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.

In addition to the event’s fun and playful spirit, DeFranco wanted the BubbleBath brand to showcase the time, effort, and genuine emotion behind the project. “This was especially important when dealing with companies and other official organizations,‚Äù he said. “Everything had to seem legit, and like I wasn’t just some hooligan who was going to take over Union Square for a day.‚Äù James Victore, DeFranco’s portfolio teacher and mentor at SVA, applied the Socratic method, pushing his student at every stage with the question “What would Pentagram do?‚Äù The end result was two logos, one more corporate and serious, the other more creative and playful.

DeFranco set the more businesslike BubbleBath logo in HelveticaNeue condensed bold and sprinkled various weights of Trade Gothic throughout the project. “Whenever I use set type these are two of my favorites,‚Äù he said. “Everything else was done by hand, which is how I prefer to do all my type.‚Äù

“For me BubbleBath was just a stepping stone. I want to keep going bigger and continue to surprise people and myself,‚Äù said DeFranco. “I would love to be able to make a career out of this type of work.‚Äù He aspires to work with designers such as Stefan Sagmeister and Victore, “who use design to touch people, to educate, and to inspire.‚Äù

The event exceeded even DeFranco’s expectations. “I never expected BubbleBath to touch people the way it did,‚Äù he said. “I had a lot of people coming up to me asking for hugs and to tell me how much the event meant to them.‚Äù But it wasn’t all holding hands and blowing bubbles. One reveler decided to share with DeFranco some bubbles of another kind. “The most amusing part of the day happened when someone came up to me and spat right in my face. Seriously.‚Äù

The unlikely hero, the iPod gets mentioned regularly in generic trademark conversations. The word “iPod” has come to describe all mp3 players. It is part of the English language. Therefore, “iPod” is a generic trademark. You can argue that if you want, but it is true. Once you accept that you have to ask the question, “Why hasn’t this hurt Apple?” If iPod is a generic trademark then shouldn’t it be suffering all the negative side effects that come with that dubious title? Somehow Apple has survived. In fact, they have thrived as if they were covered in magical pixie dust. Doesn’t this prove all the genericidal activists wrong?

First let’s tackle the obvious. Why doesn’t it hurt Apple when another brand of mp3 gets called an iPod? Answer: Apple is the best product on the market. When you say “look at my iPod” and you whip out a Zune, everybody knows it isn’t a *real* iPod, and they might just laugh at you. The Zune isn’t inferior to the iPod because of its name, it is just an inferior product. It is a big bad wolf dressed up in ugly duckling clothing. The name has nothing to do with it. If Apple had chosen the name Zune for their mp3 player Apple would still be the hottest princess at the ball. I am not saying that there isn’t value in a good name, but the *real* value is in the product itslef. As long as Apple makes the best products they don’t have to worry about any negative effects of a generic trademarkicide™. The same can be said about Kleenex, Xerox, Band-Aid and any other generic trademark that finds themselves lost in the dark side of the forrest.

A generic trademark only becomes a liability after you no longer have the best product. If a better iPod than the iPod is created by somebody other than Apple, the iPod will be in real trouble. Just don’t think for a second that a generic trademark had anything to do with it.

The people that get caught up with generic trademark fears are the same people who put way too much emphasis on the names of things. These might even be the same people who put too much importance on a logo. That’s right I am talking about designers. We love to point out the success of companies who use design well. We fool ourselves into thinking that companies like Nike or Target were catapulted to dominance on the wings of design and clever names alone. The truth is that if you could strip away the great design these companies would still be remarkable. Sometimes we look at the past and forget how funny the word “iPod” or “blog” sounded the first time you heard it. Did you really love the Nike logo before you fell in love with the Nike brand? Target’s logo was around a long time before it really got used well.

Why do we do this? Why do we repeat fairy tales about how design has the magical ability to turn an ugly duckling into a prince charming? I think the reason is because we want it to be true. Most of us are working for used car salesmen or designing flyers for butt cream. In order to make it through the agony of our situation we tell ourselves a Cinderella story. If I could design this box of dog biscuits *really really* well then I could make a difference. The AIGA jury will fall in love with me and fill my castle with gold awards. With a great logo and a better name, Bob’s Electronics could really be something special because underneath those warts is a swan. Eventually we grow out of our bedtime stories and realize that design isn’t a magic wand. The moral of the story is that your mom was right. It *is* what’s inside that counts. Without a remarkable company underneath, design is the emperor’s invisible clothes. Everybody can see the wrinkly old man beneath the Photoshopped exterior. Remember that and we will all live happily ever after. The end.

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?

Ok, ok . . . These are not real! As far as I know, none of these logos are in the process of being redesigned either, but this would be my worst nightmare. I created each of the above redesigns in about 15-30 minutes of Illustrator and Photoshop “magic”. There is no real thought behind them . . . just swooshes, bevels, perspectives, gradients and transparencies. I did these as an attempt (albeit a weak one) to convince others to not mess with these logos, at least not in this way. So many great and timeless logos have been scrapped for the shiny new logos of today. So much could be done with the supporting visuals to enhance a brands identity, that many times there is no need to destroy the classics. Maybe the usual suspects (the few mega-branding firms who handle these types of rebrands) will see the above designs and scrap their first round of ideas, and push on to create some innovative identities and not the easy solutions that we have seen so much of lately.

The Current Logos

To quote a recent Speak Up editorial by Armin Vit . . . “that Payless’ new logo is not good. It’s bad. And worst of all: It’s not amateur-bad, it’s professional-bad. Just like AT&T, UPS, Aflac, NWA and many, many more.”

I know I am probably preaching to the choir here, but maybe, just maybe if we sing loud enough, the branding firms that make these decisions will hear our song of reason and make the right decision. If we are going to redesign a classic logo (or design a new one for that matter), lets stand up for good design and actually do something innovative instead of relying on bevels and drop shadows applied to someone else’s genius.

The Ducks that are no longer “Mighty” get a new logo from Frederick & Froberg Design Office. “We wanted to be more traditional in terms of the name, … In fact, it was a little too tied to the movie.” said Ducks owner Henry Samueli

From the Press Release: “The result is a strong, typographic mark anchored by a stylized “D‚Äù that echoes the image of a duck’s foot or footprint. The custom typography has a powerful forward momentum and is made up of metallic gold letters with orange drop-shadows and a black holding shape. The new uniforms are an evolution of the earlier sweater design but with gold, white and orange sweeping stripes influenced by the curves of the ‘D’ in the Ducks’ logo.”

The Milwaukee Bucks mix the new with the retro to create their new logo.

“With a nod to their early days and a look toward the future, the Milwaukee Bucks on Wednesday night unveiled their new logo and color scheme.

Out goes the purple. In come three colors: a red that is far deeper than Bucky Badger red, the traditional forest green and silver.”

I reviewed Cooper Tires getting rid of Cooper Black in their logo, and it looks like Payless Shoes is following their lead. While the Payless identity was in need of some work, the results are a bit uninspired. Armin has an good review on the new logo over at Speak Up. Maybe someday I will learn to love Cooper Black as much as Armin.

From the Press Release:“The new logo, the first redesign of the Payless logo in about 20 years,
incorporates key design elements that leverage Payless’ rich heritage and communicates a “new and improved” Payless — a brand that is contemporary, fun, friendly and, above all, stylish”

MasterCard International becomes MasterCard Worldwide. I probably shouldn’t be this sarcastic, but can you count how many transparencies and gradients are included in this logo? Is it really that necessary?

From the Press Release: “The three circles of the new corporate logo build on the familiar interlocking red and yellow circles of the MasterCard consumer brand, and reflect the company’s unique, three-tiered business model as a franchisor, processor and advisor:”

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.

While white is the obvious choice for iPod related products, I find it a cheap solution for corporations to use white to make their own product look a little more sophisticated. With so many imitators, maybe Apple has no other choice but to set the new standard. For the visual landscape, I would actually prefer the cheap white imitations that are coming out right now, rather than the PC and stereo market jumping back to their visually oppressive black box days.

For obvious reasons, the white trend is more prevalent in the small stereo/radio market. Much of the computer market is still silver or dark grey, but an occasional iMac imitation pops up here and there. On a side note, a few of the products below might actually be light grey or silver, but I included them because of they are portrayed as white rather than their actual color. White must sell.

In reference to her Public Theatre design being used as a cliche in New York, Paul Scher says . . . “There is simply a finite amount of time one can do the same thing without both the design and the designer becoming stale.” With this in mind, maybe Apple should move away from white . . . or can they keep redesigning their products, throw in a little black and still stay as fresh as ever? You be the judge.

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‚Äù) 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!‚Äù-style newsletters in the dust? One word: branding.

Great design and successful branding are usually the product of intimate understanding: of what an organization or product does, why it does it, who it does it for. But, when something is new (and not even necessarily novel), there is that tiniest of windows (a porthole of opportunity, perhaps) when great design can catapult a product or company into prominence and help to define its activities, values, and audience-the stuff that most design is only intended to reinforce or echo.

Founded in 2000 by Dany Levy, DailyCandy began by creating a brand that appealed to its core audience: hip, stylish, and rather acquisitive young(ish) women. Enter artist Ruben Toledo, fashion illustrator extraordinaire. Toledo’s dreamy yet sophisticated watercolors-whether of sugar-dusted bonbons, elegant cityfolk, or a pair of impossibly pointy-toed shoes-were allowed to shine on DailyCandy’s otherwise minimalist website, where readers can now sign up for 13 different versions of the company’s newsletters.

DailyCandy was a perfect fit for Cuban-born Toledo, whose work has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre. His signature style is confectionary, and he clearly appreciates the breezy fashion world as much as it does him. (His wife, Isabel, is a fashion designer.) “What I love about fashion is that it’s so sincere in the fact that it’s fake,‚Äù Toledo told Graphic Design USA. “Fashion is all about business. It’s all about selling. It’s all about N-E-W. It’s all about now. And it’s fast. I love fast.‚Äù

But when Toledo got big fast (his work now graces multi-page ads for Nordstrom, among other clients) he quietly stopped illustrating for DailyCandy. Artist Sujean Rim took over-seamlessly. With their shared light touch and whimsicality, it is very difficult to distinguish one artist’s long-limbed silhouettes and deftly-colored scenes from the other’s.

With a white background, a no-nonsense layout, and a single close-cropped photo of the day’s featured trend (a new line of knitwear, a $1,999 winemaker, Jonathan Antin’s shower water purifier), DailyCandy newsletters are designed brilliantly if with a rather troubling message: when you have style, substance is optional.

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?

Tonight was my first experience with the new Coca-Cola Company commercial and accompanying logo and identity. This was brand building at its finest. We designers complain how the large branding companies are using gradients and transparencies as a crutch. The Coca-Cola company does the opposite. I will be interested to see who was responsible for this rebranding effort. Or, is this an entirely new brand? Of course they aren’t going to mess with much of the Coca-Cola soft drink brand (besides the new slightly simplified bottle icon), but nothing is keeping them from capitalizing on the Coca-Cola equity to strengthen their multitude of other beverages. Hence the “Make Every Drop Count” campaign/tagline and new identity for “The Coca-Cola Company”. I consider myself to be fairly aware of parent brands and the various brands underneath that umbrella, but it was pretty fascinating to see them all collected in one single area. Did anyone realize they were still making Tab? My favorite part of the new website is the ability to click on the different categories (i.e. Energy Drinks, Soft Drinks, Juice …) and see the appropriate drinks realign and the others disappear.

A couple screen captures from the flash intro.

Without the aid of a press release I will just have to go off of the website and the visuals to try to figure out the strategy behind this brand leveraging. With attacks on the harms that caffeinated cola drinks can cause, this effort works at making Coca-Cola appear a health conscious corporation. I would paraphrase it like this . . . “Look, we also sell juice, water and other healthy things.” They talk about the benefits of some of their less healthy products. “Yes, coffee and soda are two ways to help you stay hydrated.” A direct quote. While using the saturation of the Coca-Cola name to promote the other brands, they are using their healthy beverages to improve their dark cola image.

With the introduction of a new logo, I can’t help but to discuss the formal elements. Do the new “droplets” and color scheme work with the old script type? To me they seem a little bit awkward together, but for the most part I think it is an interesting and successful combination. They obviously wouldn’t want to go away from the Coca-Cola script, but they still need this brand to be different than the soft drink. I commend them for the flat graphic quality of the droplets. The commercials incorporated the droplets wonderfully. As far as comparisons go, does anyone else see similarities with Duffy’s Bahamas identity? The bright varied colors on roundish shapes seem a little too similar to me. I’m not saying that they copied the Bahamas logo, it is just a little too similar. The text is even gray. Of course maybe I am just thinking of that because of all our recent Duffy coverage (1,2).

I am hoping that the flat graphic style of this new identity catches on instead of the gradients and transparencies of Interbrand and FutureBrand. Sprint and now Coca-Cola show us all that animation is just as, or more effective with glorious flat color.

First, I got to tell you that I have loved Legos, I mean Lego blocks, for as long as I can remember, and I have always called them Legos. I even had a subscription to Lego Maniac magazine when I was growing up. Little did I know that this simple mispronunciation was eroding the Lego brand, and contributing to an epidemic that continues to hurt Lego significantly. At least that is what Lego wants you to think. On a “fair play” page of Lego’s website dedicated solely to preserving the Lego brand, they say the following, “If the LEGO trademark is used at all, it should always be used as an adjective, not as a noun. For example, say “MODELS BUILT OF LEGO BRICKS”. Never say “MODELS BUILT OF LEGOs.” Why you ask? Well, you see kids, “An owner must prevent the improper use of its trademarks to prevent the public from being deceived.” Lego is “deceiving” themselves if they think that they are doing me any favors by telling me what I can and can’t call their toys. I can understand the importance of corporate standards, and a handbook of identity guidelines can be a wonderful thing. But it is one thing to run a tight ship internally, and quite another to demand that your customers adhere to your corporate language. Bennett made a very good point with his comment that ““It doesn’t really matter if the Lego people don’t want us to say Legos. The consumer decides the brand, not the company. Ask the experts. It is one of the first rules of branding. A company can do their best to influence the consumers perspective of the company, but in the end it is the public that makes the final decision. FedEx along with the brand guru’s at Landor realized this, and took advantage of it. It would have been silly for FedEx to try and insist that everyone call them Federal Express.”

If you are beginning to think that Lego is obsessed with their brand name, just look at one of the bricks. Stamped on every raised knob on every Lego piece is the word “Lego.” No wonder some Lego fans get so upset when people say “Legos” instead of “Lego.” They have been brainwashed by a childhood surrounded by millions of tiny Lego logos!

Actually, Lego’s oppressive stance is even more puzzling when considered in the context of their commendable reputation for embracing an open source environment in the past. When Lego released RCX (programmable robot sets that snap together and run on microprocessors), Lego enthusiasts hacked the code and posted RCX’s secrets on the Web. They resisted the urge to sue, and that decision allowed their customers to make significant improvements to the product. In the recent redesign of the robotics kit, Mindstorms, entusiastic Lego users actually designed the product!

Recently, Lego users hacked the Lego Digital Designer program which allows you to build 3d models on your computer. The hack allowed users to decrease the amount of Lego sets they had to buy in order to complete their models. Obviously, this takes money right out of Lego’s pocket, and to everyone’s amazement, Lego executives actually applauded the solution!

When you think about it, Lego is really built upon an open source model. You buy a set of Legos, follow the instructions, and make the toy. You start to get bored with it, and add on to the original design. Eventually you take it apart, and use what you learned to make your own inventions. You improvise. You invent. The amazing thing about this open source environment is that you become a life long fan of the product. The point that Lego misses is that while they think they are protecting their brand, they are actually building a wall (of Lego bricks perhaps) between them and their customers with their strict corporate language. Lego’s biggest asset isn’t their brand, it is their energetic and enthusiastic customers. Lego should lighten up and let their customers call the Lego brick whatever they want.

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 clich√© 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.

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.