Get Busy Livin' or Get Busy Dyin'
by Nate Voss, (12 comments)
Brand. Branding. Brand building. Brand refreshing. Brand positioning. Brand strategy. Rebranding.
UPS and AT&T (now at&t) have taught me one thing: Traditional logo design is dead. Identity design is being reborn as a new thing: Branding. It’s a piece of a larger whole, and it is no longer being driven by design.
I, as others, bemoan the passing of work by Paul Rand and Saul Bass. If ever the graphic design world made heroes of its practitioners, it’s these two men. What they created was second-to-none in graphic design. Generations of designers have been raised on their work, and damnit, its hard to say goodbye.
But our profession is driven by technology and progress. I do not mean the computer, direct-to-plate printing, or any other advance in the graphic design industry. I’m speaking of the technology of our clients. The progress of industry. The growth of the world around us. Graphic design is not a self-sustaining industry. Hospitals won’t go out of business, because people will always get sick; hospitals will take care of themselves. Graphic Design, by contrast, is completely at the whim of the present economy. If business is up, design is up. When business is down, so, too, falls design.
In short, our clients’ business defines the success of our industry. It is our clients’ business goals that demand a certain presence in the global community. That community is growing and expanding at an exponential rate thanks to the communications sector — internet, phone, television, etc. Those are the platforms and media that are staking a claim in the current marketplace. And not just one; it is a plethora of different media avenues. The public is just too damn savvy and hip to our game for the old guard of TV/Radio/Print-vertising to sustain the same effect it used to.
In these new media outlets, and even in some of the old, there is a wealth of possibility for visual enhancement. The fact that I haven’t seen 40-foot digital, backlit, animated billboards on I-80 is a matter of only time and money. They are coming. They may already be in Vegas, I don’t know.
The rub to traditional identity design (“logos”/marks) is that the old rules of designing them don’t take advantage of the new media. They adhere to the outdated laws of production: flat graphics, simple to reproduce at any size. Of course simplicity still leads to memorization, which is key to audience recognition, so please don’t abandon all the old rules yet. But it is time we update them.
In fact, it is high time we as designers quit bitching about the New Identity Design. Has anyone noticed how small of a role we are actually playing in it? I wonder to myself how many of the designers who spout hate towards the new UPS and AT&T marks (or avatars, really) were actually approached by those two companies to do the job? How many design firms pitched the project? I don’t know the answer, but I’ll wager it wasn’t many. Those jobs are leaving design firms — even the largest, most successful of them — for the large scale Brand Houses like Landor and Interbrand. If I should discover that Pentagram, my heroes, aren’t even getting a seat at that table, I may well break into tears for our profession.
Marty Neumier waxed philosophic in his article Who’s Afraid of the Big Brand Wolf that we may have missed our chance to be a part of this. Sure, the new flower shop around the corner will always need a marquee, but our days of living in the limelight with global entities may already be behind us.
My advice to the graphic designers of the world: Look at UPS and AT&T. Get used to that. Get ready to execute like that. And by god get ready to do it better than the people doing it now.
The new AT&T identity is a bigger step backward for graphic design than the new UPS, and unless we embrace this new direction for our industry and start doing it better than the next guy now, we will never get the chance again. Identity design will become this schlock because the marketing and brand positioning teams won’t know the difference without us. We need to be on hand to show the rest of the branding community that there is a better way to reach their goals than what they are getting now. And we need to be able to deliver what their clients and customers are looking for.
Learn what an avatar can do for a company. Explore more options than flat dimensionality. Look into the possibilities of animation and earmarks. Grow. Grow as an industry. Grow as designers.
Get busy living, or get busy dying.
Special thanks to The Shawshank Redemption for the inspiration of this article.
Comments (12)
p.berkbigler said:
I suppose you knew I’d likely bite on this one, Nate - It does seem that the “graphic designer” is being excused from the table as the “brand engineer” has swiftly taken their chair while they were up for coffee, but I’m wondering if this identity shift has had more to do with corporate consolidation and global specialization than it does with “pure” design being factored out of the equation. Interbrand and Landor have just worked their tails off to ensure that they are the top-tier brand houses vs. the top tier ad agencies / design firms / marketing gurus - they successfully deciphered what it really meant to be Brand Specialists TM and then spread the word quickly through maximum visibility clients.
When I look at marks like the new UPS logo and the new AT&T logo I’m reminded again and again that identity / brand design at that corporate / global level is a ballgame I’m entirely out-of-my-league on - I have only a vague notion of the countless branding reviews, design presentations, mark revision rounds, and council-around-the-table meetings that HAVE to have gone into the creation and realization of what many of us are looking at and thinking “And that’s what they came up with?”
Having seen several gleaming examples of really solid, witty marks that were cast by the wayside in favor of what seem to be vaguer and more mediocre choices I’m reminded time and again of James Victore’s description of the logo: “One super-expensive lucky rabbit’s foot”. Brand understanding really does seem to incorporate the knowledge that a logo / mark is only so much ink on paper or pixels on screen without the engineering of the narrative / collateral to fill out its meaning.
We are certainly at the horizon where identity design now needs to solidly include consideration of the motion graphic potential of any logo / mark - how will the mark show up and “grow” on a web banner or in streaming media? What could it look like if the mark actually is rotated in a dimensional format? etc, etc… The beauty of design is that its principles carry from the page to the package surface to the pixels on a display without a really major hitch or hiccup.
I suspect, though, in the business sense that we’re all simply more conscious of the larger tiers in the business of our competition - Landor and Interbrand have seemingly positioned themselves not unlike their clients: globally recognized, intercontinentally active, quickly gaining cultural ubiquity across borders. Seems like they’ve figured out that formula rather nicely…
Posted on November 23, 2005
DC1974 said:
Where I went to school (to study film alas) this was part of the thinking of the heads of the design program there as well. I remember going to a lecture given by Michael Vanderbyl where he summed up the way the design program taught its designers to think: thinking about the question before the designer is needed. It strikes me now that this is the core of brand building. The deeper question of “what is’ or “why now”. Vanderbyl related a story of how he had been called to do a logo for a new client and called the office to discuss and was faced with a rude and dismissive office manager. Vanderbyl suggested that what they needed was not a new logo but a new receptionist. This is the heart of branding exercises, figuring out the deeper questions about values, naming and being able to offer that stop the client. I don’t doubt that design schools across the country are pushing their students to think about link brand marketers. So, the trend will only grow.
Posted on November 23, 2005
Dave Giunta said:
I might argue that size is just as big a contributer to the absence of design in these logos as well. Size of the brand; size of the company; size of the brand house that redesigned it.
I say this because it’s been my experience that the size of an organization breeds fear and mediocrity. The cost (financially, intellectually, and emotionally) to radically change is so much higher for a company as it gets larger in size. There’s so many more people who need to get their own “stink” on a project in order to lay claim to it’s success, and so many more tiers of corporate hierarchy to deflect blame for it’s failure.
And that’s the problem. As designers, our job is to think differently about everything. Our job is to always make something better than it was, and sometimes things are so fouled up to begin with that we have to change them so much more than a large corporation can handle. This is why, as Paul points out above, many iterations of “really solid, witty marks” are cast by the wayside in favor of more vague and mediocre ones… it’s because they’re safe.
Everything about the new at&t and UPS logos screams committee to me. And, it screams fear. Fear of changing something too much on the chance it might offend just one of their customers. As if their customers really care whether or not the UPS logo is 3D or not.
As I stated in my comment on the other at&t post on this site, reading at&t’s press release announcing the new brand should explain just how far removed from the branding table a large corporation’s fears push us designers. at&t thinks the three dimensionality of their “world” icon will actually convey to it’s customers the “breadth of at&t’s services”.
Course, maybe I’m giving designers too much credit. Maybe these thoughts are (and should be) segmented away from designers and put into the hands of brand builders. Maybe designers’ only goal is aesthetic in nature. Maybe designers should only think about graphic communication and not about what is being communicated and why… but I don’t think so.
Posted on November 23, 2005
Adrian said:
Unfortunately, I completely agree with almost everything that has been said so far in this thread. I say unfortunately because this is really depressing. What we are saying is that the world’s biggest and most influential companies can’t help but choose safe design over good design. The biggest opportunities for design to really have an impact and change the world are being wasted as a result of the committees’ fears. I know I am speaking in huge generalities, but at the heart of this dicussion is that devastating truth.
Posted on November 23, 2005
Bill Kerr said:
Don’t be tooooo impressed by the branding companies… or by your traditionaly “heroes”
Posted on November 23, 2005
'::michael nielsen::' said:
The joy in those older logos is appreciating the time and thought that went in to them. Both at&t’s and ups’s were fairly clever…but these new ones just look like the CEO’s sat down and talked:
“Hey Bill.”
“Walter.”
“We need to come up with something new, something 21st century.”
“Indeed.”
“I’ve got it, we’ll insist the agency does something really groundbreaking, like something…3D!”
“Brilliant!”
“Let’s go wipe with 100’s.”
…Or something like that. I guess I’m just saying it seems like they are just done to be done…I can’t see any real concept or cleverness on these new logos…or even a legitimate reason they changed the logo. I say COUP. Down with the corporate safety nets…If only there were a way.
Posted on November 23, 2005
p.berkbigler said:
A follow-up from earlier today and a bit of a response to Bill Kerr’s note to tone down the hero worship a bit: I know for me one of the principle reasons why I hold a ton of respect for Rand, Bass, and Glaser, particularly in some of their identity work, is that their designs survived for such extended periods of time (I also know that my own limited Graphic Design history experience is leaving out some greats that came long before these three were on the scene - some of the identity designs from the 1800’s and early 1900’s that had stood the test of time even longer than UPS and AT&T combined). I think we’re all fairly acquainted with the stories of Rand laboring to realize / develop a single final mark which he would then present & defend to the client, offering more or less a “take my craftwork & expertise on this single mark or hire me to make another” approach to the logo.
Having “grown up” in a “presenting 5 logos or less on a design more or less makes the client think they paid you for nothing” mindset, this practice still seems so beautifully audacious and enticing. Frankly, I know that it’s not entirely dead, it just may never reach some of these companies that Dave keeps pegging as afraid to look for a really strong mark to represent them (I sort of wonder if that doesn’t also carry through to their CEO’s in many instances…).
Add onto it the longevity factor and again it’s like watching someone tear down a familiar monument that you’ve really grown to appreciate only to replace it with some overblown plastic abstraction of itself - some of the spirit is still lingering there and you can remember all the things you liked about the predecessor, but the new one just underwhelms you.
Posted on November 23, 2005
JonSel said:
There are two ideas that Nate seems to be expressing in his post. First, that there are changes in the visual vocabulary that we just need to deal with and accept. The second is that designers aren’t meeting the needs of their clients because they lack the knowledge and capability of brand expertise.
I can deal with the first part. After all, the 50s and 60s saw some major changes to the visual landscape with the appearance of the great identity designers like Chermayeff and Geismar, Bass, Rand, Lippincott and Landor. What does bother me about it is that we are allowing our clients to drive that vocabulary and not the other way around.
The second part is what bothers me most, though. Paul is correct in that firms like Landor have positioned themselves to take advantage of the current dynamic. Instead of being a design firm, they are a branding agency. “You don’t need a logo, you need a new brand.” I can see the CEO going pale at the thought of hiring a simple designer when he needs something, more. The growing tide of branding the last 10 years is what has done the biggest disservice to us after all. No longer is it enough to be just a design studio. For every 10 design firms that suddenly became branding firms, there was probably only one or two that really had the expertise to carry it off. As “brand” became the key word, “design” became less and less important. “Let’s worry about design later. We’ve got this brand to figure out.”
I’m fed up with the term “branding”. I like its nascent successor (according to Michael Bierut in his latest article on Design Observer) “innovation” even less. I don’t know why we are so afraid of embracing our roles as visualizers. A great corporate identity is best realized when the client and the design firm bring their strengths together. The client knows their business better than anyone. Designers know best how to turn that into something visual that communicates with the right audiences. Design is strategy made real. Isn’t that it? What more does there need to be? Are we simply justifying higher fees?
I’m not ready to say our best days are behind us.
Posted on November 23, 2005
Nate Voss said:
The important thing to keep in mind, that everyone including clients should remember, is that you can never take an existing brand and make it “new.” The act of branding, or brand building as I like to call it, is really of developing and cultivating the relationship the customer has with the company. When a project team sets about “brand building” for a client, they have to look at the entire customer experience with their brand. Everything from visual presence to price point to customer service to what they read on the Money section of CNN.com counts towards their perceived brand.
Branding is not a cliché or a buzz word, it is a larger look at focusing the whole of the resources of a company (the client) towards one goal. Branding is the work of making that focus a reality, and it does encompass a larger team than just designers. One of the problems in the world of graphic design today is that we don’t seem to be playing a part in that team. The letterspacing of the new at&t mark should be a big enough clue.
An example, however, of a rebranding effort handled well with graphic design playing a more successful role would be the new Sprint identity. It’s motion + graphic simplicity. It looks good moving and stationary, and references the pin drop that customers with television sets have been seeing for years. The more I see that new identity, the more I like it.
But be aware that Sprint’s merger didn’t just drive a new visual identity. It drove a change in the focus of their brand. There’s a difference that usually gets missed around here between Branding and Identity Design. The two are not the same. Branding may include Identity Design from time to time, but they are two different beasts and should not be confused.
Posted on November 24, 2005
JonSel said:
You’re very right that branding is a much larger concern than identity design. My beef is with all the design firms that offer “branding” but really only offer identity design. They are the ones confusing the marketplace and alienating clients.
But that’s enough design talk on Thanksgiving for me. Enjoy your turkeys.
Posted on November 24, 2005
Bennett said:
I won’t claim to be a brand agency expert, but I don’t have as much of a gloom and doom attitude about some of the top branding agencies. Landor is a company that has a long history of great design. While the two redesigns you showed do dishearten me, I see rebrands from Landor (BP, FedEx among many others) and I see a great respect for design. Hopefully other large firms will follow Landor’s long standing lead and not the examples shown here from FutureBrand and Interbrand
Posted on November 25, 2005
Frank said:
Maybe a short rant by the late Tibor Kalman would be useful in the discussion:
“It’s about the struggle between individuals with jagged passion in their work and today’s faceless corporate committees, which claim to understand the needs of the mass audience, and are removing the idiosyncrasies, polishing the jags, creating a thought-free, passion-free, cultural mush that will not be hated nor loved by anyone. By now, virtually all media, architecture, product and graphic design have been freed from ideas, individual passion, and have been relegated to a role of corporate servitude, carrying out corporate strategies and increasing stock prices. Creative people are now working for the bottom line.
Magazine editors have lost their editorial independence, and work for committees of publisher (who work for committees of advertisers). TV scripts are vetted by producers, advertisers, lawyers, research specialists, layers and layers of paid executives who determine whether the scripts are dumb enough to amuse what they call the ‘lowest common denominator’. Film studios put films in front of focus groups to determine whether an ending will please target audiences. All cars look the same. Architectural decisions are made by accountants. Ads are stupid. Theater is dead.
Corporations have become the sole arbiters of cultural ideas and taste in America.
Our culture is corporate culture.
Culture used to be the opposite of commerce, not a fast track to ‘content’-derived riches. Not so long ago captains of industry (no angels in the way the acquired wealth) thought that part of their responsibility was to use their millions to support culture. Carnegie built libraries, Rockefeller built art museums, Ford created his global foundation. What do we now get from our billionaires? Gates? Or Eisner? Or Redstone? Sales pitches. Junk mail. Meanwhile, creative people have their work reduced to ‘content’ or ‘intellectual property’. Magazine and films become ‘delivery systems’ for product messages.
But to be fair, the above is only 99 percent true.
I offer a modest solution: find the cracks in the wall. There are a very few lunatic entrepreneurs who will understand that culture and design are not about fatter wallets, but about creating a future. They will understand that wealth is a means, not an end. Under other circumstances they may have turned out to be like you, creative lunatics. Believe me, they’re there and when you find them, treat them well and use their money to change the world.”
~Tibor Kalman, New York, June 1998. “F_ Committees. I Believe in Lunatics” article excerpted from Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist . Published by Booth-Clibborn.
Posted on December 12, 2005