Rebranding A CPA Company, Just In Time For April 15. Though there are plenty of CPAs who will disagree, in the court of public opinion, accounting ranks just above insurance in terms of professional glamour. Yet it’s a super competitive market, and so for many companies, projecting an appealing image to clients is surprisingly important. That was the brief handed down from Anders, a St. Louis CPA and business advisory company, who invited design agency Atomicdust to rethink their identity earlier this year. The company--which has been around for a few decades--asked for an iterative brand that could convey their diverse business, which includes wealth management for high net-worth individuals and regular old tax prep. Originally called Anders Minkler & Diehl, the first move Atomicdust made was to pull a Madonna and cut off the company’s last two names. The visual identity follows the lead of the sloganeering, with a slew of unique icons for each area of the company’s business.
[H/t Identity Designed] American Airlines Rebrands Itself, And America Along With It. American Airlines has just rebranded for the first time in over 40 years. The AA logo of yore is gone, replaced by the Flight Symbol, a red and blue eagle crossed with a wing. And every plane will be tagged with a high-velocity abstraction of the American flag on its tail. There’s logic behind the decision: AA recently ordered 550 new planes. Many will have composite bodies that can’t be polished with the mirror shine of American’s existing fleet. The look had to be reassessed for brand continuity, so the company has spent the last 2+ years with Futurebrand reconsidering everything from the plane’s finish (it’ll be mica silver paint) to the logo to the website to the interior seats to the terminal kiosks. “Technology. “The old identity was slightly skewed to a more powerful American image. So AA kept the eagle, but it ditched the talons and transformed it into the Flight Symbol. “With stars, the design has a different connotation,” Seger says.
See more here. [Hat tip: Gizmodo] Alma: La belleza de una tierra encantada - Marca País Colombia. “Alma es la sustancia capaz de querer, entender y sentir” Alma es una marca que se encarga de diseñar productos que expresan la identidad Colombiana, y promueven al país como una experiencia positiva reforzando su cultura y sentido de nacionalidad dentro del mismo. La marca nace de la necesidad de dar a conocer al mundo entero y a nosotros mismos los aspectos positivos y la belleza de una tierra encantada como lo es Colombia. Libro Alma ¿Qué mejor manera de contar una historia que a través de un libro? El primer producto de la marca es un libro que parte de los rasgos físicos y comunicativos de la tipografía, las texturas y las imágenes para representar la identidad humana y la cultural de un país.
Valeria Di Domenico, autora de “Alma” Estudió Diseño Industrial en la Universidad Javeriana y Alma fue su trabajo de grado. Tuvo la oportunidad de vivir fuera del país y en esa experiencia se reencontró con la belleza que tiene Colombia y que su gente no lograba comunicar realmente en el exterior. Designing Obama. To Create The Future Of Brand Identity, IDEO Looks Inward. On March 25, the designers at each of Ideo’s 11 international offices put their other projects aside and spent the day thinking about Ideo. The aim was to brainstorm a new identity system--the second time it’s been overhauled since the firm was founded in 1991--and the ideas, which can be viewed on a Tumblr dedicated to the project, took many forms. There were experimental business cards and animated GIFs, handmade crafts and polished mini-movies.
One designer envisioned a "biannual cosmic event," in which an "optical obelisk" would project a massive Ideo logo on a nearby building on the days of the vernal and autumnal equinox. All of the proposals have something to do with Ideo--they reflect its outlook, its ethos, its employees, or its services--but at the same time, they’re all reaching towards something greater, too.
And that was the point. The brief the designers received that morning didn’t just ask them to come up with a new identity system for Ideo. Rebranding 7-Eleven With A Bold, Retro-Nostalgic Style. Unlike ornery New Yorkers, most Swedes have never had major moral beef with the steady colonization of 7-Eleven in their cities (well, for the most part). In fact, Stockholm was the location of the convenience mega-chain’s first European location back in 1978.
So when the Swedish arm of 7-Eleven invited BVD to take on a rebrand last year, the goal wasn’t to tone down the corporate identity of the chain, as it might have been on this side of the Atlantic. Instead, the Stockholm-based studio dove into 7-Eleven’s 80-year-old graphic identity, embracing and amplifying its most distinctive elements. At the core of their reimagined brand is the company’s green-and-orange pinstripe pattern, which has fallen out of favor in the past decade or so (perhaps because it’s more likely to remind us of Clerks than good coffee). Architecturally speaking, many 7-Elevens in America have chosen to tone down the glaring lights and garish colors associated with its gas-station-rest-stop image. Antes y después, MyFonts. MyFonts contiene la mayor selección de tipografías del mundo, con una biblioteca cada vez mayor de más de 62.000 tipografías, y con más de 400 fundidoras y diseñadores, MyFonts ha sido uno de los lugares de compras de tipografías más completo en la web desde su lanzamiento en 1999.
El rediseño estuvo a cargo por un estudio de diseño gráfico de Holanda, llamado Underware. Cuando Underwere comenzó a realizar los primeros bocetos de diseño, en un comienzo trataron de encontrar una solución tratando de representar una amplia gama de estilos en un mismo logo. El uso de varias tipografías, o la variación de la posición y el peso en el logotipo para transmitir una sensación de la diversidad tipográfica, era una de las primeras opciones que se pensaban para el rediseño del nuevo logo de MyFonts.
El nuevo logotipo de MyFonts funciona como un logotipo moderno pintado a mano. Podemos ver que los rasgos de “MyFonts” indican una tipografía con personalidad y originalidad. Why On Earth Would Apple Sign On To The Volkswagen iBeetle? The iTV. The iWatch. The iCar. All of these mythical products have been floated at some point on the Internet, where speculating wildly on future Apple products is a perennial pastime. Sadly, for all the bloviating, the world still waits for the Apple smartwatch and the Apple HDTV. But now the iCar has arrived, out of the blue. Sort of. Last week, at the Shanghai Auto Show, VW debuted a new collaboration with Apple.
Here’s what we know. We know that the main integration comes in the form of an iPhone docking station, which works with a specially designed app to give the driver voice-activated access to all sorts of smartphone features. We also know that the car’s really called the iBeetle. Here’s what we don’t know: Why? But still, this isn’t Apple revolutionizing the dashboard.
It’s strange, and even though it’s become trite to say, it’s hard to imagine the late Mr. 10 | VH1's Smart New Branding Takes A Backseat To The Content. A few weeks ago, VH1 quietly unveiled a new brand identity, designed by a small team at New York agency Gretel. The network’s old logo, a multicolored gradient confection with a squiggly tilde crown, has been replaced with a thick sans-serif logo rendered in deep purple, tagged with a plus sign (+) that grows from the H. It’s the network’s first new logo in a decade, but the change was noted by relatively few online. According to VH1 President Tom Calderone, that was the idea. “We did this with a bit of stealth,” he told me during a phone interview. “The idea was to let it happen organically.” After all, for every high-profile corporate rebrand, there’s a high-profile public backlash. “The plus became the connective tissue for the language,” says Gretel’s Keira Alexandra, “a language of short textable bursts, of search terms and tags, of endless streams of hyperbolic, enthusiastic, obsessive cultural knowledge.”
The plus sign is actually a fairly modern invention. 2 | American Airlines Rebrands Itself, And America Along With It. 7TV Rebranding - gregbarth.tv. BRONZE WINNER AT THE ART DIRECTORS CLUB 91st ANNUAL AWARDS, 2012 The rebranding was intended to strengthen 7TV's new image as a Do-it yourself channel. One that promotes health, education, and general knowledge about how to better yourself. The minimal look was chosen to evoke a certain zen and meditative state of mind, playing on the ambiguity of full versus empty spaces. It also allowed us to derive the branding into various moods, depending on the channel`s topics (Travel, Construction / Renovation, Cinema, Changing Yourself, Relationships), giving the Identity a changing character, color and feel. The concept was to highlight that through an organized and smart assembly, you can improve your life, making all the pieces of the puzzle fit perfectly together.
To emphasize an honest and human approach, all on-screen elements were made and animated by hand Created and Directed by Greg Barth Client 7TV RussiaAccount manager Greg Barth Creative Director Greg Barth. 10 Inspiring Examples Of Small-Biz Branding. Branding campaigns don’t often make mainstream headlines, but when they do, they’re about the bigwig companies--Coca-Cola, Apple, and Nike, to name a few. And we usually take notice only when brands go wildly and horribly astray--think Peter Arnell’s disastrous repackaging of Tropicana, or Gap’s unwelcome Helvetica logo.
The real innovations in branding, however, are happening at small companies, which can experiment with daring and quirky concepts--without being beholden to executive boards, shareholders, or their own legacies. Some of the best examples are compiled in a new book titled Introducing: Visual Identities for Small Businesses from Gestalten.
What makes these campaigns so successful? Check out the above slide show, featuring identities for everything from a Zen-inspired dental practice to a bike shop specializing in hard-to-get parts. Buy the book for $52 here. A Minimalist Tequila Identity Goes Against The Industry's Grain. As someone who unashamedly still picks wine bottles expressly on the basis of their labels, I can attest to the fact that first impressions are important in the overcrowded world of alcoholic beverages. And in general, the prevailing packaging dictum for the category is to do everything possible to make that impression. Stand in front of the massive air-conditioned beer wall at your supermarket to see what I mean--you’ll find screaming type, bold graphics, and colors covering more or less the entire visible spectrum.
The designers behind the identity for Tiqo, a new Tequila-based mixed drink, are trying something different to cut through all that clatter: restraint. The design, executed by the interdisciplinary firm Manifiesto Futura, based in Monterrey, Mexico, is certainly different than most of what you’ll find on those shelves. The overall result is a thing with a fluid form and a confident character. See more of Manifiesto Futura’s work on their site. Hat tip: The Dieline. Nucoco Chocolate. For Sale: Hessian, A Brand Without A Product. In an era when designers sometimes devote years to client research and talk enthusiastically about “distilling the core values” of their brand, is it possible to design an effective brand identity before a client even enters the picture? Designer (and cofounder of social shopping site Svpply) Ben Pieratt thinks so, and he’s testing his hunch by selling a “brand without a product,” called Hessian, for a single flat fee. $18,000 will get you Hessian’s URL, Twitter and Tumblr accounts, fully fleshed-out batch of image assets, an app interface, and more.
Pieratt will even include 30 hours of design time to customize Hessian to the buyer’s needs. “The Hessian could be a restaurant, a startup, a clothing brand, or more,” goes the pitch. “It fights for life by building meme-hooks through studies in contrasts, nostalgia, repetition and confusion.” Hessian comes from a simple insight into the strengths and weaknesses of designers. [H/t Wired] Branding / Identity / Design » The very best in corporate brand identity design. Branding / Identity / Design. Ocho Candy. Speak Up Archive: Flexible Consistency, Consistent Flexibility. Guest Editorial by Jon Hewitt In late 2006 I went to see Alan Fletcher’s retrospective at the Design Museum in London. It’s the only exhibition, before or since, where I’ve read every word on every caption for every piece of work.
It was a masterclass in design. The piece of work that struck me most, more than the witty collage work or the posters written in Fletcher’s trademark handwriting, was a rub down sheet of Reuters logos. What I realised, whilst I was looking at that rub down sheet, are the massive technical restraints that limited identity design forty years ago. There was one logo and it only physically existed in a handful of sizes. The rules were kept simple. Forty years later, identity is referred to as brand and we use media banks to download brandmarks instead of using sheets of rub down logos. Boîte à musique from Karl Gerstner: Designing Programmes recently republished by Lars Müller Publishers.
MTV logos, old and new. The identity becomes a showcase.
Logos. How do colors affect purchases?