Hasta La Ideas

Lippincott worked to unify the brands of merged airlines Avianca and TACA. The three-year project culminated in the recent unveiling of a bold new visual identity.

With a client list that includes 3M, Delta Air Lines, Hyatt, Samsung, Starbucks, and Walmart, Lippincott has spent the last seven decades combining strategy and creativity. (The recent brand face-lifts of Stanley and eBay? All Lippincott.) At the helm of the firm, which is part of Marsh & McLennan-owned Oliver Wyman, is Rick Wise, who oversees innovation in Lippincott’s design and strategy practices while also advising clients on their branding issues. The Wharton alum made time to chat with us about some recent Lippincott projects as well as his branding pet peeve, what’s on his desk, and why the Taj Mahal never gets old.

Lippincott turns 70 this year. How are you celebrating?
It’s a big year for us. We’re celebrating by both looking back on how the industry has evolved, honoring the moments Lippincott has influenced and the iconic brands we built, as well as looking ahead to what the next 70 years will bring. For instance, in May of this year, we designed “Pencil to Pixel” in collaboration with Monotype—an exhibit documenting the past, present and future of typography. As part of this, Lippincott developed an exhibit of its own—curating artifacts and designs throughout our history. As part of that we also moderated a roundtable discussion on the future role of design and brand expression with executives from Coach, Warby Parker, Virgin America, Chipotle, and eBay.

Tell us about a recent Lippincott project that you are particularly proud of and why?
We are very proud of the work we did for Avianca, the Latin American airline formed by the merger of Avianca and TACA airlines. We worked hand in hand with Avianca for three years to create a new unified brand, developing the new logo, aircraft livery, plane interior, visual system and frequent flyer program. It’s a really beautiful system for an airline that aspires to be the regional leader. But what we’re most proud is our work helping build a unified brand from the inside out—making sure the cultures were aligned, the employees were energized, and most importantly the customer experience could live up to the promise of a unified pan-Latin American airline.

As a specialist in brand strategy, what brand (aside from your current or past clients) would you single out as an emerging brand to watch?
I’m a huge music fan, and it’s been really interesting to watch the growth of Beats by Dr. Dre. It’s pretty amazing to see the brand they have created in just a few years, focusing on the overall music experience. They have taken a page out of Apple’s playbook by focusing on innovation delivered in great packaging and design, and took a product many thought might be obsolete and made it relevant again.
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…and the hype campaign officially begins: the Mac Pro on Apple’s website still bears the all-too-vague promise of a December delivery date, but the soon-to-be-Spaceship-bound Cupertino All-Stars have not-so-shamelessly seen fit to sent us a custom poster tube (the contents of which are seen above and below), and it’s a looker.

Somehow we’re not surprised to find that Sir Jony Ive is not content to rest on his laurels: he’s gone ahead and designed a “beautifully, unapologetically plastic” cap for the shipping tube, and it’s stunning. The photos hardly do justice to the solid plastic puck; apologies for not donning white gloves before handling what would surely fetch a handsome sum on eBay in BNIB condition. In fact, while the rest of us might consider the cylinder itself to be sufficient packaging for large print materials, Apple’s poster tube actually came in a box.

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…and the backlash begins: Yahoo unveiled their new logo this morning, following their 30 Days of Change marketing campaign, an interesting publicity stunt that came across as a mass-market (i.e. less rigorous) version of, say, the Brand New IDEO Make-a-Thon.

I’ll defer to Armin Vit of Brand New for a full analysis of the new logomark—will.i.am was unavailable for comment—but I must say I find it uninspired and uninspiring. Line-weight and non-obliqueness notwithstanding, something about that “Y” and the subtly flared lines evokes watered-down YSL, and the tweaked humanist typography feels a bit design-by-committee to me (it was, in fact, designed in-house by Marissa Mayer & co.). Current brand usage guidelines include the punctuation mark, but sadly it’s not quite the same without the so-called “9-degrees of whimsy”—at least not until browsers support the CSS ‘rotation’ property—and in any case, we’ll stick with regular-ol’ unexclamatory “Yahoo” in common parlance.

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Industrial designers solve lots of different problems. One of them is controlling the intent across a portfolio of products across product generations. New core77 forum poster Proe-warsztat from Poland asks how one goes about creating a language. From my perspective, there has always been two approaches to creating a design language, “prescriptive” and “descriptive.”

The first is the traditional “prescriptive” language, with a clearly identified set of elements, treatments, materials and sometimes even radii. These often make for great designer books, but can be messy in application as they don’t really foresee the types of problems a future product might have to address nor do they tend to scale. Early in the conversation, poster Modern Man brought up BMW’s “Hofmeister” which is a great example of a perscriptive design element that has withstood the test of time.

The second type of language is a “descriptive” language, which is a loose set of guidelines that drive toward a desired end state. It has more to do with a feeling that a strict rule book. This is much harder to document and maintain, but the result tends to be richer and easier to evolve. The above example, designed by forum poster Jim Kershaw for Irwin Tools, is a great example of descriptive language in execution. Each product has slightly different material mixes and constructions, and varied feature sets, yet they hang together as a whole nicely.

Above is an example that my team developed that mixes the two for BOOM, our lifestyle audio brand. A set of guiding descriptive design principles were created to focus innovation around a particular type of problem set for a particular type of end user to achieve an overall feeling. We then layered over top of that prescriptive elements like particular disintegrating hole pattern to drive home the family connection.

Join in the conversation HERE, we’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in dealing with design languages!

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Once the temperature tops 85 degrees, evolution has programmed humans to suppress all executive functions and focus on securing ice, preferably of the creamy and sweet variety. But we can’t just switch off our aesthetic sensitivities upon approaching the freezer case, a sweating showplace of less than delicious design. Ben and Jerry’s pint containers have become increasingly oafish since the company’s acquisition by Unilever, Edy’s taste in typefaces conjures baked goods rather than frozen goodness, and we’ve long been dubious about faux-Danish Häagen-Dazs. The solution, of course, is gelato, and no one does gelato logos and packaging better than Louise Fili.

The New York-based designer and her crack team are behind the dreamy, la-dolce-vita look of L’Arte del Gelato (the logo was inspired by pasticceria papers, ice-cream hues, and peppy Italian script samples from the 1920s), and have just added to their list of gelato-related achievements with mouth-watering packaging for Gelato Fiasco. Fili’s overhaul for the Brunswick, Maine-based gelateria included upgrading the flimsy takeout container to a sturdier clear cylinder that reveals the vibrant colors of flavors such as Dark Chocolate Caramel, Wild Maine Blueberry Crisp, and Everything’s Coming Up Roses. Please pass the Pomegranate Chocolate Chunk.

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