Note before reading: We DID NOT DESIGN THIS WORK. This is a campaign by Wolff Olins.

We've had the privilege here to watch several talks from the speakers at the Brand New Conference. In the talk by Marina Willer, she speaks about a case study on Amnesty International, which she had directed while at Wolff Olins.

What is Amnesty International?
Amnesty International is a global movement of people fighting injustice and promoting human rights.

The Problem
How can the Amnesty International brand be unified and represented consistently across all countries? How can it stand to deliver a message that is applied to different languages and cultures?

The Approach
Less design.

Marina emphasized creating a visual language "without much design". A simple typeface and the color yellow, signifying hope, were chosen as the brand elements.

Why?

The thought was to create the reverse of oppression. Instead of masking the organization with a new identity to make it look more "well-designed", they courageously chose to present the brand with a simple, yet brutally honest approach, thus freeing the brand to live and breathe on its own.

Even more thoughtfully, the decision was made to keep the existing logo. Marina says, "We thought it would be a crime to change the [Amnesty] logo because it is so well known. Whether we like it or not, it doesn't really matter. It's famous and it can save lives."

The Result

We can all have our own input, but I'd say it is a brilliant and humble way to put the needs of the brand/client first. It's not always about the next revolutionary design, but carefully considering the brand challenge at hand and offering honest solutions.

A Brand's place matters in two ways.

1. Shaping External Perceptions

For consumer brands and business to business brands alike, physical office space isn't just a place for employees to do their jobs. It is a major touch point for any brand. A perception setter. The moment a customer walks through the doors perceptions are forming. The question is, Are they forming into what you want?

Restaurants probably understand this the best, perhaps they suspect food actually tastes better when the environment suggests so. On the contrary, I see business to business brands do this the worst. As a business owner I understand and appreciate the idea of keeping overhead low, but not at the expense of your brand (or perception). Simply defining these three questions is a good start:

How should customer's react when they walk into our office?
What's the first word we want them to say?
What's the worst thing they could say?

2. Inspiring Internal Culture

Our office, our home, or our coffee shop, wherever we are effects our thinking. A few months back Dustin and I had the privilege to attend a 3-day innovation & creative process workshop hosted by the IGNITIOR team at the Coca-Cola company. One of the first things we learned was the importance of an environment for incubating creativity. No one wants to "Brainstorm" in a windowless florescent-lit conference room like the one below. No natural lighting, low ceilings, cramped spaces, and no visual stimulus on the walls make for a depressing creativity nightmare.

Contrast the above environment with two places I toured a few weeks ago in Chicago, Threadless and 37 Signals. Two VERY different brands and experiences but both very successful in creating great external perceptions and internal inspiration.

37 Signals 

Large windows with plenty of natural lighting.

Chalk Wall – They bring in local artists to change it up every so often for new stimulus.

Beautiful Wall Art by a local artist

Full Size Kitchen for large gatherings

Threadless

Exterior of building with a "billboard" space that rotates based on popular user submissions.

Main Lobby- I love the "Make Great Together" rally cry

The Threadless Airstream

Skateboard Deck Art on display

I'm always interested in what else is out there. Any other great work "places" out there?

Eight years ago Facebook was in beta, operating out of a dorm room. Last Friday it became the third largest public offering in the history of the United States. At $104 billion, Facebook's market value is higher than McDonald’s, Citigroup, Amazon.com and most American companies. Mark Zuckerberg is 28 with an 8 year old company of which his stake is worth around $20 billion. That's a lot of Powerballs.

Now, the question on every stockholder's mind is whether Facebook has an expiration date. It's easy to think of Facebook as joining a group of historically overrated draft picks; webvan.com, pets.com, etoys.com, boo.com. All of these late nineties, dot-com brands grew too fast, lasted about three years after IPO and all have essentially been replaced by Amazon.com now fifteen years later. Despite mismanagement, they were either ahead of their time or couldn't keep up with the time. As young as Facebook is, the internet is nothing like it was eight years ago, much less fifteen years ago. Facebook is very much a reason for that. It's certainly not just a good idea with 800 million friends worldwide and $1 billion in net profit last year.

Will it ever become "old school" to have a Facebook account? Social apps like Foursquare, Instagram, Spotify and Twitter are all much newer than Facebook and would seem to be more relevant. They're all designed around the assumption of social media rather than the invention and focus on one small piece of our social lives. We're OK with this because they're all available as apps on our phone and connected to Facebook. Mobile OS's have provided the platform for a social media mall. I'm sure Facebook would have loved to be the source for what these new apps provide but that's not what we want anymore. In the same way that Sears has become just a long entrance to the mall, we're moving from branded social media to individual social media brands. I wonder if the future of Facebook's relevancy lies in it's willingness to be just the halls of the social media mall. Not always a destination but a connection and place to talk along the way.

I don't think you can force conversations to happen in one place. Social apps seem to only complement Facebook rather than replace it. They fill the figurative halls with friends' whereabouts, photos, music, thoughts, etc. while leaning heavily on the social network Facebook provides. If this is right, then it's in their best interest to keep acquiring popular startups like Instagram but also to keep them independent. If Instagram is reduced to filters for Facebook posts I'd imagine the conversations would just move elsewhere.

AMC's "The Pitch" premiered almost three weeks ago on April 30th. The Reality TV show features two advertising agencies competing against each other to "win" new business – Condensing a one week crash-course of work into hour long episodes that conjure up crystalized versions of an already cut-throat industry.

A Flawed Approach.
Pitching is crafting and presenting speculative work to a potential client, and is one of the Advertising industry's biggest flaws. While pitching is commonplace for agencies, it rarely happens anywhere else. We've all heard the mechanic or doctor analogies… You don't ask a handful of professionals "How would you fix this?" and then only pay one. "The Pitch" tells it's audience that giving away your strategy and ideas for free, for a chance to win new business, is acceptable.

Get Creative.
From a designer's perspective, the results of the work on the show are less than inspiring, i.e. – finding a rapper on YouTube isn't exactly a concept. But what is even more bothersome, is that "The Pitch" skews a client's perspective of what we're doing! Great work is not some dismal, knock-down, drag-out death-match. It takes time, process and a life outside of the office.

You Think You Know, But You Have No Idea.
After The Real World premiered in 1992, it gave everyone the ability to become a star, particularly inspiring youth*, see: YouTube. The problem is Reality TV has a strange way of warping perspectives and priorities. My biggest concern is that aspiring Advertising and Design majors are receiving the wrong message. This industry isn't about becoming the next celebrity, it's about equipping our clients with the tools to make them famous.

* No disrespect to iTrevor, I personally find his Apple Store dances hilarious.

I've been wanting to write on the topic of Brand Standards for a while now – partly to flush out my own thoughts, but also to share my struggles with the trending topic.

For those that don't know, Brand Standards (or sometimes called Style Guides, Visual Identity Guides, etc.) are multi-page documents traditionally thought of as the do's and don'ts for a brand's visual assets such as logos, trademarks, fonts, colors, graphic elements, copy writing, visual themes, and imagery. They usually contain exciting topics like clear space, minimum sizing, hex colors, and grid requirements.

In reality they should be fun, but I see tons of them that just don't feel usable, interesting, or even human. Often they are formulaic, mechanical, and complex. Most end up as beautifully designed dust collectors tucked away in a desk drawer. The last thing I want to do is create more useless paperwork that clutters up the world. If this is the case, why do brands create them? Why are they needed? What purpose do they serve?

Here's what I believe GREAT brand standards should do:

1. Help establish a consistent and recognizable visual language for the brand.
Simply having a "cool" logo isn't enough anymore. A brand needs to have a differentiated and unique identity system across all applications that is recognizable to it's costumers. Southwest's "No Change Fees" bright yellow billboards can't be confused with Delta's black & white imagery with angled red type. If you remove a logo and can't tell it from the competition, you're in trouble.

2. Define the "sacred" and the "soft" elements equally.
Great standards take time to carefully define what is untouchable (sacred) as well as explain areas for creative freedom (soft). For example, the Coke script logo, contour bottle shape, and color red are untouchable but perhaps everything else is up for grabs. That balance of sacred and soft has led to beautiful things like this.

3. Serve as a central rallying point for all designers, agencies, and/or stakeholders involved in designing elements for the brand.
Almost every designer has an undefined opinion on what they think is "good." When multiple designers get involved they leave their fingerprint of uniqueness on each piece. They want their piece to be special, interesting, and award-winning. They aren't necessarily thinking about brand cohesion. Standards should be the rope that reigns them in but at the same time isn't so tight that is chokes the creativity out of them (which goes back to point #2).

Chances are if these three points aren't relevant to you then you don't need standards. If they are, then what's important is to to clarify the problem(s) you're trying to solve, create standards unique to that problem (and you), and create them with the end user in mind. Most of all, make them human, useful, living, and inspirational. The world has enough dead documents laying around in drawers. Create something great. Create something people want to use.

Big thanks to Intern Devin for the blog image.

"Be interested, not interesting." It's a popular saying and it's a powerful way to help people feel valued, heard, and appreciated – meeting very basic human needs. Similarly, brands need to feel human and meet human needs by injecting an element of this into their own DNA.

Simply asking people (or customers) what they like, love, and loathe about your brand is a great start. Mass surveys can work but what's best is a person-to-person conversation (on the phone or in person). Desiring feedback means the world to people, it connects you (and your brand) to them. After several conversations, you'll come away with groundbreaking or affirming insight on what's most loved and most problematic about your brand. Then, and only then, can you go about your work to solve any problems noted.

As mentioned in Dwain's presentation, imagine a giant scoreboard keeping track of the words you use (a brand) and the words they use (a brand's customers). At the end of a conversation if your score is higher than theirs then you lose. Customers want to feel heard and that means they don't want to feel like you are always trying to sell them something. They want to feel appreciated beyond the transaction. Today's marketplace desires authenticity and vulnerability over the veneer of perfection.

Just like people, brands aren't perfect. But their willingness to listen & help can greatly mend all imperfections.

See more from Dwain's talk at the April 2012 Creative Mornings.

“Today’s design environment is one facet of man’s overall culture – hence, it is only partially responsible for the visual mess in which we find ourselves. One microcosm of this threat to our civilization is the detrimental characteristic prevailing in the philosophy of advertising and public relations that has indubitably cemented sales records to the products, regardless of the intrinsic worth of the product. – The result in part is the manufacturer who produces products of expediency; and the craftsman (the labor community) who demands more and more monies without equally important demands for products with structural aesthetic honesty.”

Lester Beall
Print Magazine (1968)
“Graphic Design in the Human Environment”

This map may be nothing more than a truism but it is interesting to see brand architectures revealed. So many of these house hold names I never consider in relationship to their parent brand or "brothers and sisters". For instance the company that makes my Oreos also makes my A1 steak sauce. They are cousins so to speak. Not a huge disconnect but then there's the company who makes my Pringles that then also makes my baby's diapers which have quite the opposite effect on my appetite. The value of a pluralistic brand architecture.

Great brands need a verbal nail and a visual hammer. Or in other words, a focused positioning statement and a memorable mark. Laura's new book shows how leading brands, over the years have leveraged this strategy to make sure that we remember who they are and what they stand for. The sharpness of the verbal and the strength of the visual ensure brand memorability.

We had the pleasure of working with Laura on the design of her new book. Below are a few photos. It's also great to see that within a short amount of time it's become one of Amazon's top 100 Best Sellers under Advertising. Congrats Laura!

↓ Yes, we painted it.

↓ We were also able to help redesign the Ries&Ries website.

]]> http://matchstic.com/blog/2012/04/visual-hammer/feed/ 3 http://matchstic.com/blog/2012/04/childrens-healthcare-of-atlanta/ http://matchstic.com/blog/2012/04/childrens-healthcare-of-atlanta/#comments Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:00:41 +0000 Blake Howard http://matchstic.com/blog/?p=13346

CHOA, as it's referred to, was challenged to expand the reach of their brand while preserving precious and emotional brand equity. The goal was to modernize the brand, making it more cohesive, strategically-focused, and appealing to teens and their parents. The goal was to enhance Children's brand equity in order to support future recruiting and a growing national reputation.

Process & Solution

Through qualitative and quantitative research, it was concluded that the historical "Hope & Will" characters held strong brand equity & awareness throughout Georgia. To revolutionize the identity would not be wise. With this in mind, an evolutionary rebrand approach was elected in order to both maintain and grow the current brand equity.

The new Hope & Will are a simplified and modernized version of the lovable children. Subtle changes to the design include oval eyes, bigger smiles, clothing more suited to older children and a taller, a more streamlined appearance, and Hope’s hairstyle—she is now wearing a ponytail. They are constructed with symmetry, spacing, and line width all considered. The logotype was also updated to feel "kid-focused" yet still remain professional and credible. A "Naming Decision Tree" was also developed to guide the organization along for a more cohesive and intuitive naming architecture for future expansion and existing locations.

We also developed a comprehensive brand style guide (over 100 pages) to drive all stakeholders toward a coherent yet flexible brand identity system. Throughout the new brand platform, Hope & Will are signature features of a brand with more personality, more consistency, and more clarity while still retaining critical brand recognition.

Process- Brand Analogs & Mood Board

Process- Prototype Board

Process- Prototype Board

Process- Prototype Board

Process- Brand Color Palette Prototype

Process- Brand Style Guide Mapping

Process- Brand Style Guide Mapping

Process- Brand Style Guide Mapping

Brand Mark – Primary Lock-Up

"Hope & Will" Mark Evolution & Grid

Brand Style Guide Spread

Brand Style Guide Spread

Brand Style Guide Spreads

Brand Style Guide Applications

Brand Style Guide Swag Applications

Brand Style Guide Signage Applications

 

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