way as this and this.
Posted by Eric Hillerns in Brand | 15 September 2008 | Permalink | Comment on this post
International metro identities: or, ruminations on the letter M.
With at least some hint of reference to McIsaac's post from a few months back—and our work for our regional government of the same name, Metro—we simply thought this was interesting. That's all, nothing more. A collection of logos identifying metros (urban rail transportation systems) for cities worldwide, including Portland's own TriMet. Perhaps the assembly was compelling because it dredged memories of our epic study of another letter (that being the letter T) for Tidewater Barge Lines which was in full swing at about this time last summer. I forget, was it ninety eight variations on the letter T? Why, yes. Yes, I do believe it was at least ninety eight perfectly appropriate Ts. But that's another story altogether. One that will be told with some vigor, I can assure you. Image and metros story by way of Quipsologies.
Posted by Eric Hillerns in Brand | 31 July 2008 | Permalink | Comment on this post (1 so far)
Fool me once, shame on me.
Portland-based employment agency Jobdango has been sent a bill for $5,000 for chalking their URL on the city's sidewalks. Sidewalk chalking, as you know, is a cheap form of so-called viral marketing and was used, evidently with success, by Jobdango when they launched a couple years ago.
In fact, their effort inspired us to steal the idea for the launch of our campaign for Metro's Recycle at Work in 2007. We asked permission from the city, of course, because we're goody-two-shoes types; Jobdango did not. I don't have much of an opinion on this beyond noting that Jobdango's name irritates me and that the city seems to be cracking down on anything involving doing anything on our city's streets (viz. Randy Leonard's kerfluffle about folk staking parade seats with duct tape). The next step, to my mind, should be cracking down on the notorious tagger "Locate", who seems to be everywhere.
Posted by Adam McIsaac in Brand | 15 July 2008 | Permalink | Comment on this post
A Model of Brand.
During a recent archiving exercise, I stumbled upon a small pile of reference works containing a handy nugget for describing brand. But before I go further, if I may, I'll take a step back and explain.
In our client work, the conversation of "brand" regularly turns from one of "we need to brand this" or "let's focus on our branding" to one of defining what the very term means. (If you'll indulge me, I'll add that I believe we have all engaged in conversations where each party seems to be having their own unique discussion about what is an assumed shared collection of terms.) From there, I'll either enquire as to what, exactly, the client understands the term (brand; in its harried verb tense) means to them. And invariably, the focus of their answer relies mostly upon the practice of applying a logo to any number of applications.
I can't say I really blame them. We've all gotten used to the ill-informed concept of branding as it applies to, say, Nike. Or NASCAR. In both cases, we've come to identify the "brand" as what we see. The Nike Swoosh on Tiger's pristine golf cap, or your uncle's undersized, unauthorized, and likely soiled, Lakers jersey (KB24 4 Life!). Or the malt liquor, battery and aftershave logos plastered on the Dale Ernhardt Jr. 8(8) car. Fact is, those are indeed part of the brand (as is your uncle or the fuel economy of that left-turn-only stock car), but only a part. Sure, they've technically been "branded"—in the same way that the steer receives his fiery mark—but the discipline of brand is actually about a complex set of relationships and the intersections that make them interesting.
I'll return to the point at hand; that handy reference piece. Way back in 2001, Hugh Dubberly and his team at Dubberly Design Group developed an excellent visual reference to illustrate and map the elements of brand. If you're a client and you've not studied this piece, then you've likely been talking in circles (as I did in illustrating the argument above). And if you're a creative firm who hasn't shared this with your clients (at least at the conversational level) then you too, have been working too hard. Kidding aside, it's a fine piece of work that's worth coming back to again and again. Download this PDF, and a handful of other useful models here.
Posted by Eric Hillerns in Brand | 12 June 2008 | Permalink | Comment on this post
Old brands never die; and neither does anything else, dammit.
Rob Walker has a piece in this morning's Times Magazine about companies who purchase the rights to dead brands — e.g., Brim decaffeinated coffee, Underalls, Eagle Snacks — and revivify them. The brands return to market, however, having first been updated: the plan for Brim is to contain a full portfolio of coffee-related drinks, caffeinated and non, because consumers—while remembering the brand name well—have apparently forgotten that it was a decaffeinated brand.
I'm the kind of guy who flips through old magazines and thinks, Ah, hell. Why can't a fella buy a box of Quisp anymore?
I wouldn't think twice about Quisp if it were still on the shelves [Actually, it's back, too. —Ed.]. And though I remember my mum buying Brim, I wouldn't think about it at all if it hadn't been name-checked in the Beasties' Root Down
. But here's what bugs me: the complete separation from the brand and the product, which seems … well, cynical. Walker's subjects refer to the return of the Volkswagen Beetle as the master pattern, but the Beetle is still made by the folks who always made it, and the new version holds true to the original's mandate: a simple car for the middle class. Brim, Underalls, Eagle Snacks, Salon Selectives are not only not iconic brands, but the reloads have little, if anything, to do with the original product. Which, I suppose, is part of the point. When all folks can remember of a brand is the jingle, you can shove anything under that jingle and sell it.
Posted by Adam McIsaac in Brand | 18 May 2008 | Permalink | Comment on this post
Brand differentiation, explained.
I can't attest to the myriad visual references that came to mind when young Logan shared the Bizarro strip from this morning. I had tucked into my first cup of Joe, and for the life of me, I didn't see this as a bat. Of course, that's another discussion entirely and not particularly family-friendly. But I digress. We found this one especially pertinent to our little on-going brand dialogue. I've actually had clients make this argument when suggesting a startlingly familiar product name. "Can't we just make it two words?" And, "sure it's spelled the same way, but couldn't we just pronounce it differently?"
Posted by Eric Hillerns in Brand | 15 May 2008 | Permalink | Comment on this post
Change for the sake of change considered harmful.
Beware: longish, wonkish, and peckish rumination on brand follows. For readers with shorter attention spans, here's a synopsis: My folks had a friend who got married for the first time because he was dating a girl and ran out of things to say and so he asked her to marry him. This kind of thinking happens all the time in the brand development business. Listen: we want to make money. But more and more, our first question to a client who wants a re-brand is: Do you really need to do this?
The Port of Seattle's former logo at left, and its replacement.
The Port of Seattle wants to be the cleanest, greenest, most energy-efficient
port in the nation. Step one toward that goal, as you might imagine, was commissioning a new logo.
There's not an emoticon that accurately conveys "lips, pursed; left eyebrow, raised," so you'll have to imagine me doing it.
Re-brands are undertaken for many reasons, many of which I suspect are well-crafted rationalizations of management not being able to thinks of anything else to do. Getting a new logo is supposed to be hard work for a company—years ago, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company for whom I was preparing an annual report claimed, to my chagrin, that adopting the company's new identity had been more difficult for him than a round of layoffs that eliminated 4,000 of his employees—but it's easier than changing policy. In the case of the Port, CEO Tay Yoshitani wanted a standard under which to rally his sustainability intitative. Identity as the vanguard of policy: understandable, and even admirable.
Except, as you might suspect by now, I don't care for the result. Or, more precisely, I don't think the new logo, created by Seattle branding firm Ardent Sage, is an improvement on its predecessor, a vigorous chevron which suggests the cranes of the port, stacked containers and the confluence of the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Puget Sound to the south.
I understand the rationale behind Ardent Sage's solution, but the result seems tentative, almost wispy. I'm as guilty as the next guy of the italicize the conjunction
motif, but I can't see it in the industrial context.
Various familiar trademarks, before and after rebranding.
Which I suppose is part of the point. Look at recent developments among the monoliths: Xerox, Chevron, UPS and AT&T have all undergone softening (my colleague Mark Conahan describes the process as someone putting the logo in his mouth and sucking on it a while
) to the detriment of their narrative power: Xerox no longer references anything in particular; AT&T's world-as-information-transmittal has been replaced by an orb that I suppose is meant to be a three-dimensional version of its predecessor but is drawn so poorly that I have difficulty even seeing the sphere; and UPS has dipped Paul Rand's puckish package-and-shield in lucite, losing the package—and the meaning—in the process. Only Chevron has stepped up its narrative by entering the third dimension: the red-and-blue stripes now offer an elegant flip that brings to mind devotional ribbons, such as the ubiquitous Support-our-troops variety: an irony perhaps unintended by its creator, Lippincott Mercer.
What is lost among The New Friendlness of all of these—including the Port of Seattle's, getting back to the matter at hand—is a sense of authority or finality; I want some sort of assurance that the organization behind the logo is confident in what it's doing.
Some of that may be addressed in in the new system's deployment, but I can't help feeling that the Port might have been better served by an evolution—dump the late-eighties maroon-and-gray for a cleaner color palette, reload the collateral/usage standards, redraw the logotype, maybe, but keep the part that worked.
You lose the drama of the introduction, sure. You also lose the headache of the press wringing its hands on behalf of the American People over the $40,000 design fee (when was the last time the American People ever knew or questioned the amount a public agency spent on routine legal fees, I wonder?). And it could be that the story of the Port's transition to sustainable practice—might have been better served by an evolution of their existing identity, rather than starting from zero.
Posted by Adam McIsaac in Brand | 01 May 2008 | Permalink | Comment on this post
Who is a great lover?
Recently, I sat down with Jen Maxwell-Muir of Maxwell PR. After exchanging our initial pleasantries, the conversation naturally migrated to how our respective firms describe process, and further, the perspectives of the creative partner within the brand development assignment. We discussed the points at which we enter the client's life and how the approach varies between advertising agencies, Web developers, public relations concerns and design firms. I was reminded of an exceptional illustration produced by our friends at Neutron. Exceedingly simple, it demonstrates the relationships among the so-called creative disciplines; marketing, telemarketing, public relations, advertising, graphic design, and of course, that ubiquitous thing to which we refer as branding.
Posted by Adam McIsaac in Brand | 21 April 2008 | Permalink | Comment on this post
Paul Arden, †2008
English advertising agent Paul Arden died yesterday following a long illness. He wrote several books about the creative business; I recommend all of them to anybody even tangentially related to the business, but It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be is required reading. Mr. Arden was one of those advertising folks who transcend the tribalism of the advertising vs. design mindset; a big thinker who never forgot the details. Creative Review has an obituary followed by a long thread of comments from people who worked with him. Go there.
Posted by Adam McIsaac in Brand | 03 April 2008 | Permalink | Comment on this post
Discipline
Steve Heller writes up the Obama campaign's brand discipline in this morning's New York Times, and in particular its use of H&FJ's Gotham typeface. This has to be at least the fifth article on Obama's use of Gotham I've come across; you people (and by that I mean The American People) seem to be absolutely bananas about it. For an appraisal of the other two candidates' efforts, I give you H&FJ itself; it's an oldie, but still a goodie.
Posted by Adam McIsaac in Brand | 03 April 2008 | Permalink | Comment on this post
Charlie, I'm in the tunnel now, buddy...
Spot for Jaguar's XKR done by our pals Johnson & Wolverton at EuroRSCG in New York. This has been out for awhile, but I hadn't seen it before they returned to Portland last week to keynote our local AIGA chapter's vendor show. The YouTube doesn't do it justice (especially since the uploader didn't maintain the true aspect ratio; the original was done in widescreen and is scaled vertically here so that the car looks crap), but you get a sense of the piece's rich surface. I am always amazed at how J&W bring a transcendent print sensibility to film, and delighted at their omnivorous approach to process: the dude with the midlands accent at the beginning is the actual driver of the car; they had a camera riding shotgun with him which picked up his chatter on its condenser mike. This could have and would have been ignored by a different filmmaker, but they noticed that there was something about his voice that was perfect for the brand. English, but not posh, and not that Guy-Ritchie-fake-cockney thing either. He sounds tough and professional, like a fighter pilot. Totally silly, if you break it down, but perfect in the context of the spot.
This kind of thinking has always been hallmark of J&W's work: production events like shoots are really exercises in raw material gathering, and are carefully planned to allow for lucky accidents, rather than hew tightly to a storyboard. The real work happens back at the shop. All filmmakers work this way to an extent, and certainly editors play a greater part in the success or failure of a work than most layfolks realize (the editor here was Neil Gust, by the way; a respected musician and former staffer at J&W Portland and now an independent editor in NYC), but my sense is that J&W push production earlier in their process than most, so that there's more time to tinker and generate additional material. Nothing gets ignored.
Anyway, great spot. The only downside is that I've had to stand Conahan hiding behind walls in our offices at regular intervals throughout the day and calling out "I'm in the tunnel now, buddy." More on J&W's presentation shortly.
Posted by Adam McIsaac in Brand | 30 March 2008 | Permalink | Comment on this post
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