Hasta La Ideas

Rushing water, DNA helices, stop-motion footage of a city at night. Put ‘em together and what have you got? A generic brand video. Royalty-free stock footage purveyor Dissolve.com seized upon the formula outlined by Kendra Eash in a recent piece for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and brought it to life in this amusing short, made entirely with stock footage and narrated with an avuncular twang by Dallas McClain.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It’s been almost four decades since Saul Bass whipped up the jaunty Avery logo, its leaning red triangle of paperclips a beacon on many a binder, label, and even the collection of Hermès knockoff totes rolled out under the “Martha Stewart Home Office with Avery” brand. But change is afoot, and the new parent company of the office and consumer products division of Avery Dennison is looking to place a giant divider between the primarily business-to-business company Avery Dennison and the consumer products brand now known simply as Avery. Enter Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, who were challenged to create a new visual identity for Avery. It had to be distinctive and modern while retaining the brand’s recognition in the marketplace and (d’oh!) work within Avery’s existing package design, which was to remain unchanged—all as the ghost of Bass peered over their shoulders and whispered strong opinions about the capital “R”. Their solution? Keep the off-kilter red square, and move it behind a redrawn Avery wordmark.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Seeing as web trends are even more capricious than the weather patterns we’ve been experiencing here in NYC, the backlash to Squarespace Logo has tapered off by now, but seeing as it launched just two weeks ago, the democratic logo design tool is still worth considering as symptom of how we define design today.

Somehow, I doubt that Squarespace encountered such unanimous antipathy when it debuted as a user-friendly website-building tool, ten years ago; after all, the dog-eat-dog CMS game has come a long way in the past decade, and I’ve only heard good things about their flagship product. But graphic design, including but not limited to branding/identity/visual communication/etc., is another story. Co.Design rounded up the pithy rejoinders—a few more have trickled in on the de rigueur data exhaust Tumblr—and garnered a slew of comments, as did the Wired post, so I’ll concede that someone else has probably already made this point.

Having only dabbled in front-end development and graphic design in my day, I won’t pretend to be an expert in either domain. But as a knowledge worker who spends most of my day tending to an at-times fickle CMS, regularly troubleshooting various glitches as they inevitably arise, I know all too well that an intuitive backend is a bridge between the ‘dirty work’ of coding/scripting and public-facing content.*

Contrary to its name, ‘web design’ is not design in the same way that graphic design is—a subtle distinction, perhaps, but a critical one. Web design is largely dictated by best practices, at least when it comes to creating a functional, navigable container for content. Which is not to say that web design is not creative, but rather that the hard constraints of HTML/CSS/etc. (not to mention browser/OS compatibility) are precisely why CMS’s and templates make sense: Just tweak the font size and column width, add a social media widget, and you’re good to go. “Just another WordPress site,” as the saying goes.

Logos, on the other hand, are meant to express an identity—the very heart and soul of a company—in a painstakingly-kerned font and/or ideographic vector illustration. Graphic design is a creative endeavor; as such, it is more than a matter of simply dragging and dropping elements or picking your favorite color. Think about it: Websites hew to a half-dozen standard layouts, where details such as fonts and colors evoke a general look and feel but rarely, if ever, denote a specific brand—which is why you look to the top left corner or center of the page for a logo.

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Hear that dull whine in the background, the noise that sounds something like your neighbor using an impact driver down the hall? Close—its actually the reaction to the new logo for Black & Decker Black+Decker. Designed by Lippincott, the consultancy behind last year’s well-received Stanley refresh, the verdict on the new look is rather less auspicious—over on Brand New (where Armin Vit took my first choice for a title), commenters have found it underwhelming. Some have noted the potential for a Tropicana trap, and indeed, the ‘more personable’ typography vaguely echoes that of Home Depot’s ‘house label’ (har) HDX.

My own gut instinct was that the new identity falls somewhere between housewares genericism and maybe mid-market tech peripherals; too airy to compete with the likes of DeWalt, Bosch, Milwaukee, etc. (the former is a subsidiary of Stanley Black & Decker, which has not yet updated the logos on their website). Meanwhile, I felt that axing the ampersand in favor of a Phillips-head plus evoked not an architecture firm, as some have suggested, but housewares brand Black+Blum… whose oblique/lightweight logo would actually look pretty good in the latest Lippincott treatment.

Where the bold condensed letterforms of the old logo convey a certain no-nonsense utilitarianism, the orange-on-black aesthetic feels distinctly masculine in a way that feels radically different in white, as it appears on the vacuum cleaner.

Is it just me, or does the base look like an external hard drive?

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We’ve covered Canadian design before—the good and the bad… and, with the government’s recent foray into visual identity, the ugly. Our neighbors to the north are looking forward to celebrating their sesquicentennial in 2017—to spare you a Google search, that means they’re celebrating a 150-year anniversary—and the government has already begun designing a logo to commemorate the event. Unfortunately, their attempts are a bit off the mark—just take a look at the designs above. Not a single one of them is remotely worthy of, say, this charming Canadian couple who made web rounds a few weeks back.

After reading an article on a Canadian news site featuring the designs-in-progress, one designer took it upon himself to redeem his homeland and up their design cred. Ibraheem Youssef designed a logo of his own and reached out to a few other well-known Canadian designers to ask them to come up with their own versions. The response was astounding (and much better looking).

He documented all of the submissions online with descriptions giving more information about the designer behind each submission and what it represents.

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