Truly Deeply/Madly

The Third Chap­ter in our Com­pre­hen­sive Trend Report
Over the last two Mon­days we’ve pub­lished the first two sec­tions of our research report into trends in visual lan­guage. Each Mon­day for the next four weeks we’ll pub­lish another chap­ter. This week’s chap­ter focuses on trends in brand visual lan­guage of ‘Afford­able Lux­ury’, ‘the Cult of Per­son­al­ity’ and ‘Urban Attitude’.

Trends in the visual lan­guage of brand iden­tity are dri­ven by many fac­tors from the ‘me-too-ism’ of design­ers and their clients mim­ic­k­ing the visual lan­guage of mar­ket lead­ers, to new and emerg­ing trends such as ‘sus­tain­abil­ity’ that draw a sim­i­lar and en-mass visual response from design­ers all over the world. Over the past 12 months we have col­lected more than five thou­sand dif­fer­ent brand expres­sions span­ning almost every major indus­try and cat­e­gory of the west­ern world.

The brand expres­sions we tracked included exist­ing, new and refined brand iden­ti­ties, prod­uct pack­ag­ing, news­pa­per, mag­a­zine and bill­board ads. The scale and breadth of these brand expres­sions allowed us to iden­tify the major brand visual lan­guage trends of a broad range of mar­ket lead­ers for the last year. Whilst the major­ity of the exam­ples pre­sented in this report are recent, many trends are not in them­selves new. It is our inter­pre­ta­tion of the groundswell of take-up of a trend and the influ­ence exerted within their mar­ket by the brands involved, that leads us to define the most com­pelling and influ­en­tial trends.

What’s the value of a Trend Report?
All brands project an image through their visual lan­guage. It is up to each brand to make con­scious and informed deci­sions about exactly what they wish their visual lan­guage to com­mu­ni­cate rel­a­tive to the com­pe­ti­tion and to their market’s perceptions.The report includes hun­dreds of exam­ples of brands and their visual lan­guage to illus­trate exam­ples of brands who lever­age trends to their advan­tage, as well as exam­ples of those who fol­low trends to their dis­ad­van­tage. The exam­ples cross indus­tries from fash­ion to food, from trans­port to telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and every­thing in between, as well as mar­kets from Aus­tralia to Asia, from Europe to the Mid­dle East and the U.S.

Valu­able Insights for all Own­ers and man­agers of Brands
An under­stand­ing and mas­tery of the trends in brand visual lan­guage will allow busi­ness to ‘tune’ their brand’s image to ensure they’re con­sis­tently com­mu­ni­cat­ing the right mes­sages to the right peo­ple. For every organ­i­sa­tion seek­ing to best man­age their brand iden­tity, these trends must be part of the con­sid­er­a­tion process. For each brand there will be advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages to lever­ag­ing the cues and mean­ing inher­ent in these trends. The big ques­tion you should be con­sid­er­ing is this; ‘does the trend pro­vide an oppor­tu­nity to lever­age a set of visual cues to com­mu­ni­cate the per­fect brand mes­sages to your mar­ket, or has the trend become so widely adopted as to com­pro­mise the unique­ness of the brands who fol­low it?’

Down­load Chap­ter Three
of our Trend Report

Over the last two Mon­days we pub­lished the first two sec­tions of our report into trends in visual lan­guage. Each Mon­day for the next four weeks we’ll pub­lish another chap­ter. This week’s chap­ter focuses on trends in brand visual lan­guage related to ‘Afford­able Lux­ury’, ‘the Cult of Per­son­al­ity’ and ‘Urban Attitude’.

Click here to down­load Chap­ter Three of our Brand Visual Lan­guage Trend Report.

Or click here to down­load Chap­ter Two of our Trend Report.

You can also click here to down­load the First Chap­ter of the Trend Report.

© 2010 Truly Deeply. This work is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons License. We’re delighted for you to share, blog or pub­lish extracts of our arti­cles, on the con­di­tion that Storm Design & Brand DNA are prop­erly cred­ited (and linked to) as the source, and that you include our URL: trulydeeply.com.au

For fur­ther infor­ma­tion, ques­tions and enquir­ers, con­tact us.

David Ansett, Bran­da­men­tal­ist
For daily updates of our brand think­ing, fol­low me on Twit­ter
Brand Designer

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