Creating Memorable Brand Design
As creative director of our brand agency I’m always being asked by our clients how to create the most effective brand identity or corporate image. The answer always begins and ends with owning ‘Unique Visual Properties’. Unique visual properties are visual elements of your brand identity that position your brand and its strategy in the hearts and minds of your target market, but just as importantly, achieve that goal with fresh and unique visual language. By consistently presenting your unique visual properties to the market, over time you will own them and their brand associations, providing you with defendable, bankable brand equity.

Brandable Type Design
Flicking through the web last week I came across this remarkable piece of typographic design by Paul Hollingworth. This type design struck me as it was both unique and filled with personality – two great attributes for a brand design visual property.

If you’d like to talk to us about creating unique visual properties for your brand, we’d be only too happy to chat.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
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Graphic Design Melbourne

How do you create the visual language for a place?
As the debate continues to bubble along in regards to the new logo for Melbourne, I continue to be frustrated by the lack of discussion around the most critical question; ‘so what does the Melbourne brand look like?’ How should the city of Melbourne be represented in visual language?

The answer to that question lies 50+ hours of professional, insightful design work away, and while I’d love to have the time to genuinely explore that – I don’t. What I do have though is a word cloud of some research we did on ‘what defines Melbourne’ for a brand identity project pitch late last year. In November as part of our brand strategy process we asked more than 100 people to tell us what they thought was most defining about Melbourne as a place. We illustrated the feedback in a word cloud, which is a beautifully graphic way to represent this type of data.

So whilst we can’t show you what the essence of Melbourne looks like, we can show you what the people of Melbourne believe defines the place. As-to how effectively the new brand mark communicates this essence; you can make-up your own mind.

Dave.

Director of strategy and all things clever and witty here at Brand DNA, Peter Singline was quoted in this article in today’s B&T about the new City of  Melbourne brand identity. Pete also penned a sharp article on the matter which has been faithfully reproduced in today’s news (see below), complete with a pic of Pete’s handsome scone. Click on the pic to view the original article.

In his article Pete questions the motives of our great Mayor in selecting an interstate brand agency to create a new brand mark for our fair city. He poses the question, was Cr Doyle in fact smarter than the rest of us and the decision a masterstroke of strategic genius? We think probably not.

The Value of Design
Unfortunately in the first article Pete was quoted alongside the dubious folks at Design Bay, who have set the debate around the value of design back a decade by seriously suggesting the project could have been run as a design competition with a $10,000 prize for the winner, the final choice made by popular vote of the people. At a time when we are all working diligently to demonstrate the commercial value of brand and design, the idea of 50 designers working tens of thousands of dollars worth of hours each for a total payment to the design community of $10,000 is beyond the pale.

Ah-well, as they say; ‘you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose who you share the media with’.

Recent article published in the Melbourne Leader in response to the launch last week of the new
City of Melbourne Brand Identity. There has been much debate centered around the question of whether an international brand agency from Sydney was the right choice to design a logo that is all about Melbourne.

The article quotes Storm Creative Director as the brand expert. Interestingly, many of David’s comments are miss-quotes or entirely made-up, but who are we to let accuracy and finicky detail get in the way of a good story.

Most importantly, neither this article nor any of the others that have covered the topic enter into a debate about whether-or not the new identity accurately and evocatively communicates the rich spirit and personality of Melbourne. In all the debate about where the designer came from and how much was spent on the project, the most important aspect has been entirely overlooked – does the new brand mark communicate a sense of Melbourne? In our informed and entirely passionate opinion, it does not.

http://melbourne-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/insult-by-design/