Hasta La Ideas

The New York City Opera is the latest in a slew of NYC cultural institutions to overhaul their image. George Steel, the Opera’s new ambitious director hired esteemed design studio 2X4 to develop their new identity that is bold, direct, and confident in its treatment and application.

The dot triggers a philosophical discussion. City Opera is a bare-bones operation that produces spare versions of a luxury product. In theory, that could make it the ideal cultural entity for this lean age: What better way to forget about your troubles than to watch people sing about worse ones? “Luxury needs to engage ideas,” Sellers says. “Opera deals with darkness and schizophrenia, and in a time when we’ve been so deluded, that directness is reassuring.” She stops talking. The black dot sits ominously on the table, and for a moment no one speaks. Finally, Steel smiles, and the room relaxes. “I love the graphic strength,” he says. “I love it. We have a swell season, and we want it to be, Bam! Bam! This is what we’re doing: You got a problem with that?”

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Hmmm…. Something to muddle over. Johnson Banks has a whole commentary that explains BBH’s process behind finding their new logo for BBH Labs.

Excerpt from Johnson Banks Blog:
In their brief they do say ‘in exploring new approaches to creative collaboration, we post this brief well aware of the debate around the Crowdspring business model within the design community. Our interest lies in finding fresh, new creative talent efficiently. It is not in our interest to undercut existing market value design fees. Therefore we appeal to the Crowdspring community in the same way our prospective clients would approach ad agencies in an open pitch. We ask that designers submit only rough comps to this brief’.

We’d imagine that they’re pretty pleased then with the 1086 (Update: 1749) entries so far, mainly riffing around their agency symbol, the black sheep. Give that there are still three days to go to the deadline, perhaps they’ll get 1,500 entries, which would be a simple equation of a dollar per idea. Wouldn’t that be nice and neat?

Maybe their next move will be to ask for some ideas for their new client, eBAY Europe, just won, an account worth a rather hefty £22 million pounds? Perhaps not.

It’s difficult to write an end-line for this. Suffice it to say it’s a ‘white sheep’ approach to commissioning design that we would never have expected from an agency of BBH’s stature.

We came across the final logos for the 4 remaining host cities (Chicago, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo) for the 2016 Olympic games. They are all actually quite nice, much improved from the 2012 London mark that has gotten its share of bad press. The Olympic committee will make their final decision in October of this year.

The SyFy Channel has gotten a lot of negative attention since its rebrand was revealed last week. In covering the rebrand The New York Times mistakenly credited Landor Associates for the new name and identity. To clear things up the creative firm posted a blog entry stating their role in the project. To read the entry you know what to do.

Yesterday, President Obama announced that his administration will begin stamping an emblem on projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

The creative studio chosen to coordinate this task was none other than Mode, the agency who contracted Sender, the brand masters of the ‘08 Obama logo. This time around they brought on accomplished designers Aaron Draplin and Chris Glass to work their magic. At this point it is too early to comment on how the identities will be received by the hard-working taxpayers. For a complete critique of both identities, Brand New offers a very informative write-up.