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,‚Äù DeFranco told me. “It was how BubbleBath went from being an idea to a tangible object.‚Äù 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.

(more…)

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…

(more…)

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?

(more…)

(more…)

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.

(more…)