Posts Tagged ‘code of visual langauge’

12.23.09

The White Stripes nail their Band Brand Design

Band Image
What Indie band The White Stripes have done with their brand image is sim­ply impres­sive. In an indus­try bet­ter known for rock star image than brand image, the exam­ple set by The Stripes would put many main­stream brands to shame. Quite sim­ply, in the colour­ful world Rock, The White Stripes have gone after, and now own the colour red. All of their band/brand mate­r­ial has one com­mon ele­ment — it’s over­whelm­ingly red.

The com­bi­na­tion of red, black and white is a com­mon palette for alter­na­tive rock bands and can be traced back as far as The Stooges (if not before). But The White Stripes have taken the colour pal­let, lever­aged the red, embraced it and made it their own. There’s a great rock-irony to the fact that a band with the name ‘The White Stripes’ should choose the colour red to align themselves.

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12.07.09

25 Killer Custom Typefaces — A Brand Design Asset

Build­ing Your Brand’s Visual Prop­er­ties
When cre­at­ing a cor­po­rate image for our clients brands, we focus on build­ing unique brand prop­er­ties that can be lever­aged to become brand assets. A brand’s type­face is one of the visual prop­er­ties we incor­po­rate into the brand design process, both because type can be a pow­er­ful and unique part of a brand’s visual mes­sag­ing, and because for most brands, the poten­tial of type is entirely overlooked.

Chocolate Short
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11.30.09

Brand Speak — Understanding the new Language of Brand

The Ris­ing Tide of Brand Strat­egy Speak
It seems the brand and mar­ket­ing indus­tries are no more immune to the ris­ing tide of ‘busi­ness speak’ than any other indus­try. Over the last year I’ve col­lected exam­ples from around our brand agency and the web and researched the trends to bring you a list of my favorites. The good news is I think you’ll find them as imag­i­na­tive and enter­tain­ing as they are informative.

BrandSpeakPicShort

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11.22.09

Brand Design; Evolution of the Coke Bottle

A Pack­ag­ing Icon
Few brands boast pack­ag­ing that has gained iconic sta­tus — the abil­ity for cul­tures all around the world to iden­tify the prod­uct purely from the form of its bot­tle. Coke has long under­stood the brand equity within the pro­pri­etary bot­tle shape, main­tain­ing the authen­tic­ity of their pack­ag­ing as it has evolved over the years.

Here’s a photo that shows the evo­lu­tion from Coke’s first bot­tle, through to their cur­rent pack­ag­ing — a snap­shot of the fas­ci­nat­ing visual his­tory of this most valu­able brand property.

CokeBottleEvolution

If you’d like some help with iden­ti­fy­ing and devel­op­ing unique prop­er­ties for your brand, why not give us a call.

David Ansett, Bran­da­men­tal­ist.
If you’d like daily updates of our brand think­ing, you can fol­low me on Twit­ter here.

10.27.09

Monday Brand

Over a quite chat and a few beers in the stu­dio we started talk­ing about the cre­ative thought process. A few off cen­tered jokes later and the like, we started down the path of sym­bol­ism. Objects find their way into the realm of pop cul­ture in many ways. These sym­bols become accepted as rep­re­sent­ing cer­tain thoughts, ideas, per­son­al­i­ties and/or feelings.

Even­tu­ally, the chat turned into some­thing quite dif­fer­ent, how about cre­at­ing a brand that would rep­re­sent a day of the week? As you are prob­a­bly aware each day has a dif­fer­ent feel­ing and per­son­al­ity. So, just to stretch the mind a bit, I thought we could engage in a lit­tle shared project and see what we come up with. Open to any­one who wants to join in, a bit of fun, light, cre­ative think­ing. The goal is to cre­ate a brand that rep­re­sents each day of the week. As there is a group of us doing it I will make changes that you sug­gest, or you can have a go your­self. I am think­ing it will be like a visual brainstorm.

So, lets start. I am going to start with an (rel­a­tively) easy one… Mon­day. And for Mon­day we are going to go with the clas­sic Garfield Mon­day. A fairly somber day, drag your feet, lots of cof­fee sort of thing. I have heard reports that it is the day most heart attacks take place. It is the begin­ning of the week (west­ern world at least), while that is not bad news for every­one, I think a cliché Mon­day is a good place to start.

Then there is the trans­la­tion of Mon­day, which is moon day. So, the first con­tri­bu­tion is going to be a moon shape. I would like to add the color blue, as Mon­day it often referred to as Blue Mon­day.

Moon-blue

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10.13.09

Brand it like Coke — Developing Unique Brand Properties

Walk­ing the streets of Paris recently I was struck by the appear­ance of the lat­est point of sale cam­paign for Coke. It wasn’t the visual lan­guage of the cam­paign that struck me, nor a stun­ning cre­ative exe­cu­tion, there were no bronzed & cut young French guys or girls. In fact what struck me wasn’t any­thing that I saw, more what I didn’t see. There was no pho­to­graphic image, no brand colours, no copy line, strictly speak­ing there was not even a prod­uct shot — an unusual approach for retail point of sale to say the least.

Coke Paris point of sale

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10.09.09

Woolworths choking on an Apple

Woolworths vs Apple

What an intrigu­ing bat­tle there is play­ing out between Aus­tralian super­mar­ket chain, Wool­worths and Apple. The ques­tion at the cen­ter of the strug­gle is; when is a stylised green W (Woolsworths new logo) really an apple? At first glance we may feel that Apple is being a lit­tle too pre­cious about their logo. I must declare for as long as the new Wool­worths logo has been in the mar­ket I have not looked at it as any­way asso­ci­ated with Apple. But then again I am not the cus­to­dian of the Apple brand.

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09.27.09

The 10 biggest Brand Identity Mistakes

The Power of brand Image
Whilst brands do not live or die by the suc­cess of their brand iden­tity, a well designed image is a valu­able asset for every busi­ness. An effec­tive brand iden­tity will pro­vide cues to your mar­ket about your busi­ness, what it does, what it stands for and it’s com­pet­i­tive posi­tion in the mar­ket. Many organ­i­sa­tions under­es­ti­mate the impor­tance of brand iden­tity, choos­ing to invest their time and money in other aspects of their busi­ness. By fail­ing to make informed and con­scious deci­sions about the brand image they present to their mar­ket, these busi­nesses inad­ver­tently send mixed and gen­er­ally neg­a­tive messages.

A Poorly Designed Brand Identity is a cost to business

Never under­es­ti­mate the oppor­tu­nity cost of going to mar­ket with a poorly designed brand identity

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