When I was in about fourth grade I loved to draw Ferraris and Lamborghinis that I found in car magazines and calendars. I had an arsenal of rulers, compasses, pencil sharpeners, erasers, and most importantly, several mechanical pencils. I would take apart and reassemble my drawing tools with the pride and precision reminiscent of that scene in the movies where the hero puts his gun together before a battle. I desperately wanted to create something as beautiful as those cars. As I drew more and more, my drawings began to look more and more like the photos I was drawing from. I developed shortcuts to measure and rescale the proportions from photo to drawing. I was proud of these drawings despite the fact that they were taken so blatantly from other people’s photographs. Click here to see a comparison of my drawing to the original.

As an adult looking back at that little boy I have a new perspective. I am filled with fear and concern because of the current climate of corporate greed where companies sue their customers. I think I am reasonably safe from a lawsuit by posting my plagiarized fourth grade drawing, but that’s not the point. The point isn’t about stealing music, either. I gave up Kazaa a long time ago. The nostalgia of my memories contrasts with the current environment that is very toxic to creativity. If I hadn’t drawn those cars for fear of being sued, or worse yet if I had been sued, I might not be a graphic designer today.

Fortunately I believe that the recent court ruling against file-sharing is a small loss in a much bigger war. The old regime of greed and lawyers will be defeated by the emerging open-source community. The battle will be won by and fought for young artists with deep arsenals of mechanical pencils and lead smeared wrists.

by Marty Neumeier

Your new client sends you a breathless email: “Our CBO is building an IMT to reorg the brand architecture from the bottom up. We’re deciding on a BHAG this week, and as soon as we refine our backstory, we’ll probably need an avatar. What do you think?”

You could respond in several ways: 1) “What’s an avatar?” 2) “I’m not really an architect.” 3) Could you please translate that into English? 4) “Don’t call me a beehag.”

None of these answers is likely to raise your client’s confidence in your brand savvitude, especially after you sold yourself as an expert. However, if there were a copy of The Dictionary of Brand on your shelf, you could look these terms up and give her a knowledgeable response.

The Dictionary of Brand is published by the AIGA Center for Brand Experience, and contains 211 terms currently in use by leading brand professionals. Some of the terms are fairly stable, such as brand equity and primacy effect, while others, such as brand police and parallel thinking, have sprung up like mushrooms and may well disappear overnight. (This dictionary is nothing if not fresh.)

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.

Continuing the story Bennett touched on a few weeks back. Apple will be launching a slew of announcements, including their new Intel-based power macs, at the MacWorld Expo on January 10. Apparently, this seems like the perfect time for Intel to drop into a full-on logo redesign to take advantage of all the new publicity they’re going to get.

I’ve been looking online—and looking hard—because I just can’t believe this is a new logo (I confess that I don’t pay any attention to Intel). But everytime I go to Intel.com, they have their “sunken e” logo. The same one that they’ve always had. What we’re getting here is a solid basline for the text and an offical play off of their “Intel Inside” marker-swoosh, into a full-on mellenium-swoosh.

Don’t these people pay attention to anything? How long can company after company churn out the exact same logo? More so than any other millennium-swoosh logo, this one actually feels like it was designed 7 years ago. It wouldn’t be so bad, really, except that it is the perfect physical embodiment of every design cliché from 1999. (no, 3D really hit big a year or two later)

This news is trickling out from an internet leak that focuses mainly on Intel’s new processor plan. Expect the official announcement in a week to 10 days.

One of the more entertaining discussions raised by my Lego camera was an argument on Digg. Apparently you are supposed to say “made out of Lego bricks” not “made out of Legos.” That sounds funny, but some people were genuinely upset about it, and a heated and hilarious argument of 40 comments ensued. So is this just Lego fan snobbery, or is this a legitimate offense? Does it hurt the Lego brand? What is Lego’s official stance on the matter, and what are they doing about it? You might be surprised by what I learned…

While watching the commercials during the opening ceremonies of the Torino Olympics I had an entirely different experience than watching the Super Bowl commercials. Sure there were some repeats of the Super Bowl ads, but there was an element in the Olympic commercials that wasn’t as evident in the Super Bowl spots. Design. If the new Super Bowl ads were “punch line” oriented, I saw more evidence of design and more specifically “graphic” design during the Olympic breaks. It only makes sense. It is a different venue and an entirely different feel. Do the opening ceremonies lend themselves better to brand building than the “look at me” Super Bowl commercials? It would seem that the answer is yes. From the look of some of these commercials is seems that there is a resurgence of graphic elements in TV ads.

A few asides: Did Apple start the trend (of graphics centered spots)? Or was it Target? Microsoft seems to be trying to gain a little creative equity in some of their new commercials. I will believe that when I see it. One new commercial that I saw tonight that was very beautiful (looked like the Lemony Snicket’s film titles), but I don’t even remember the product. It was beautiful but had very little connection to the company. A missed opportunity.

What really caught my eye tonight was the new Coca-Cola Company commercial and accompanying logo and identity. Coca-Cola has become a true master of creating intoxicatingly beautiful commercials and products. How well does their new branding effort compare?

The trend-a-day email newsletter DailyCandy has received even more buzz than usual lately, due to a recent Wall Street Journal report that it was up for sale—for more than $100 million. According to an article in next week’s New York magazine, DailyCandy’s purchase (by “a big-time buyer”) is pending.

But there are those who, having sampled a morsel or two of DailyCandy, say they just don’t get it—what’s the big deal? So how did DailyCandy amass over one million subscribers and leave all of the other “Hey, look, buy this/go here!”-style newsletters in the dust? One word: branding.

With Apple perched so high on the branding pedestal, it is always interesting to see the next design choice that they make. Wether it be, phasing out products with color, adding texture to their TV Spots or as we have discussed already, bringing black back into their laptop (and iPod) lineup.

I know I am not the first to notice, but it is interesting to see how Apple has influenced the computer/electronics industry with their “iPod white”. While few do white successfully, it is at least less oppressive than black and not nearly as boring as the long gone beige/putty. After doing a little informal research on Amazon, I can’t claim that white is the complete color of choice for the industry, but it is definitely making a strong presence behind the now ubiquitous silver.

It has been a huge week in logo redesigns and it looks like the next couple of weeks are going to be even bigger (and flashier)! First MasterCard and Payless, and now three Rand and one Bass logo. No word on which branding firms took these on, but from the look of the designs, the list is pretty short. Westinghouse gets swooshey, United gets transparent, IBM becomes ibm and ABC rounds it all out. Isn’t this your worst identity nightmare?

Once upon a time there was a terrible monster called the generic trademark. The traditional nursery rhyme goes like this: If your brand’s name gets accepted into the general public’s vernacular, the value of your brand will be less than spectacular. Ok, I made that up, but you have heard this before, right? When people call Puffs tissues “Kleenex” the brand name “Kleenex” is pretty much worthless. Or so they say. This is usually considered a tragedy and sometimes the word “genericide” is smugly whipped out as if the death of a brand is comparable to the elimination of an entire race. Like some sort of branding ambulance chasers, there is an entire industry of lawyers, consultants, agencies, king’s horses and kings men that survive by assigning dollar amounts to brand names. According to the experts, the name “Coca-Cola” carries a humpty dumpty pricetag of over $60 billion! The at&t romance novel has so many chapters that the only consistent thing of value has been its name. It is said that the generic trademark monster has swallowed entire corporations whole and fear of the beast regularly sends corporate executives fleeing in terror. What if the generic trademark tale was an imaginary boogie man hiding under your bed? Let me use the iPod to illustrate my bedtime story…

What do you get when you combine graphic design with 400 free bottles of bubbles, about 1000 people, and New York City’s Union Square? BubbleBath: a scene right out of Willy Wonka’s fizzy-lifting drink testing room — but with snazzier branding.

Held last month on a bright Saturday afternoon, BubbleBath was the brainchild (and part of the senior thesis) of Anthony DeFranco, a student in the BFA design program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. The idea came to him when he saw bubbles floating around a Manhattan street corner (thanks to an old man selling toys a few feet away). DeFranco noticed how the bubbles made people smile and brought them together, kind of like great design.

“Design played a major role in the project,” DeFranco told me. “It was how BubbleBath went from being an idea to a tangible object.” His BubbleBath brand, in a distinctive hue best described as Mr. Bubble Pink, popped up on his website as well as the event’s press kit, t-shirts, and of course, the bottles of bubbles distributed on the big day.