Hasta La Ideas

Creative Review was at the Brand Perfect Tour yesterday in London. Presentations from the likes of Wolff Olins, Wieden + Kennedy and SomeOne provided plenty of food for thought

The Idea of the Brand Perfect Tour, which is the branchild of Monotype Imaging, is to encourage debate around the future of branding and specifically to look at the problems of communicating via the enormous number of different platforms that exist today.

One of the main themes that came out of the day was the impossibility of visual consistency across all these platforms, particularly when so much communication and discussion about products and services now takes place in areas where brands have no control eg Twitter and Facebook. As Wolff Olins‘ Marina Willer said “Your brand is not what you say it is, it’s what Google says it is”.

Where consistency can be achieved is in tone of voice, the way an organisation behaves and the authenticity of what it has to offer the world. So consistency becomes less a matter of referring to the Corporate Identity Manual and more one of making sure the organisation knows what it stands for and is clear about it. Less a visual thing and more a behavioural one.

SomeOne‘s Simon Manchipp gave what most Tweeters seemed to agree was the most stimulating presentation. Manchipp, as well as reiterating his now familiar ‘The logo is dead’ viewpoint, argued that what brands must now concentrate on is not consistency, which he dismissed as being dull and uninteresting, but cohesion.

As usual, we were left with as many questions as answers. Here’s a few to ponder:

If the logo is dead, why do people love and care about them so much?

Do an organisation’s customers really own the brand as the new orthodoxy has it, or should a brand have the courage to tell the Tweeters and Facebook groups ‘no, you’re wrong, we’re right’? And what about all those customers who don’t Tweet or use Facebook? Who is listening to them?

The new thinking has it that companies or organisations with bad products will no longer be able to exist because the power of social networking will destroy their reputation. Reality or wishful thinking?

Should your brand look the same in every situation in which it operates?

Is the app business the same as the web was 15 years ago, ie everyone rushing to release an app just because their competitors have one without really having a good reason to do so and a whole lot of unscrupulous design firms charging whatever they like to create products they know have no use?

The next Brand Perfect event is in Hamburg on June 14. Details here

CR in Print

Thanks for reading the CR Blog but if you’re not also reading Creative Review in print, you’re missing out.

The June issue of CR features a major retrospective on BBH and a profile piece on the agency’s founder, Sir John Hegarty. Plus, we have a beautiful photographic project from Jenny van Sommers, a discussion on how illustrators can maintain a long-term career, all the usual discussion and debate in Crit plus our Graduate Guide packed with advice for this year’s college leavers.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30%.

Rick Valicenti and an installation view of the 2010-2011 exhibition “Curiosities: Rick Valicenti and the 21st-Century Thirst” at Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt Center Gallery. (Photos from right: FAU students and Bud Rodecker/3st; courtesy Rick Valicenti)

In the wake of this morning’s announcement of the recipients of the 2011 National Design Awards, we’ll be spending the next few days tracking down a few of the winners, thrusting a non-functioning microphone in their faces, and breathlessly asking, “You’ve just won a National Design Award, what are you going to do next?” First up: Rick Valicenti, the winner in Communication Design, who the jury lauded for “graphics [that] bristle with innovation, imagination, curiosity, and craft” as well as his “leading presence in design as practitioner, educator, and mentor.”

The founder of Chicago-based design collaborative Thirst is no stranger to major honors (he received the AIGA Medal in 2006) or the Cooper-Hewitt (his work has been included in the musem’s National Design Triennial), but word of his NDA win still came as a pleasant shock to Valicenti. “Both surprise and delight,” is how he described his reaction as he prepared to follow Ingo Maurer to the podium at the Gravity Free conference today in San Francisco. “To be recognized at this level is an indescribable professional reward which both validates the circuitous path I made through design as well as reminds me that the time practicing design is about more than simply the artifacts,” Valicenti told us. “It’s about being passionate, curious, generous, humble, and hanging out on some edge.” Any celebration plans? “All in all, I am soaking it in and enjoy the supportive outpouring of so many friends and colleagues.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

To celebrate its 125th anniversary, Coca-Cola has just opened a new display on the history of its visual identity at the Design Museum in London…

The exhibition fills the Design Museum’s glass tank and features some rarities from the Coke archives, commonly housed in a vault in the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta. The display also shows that while differently shaped Coke bottles have come and gone, the brand’s visual identity has survived largely unchanged in 125 years.

When I viewed the collection, Ted Ryan, manager of the Coca-Cola archives, was on hand to talk through the contents of the tank and to discuss the longevity of company’s design. The Coca-Cola logo itself was created by Frank Robinson in 1886 and, Ryan explained, was written out in Spencerian script because that was the favoured typeface of accounting folk at that time. Robinson was Coca-Cola inventor John S Pemberton’s book-keeper.

One of the stand-out pieces in the tank (though designers will love the rare design manuals and identity guidelines on show) is the Raymond Loewy-designed fountain dispenser, shown above. First made in 1947, it resembles a sleek speedboat engine and is a triumph of applied typography.

Occupying the rear of the Design Museum’s tank is a display of several Coca-Cola bottles, charting the subtle changes in shape that have occurred since the straight-sided Hutchinson bottle launched in 1899.

When first designed, Ryan explained, the now more familiar curvy frame of the Coke bottle was actually a reference the shape of the cocoa bean (though the bean has nothing to do with the drink) and the form has sashayed in and out of fashion ever since.

Ryan manages the company’s archives with Phil Mooney and Jamal Booker and is, undertandably, chock-full of facts relating to the visual history and design of Coca-Cola. I’ll be sharing the best of them in a piece in the next issue of CR, in which the Design Museum’s Michael Czerwinski and curator Ria Hawthorn will also be discussing why Coca-Cola’s brand heritage is of such interest to the museum.

For now, take a virtual tour of the Coca-Cola archives at theverybestofcocacola.com and get across to Shad Thames in London for a close-up look at the objects on display.

The Coca-Cola exhibition is on at the Design Museum until July 3.

In the foreground, above: a sheet of Coca-Cola logos applied in different perspectives.

This dispenser is one of the oldest objects in the Coca-Cola archive, from 1896. It dispensed syprup that was then mixed with carbonated water.

It’s #GuestEd week on the Creative Review twitter account and today Nick Asbury of Asbury & Asbury is in the hot seat. He wants to take the opportunity to extend an interesting invitation to CR readers: to show us your worst work…

Yes, today we officially declare a 24-hour Creative Amnesty. For one day only, share your most shameful creative projects with impunity. Post your contributions on Twitter via the #creativeamnesty hashtag. Pithy project descriptions are fine. Extra points for images and links. You can also blog about it in more detail elsewhere and tweet a link.

Nick has posted up some stories over here to get things going, including the time he agreed to write the horoscopes for a retailer’s magazine, weaving in subtle plugs for the retailer. We’ll be posting a selection of the best of worst, here on the CR blog (see below).

Asbury has this to say about the thinking behind the project: “It’s not often you get the chance to tweet to 380,000 people – about four Wembley Stadiums. So I thought I should take the chance to get a conversation going. We’re all good at sharing our best work, but there’s probably as much to be learnt from the worst. The real stinkers that we wince to recall. A project where everything that could go wrong did. An early piece of student work that you thought was genius at the time. Or a project you knew you should have turned down, but guiltily did for the money.”

Follow the action on Twitter via #creativeamnesty and we’ll round up some of the best examples here on this post throughout the day.

And we’re starting strong with Wet Lemon, an early web effort from designer, Jonathan Ogden (@ogvidius). It’s “one of the first websites I ever made,” he says. “I’m sorry, internet.” Don’t apologise, Jonathan! This may still have its day…

The full horror is:

Next up into the #creativeamnesty confession booth is Michael Johnson. Arriving in Sydney, at the tender age of 22, the young Johnson unwittingly carried with him a case of ‘brushstroke fever’. Coupled with a penchant for greys and yellows, Johnson got to work on a new identity for Manufacturers Mutual Insurance:

Johnson lays bare about the project in his latest Thought for the Week post. Though we imagine this is the one logo featuring here to have made it into a blockbuster movie…

Make sure you check out the shameful confessions gathering at checkthis.com/creativeamnesty. @Stuwdesigner, @Acejet170, and @Chris_J_Doyle have all recently divested themselves of some creative howlers.

Now here’s a beauty from Mark Wheatcroft of Wheatcroft&Co. Designed circa 1999, this is a set of ‘King’ playing cards for a once well-known picture library. Once well-known. Hmm.

“OK, how much are we paying the Elvis? Make him do some more moves…”

“I guess that will have to do.” Thanks to Mark (@WheatcroftandCo) for uploading his work to checkthis.com/creativeamnesty.

Now here’s the 7″ sleeve for Dannii Minogue’s 1991 top 20 smash, Baby Love (a cover of Regina’s 1986 club hit, music fans). So who’s behind it?

If you’re thinking, ‘Is it me or can I see the hand of Michael C. Place / aka Build in there?’ then you’re correct. And thank you Michael, for this one. Oh for a shot of the ‘Lim Edition 7″ Booklet’. (@BuildsBlog).

And if you would like to share your shame, please use the comments section below to link to your past disasters

The United States Army Accessions Command—Strategic Communications, Marketing and Operations produces graphic design guides for the Army Strong brand. The guides are a wealth of information about logo usage, photo cropping style, and digital camouflage patterns. There are also downloads of the Army Strong Theme! (Remix, anyone?)

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