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.
Portland's original Tri-Met logo, designed by Irwin McFadden; and its replacement, by ID Branding.
Similarly, TriMet, our public transportation system here in Portland, had a well-crafted if a bit dated identity based upon a pyramid of triangles—each representing one of the three counties making up the service area. This is apocryphal—that's an academic term meaning I may have made it up—but I can see them dumping the triangles because the other counties felt that the arrows were pointing at downtown Portland.
That's a perception problem, not a logo problem. The arrows pointed at each other. The circles interlocked; the mark was a dynamic representation of the interconnectedness of the metro area made possible by the transportation service.
When Portland's ID Branding redid it a couple of years ago, they kept the circles but ditched the arrows, stripping the mark of its dynamism in the name of appeasing the low self-esteem of Beaverton, Vancouver and the outer suburbs. Their solution is pleasant enough, if bland; but the rigor and character by which the last system, designed in the late 1970s—has been replaced by a mild pastiche of the teutonic efficiency of European metro transit system identities—Pat Boone, say, to Berlin's Elvis.
TriMet, like the Port of Seattle, might have helped itself by taking smaller steps: are orange and brown unfashionable? Evolve the damn colors; design a new livery for the vehicles. Outer provinces feeling slighted? Add service, craft outreach programs, and—if you'll pardon the expression—advertise. Shoot, even the ITC Avant Garde used for the logotype might have been made newly-fly in the hands of one of those young Turks who seem determined to reanimate Herb Lubalin.
So: what has been gained in each of these cases? Does a new logo change the brand? Does it change your perception of these brands? Certainly the management of each of these organizations hoped that the re-brand would more accurately reflect the direction of [the company] in the global marketplace
. Or something. But has that happened? If anything we're less sure about what Xerox does, now that they're no longer the document company.
AT&T is no longer the phone company; how long, I wonder, will it refer to itself as The New AT&T
? How about UPS, now that consumers no longer have to ponder a time when parcels were tied with string? What can Brown
do for me that the United Parcel Service could not? What do these companies do that they could not under the auspices of their previous identities?
Note: Most of these stories have already been covered on the nets, largely on UnderConsideration's Brand New, from whom I got the Port of Seattle story.