Friday, March 11, 2016

AT&T Redux


It took a while, but some of my brand concerns expressed here in an earlier post, http://www.visualcrap.com/2013/08/spheres-looking-at-you-kid.htmlwere finally addressed. The brand firm, INTERBRAND, did it's best to pull the company away from the three-dimensional error of its ways. And in the inversion of the blue/white (reverse version excepted) it returns toward the notion of the light source highlight.



INTERBRAND had difficulty reconciling the CAPs approach to the name. I was not displeased with the prior lowercase approach in that it seemed to work better with a circle and the lightness and playfulness of the older 3D object itself. In the new version too much optical attention is derived from the rounded ampersand character (notoriously difficult to work with). So much so, that now was the time to consider a transition to the + sign, which would have consolidated spread left to right and married better with the 3 angular characters flanking it. It would also simply "feel" more contemporary.
Overall, a thoughtful refinement was accomplished. But as a flat dimensional effect, derived from the real sphere version and its antecedents, that meant to be a graphically interpreted light source effect, it does not really succeed. If feels less of a lit object and more like a croquet ball. 
Despite all the fiddling, this object still fails to sing. The brand guys succeeded in addressing the myriad of production issues mentioned in my 2013 post. But it is inherently weak as a "stand-alone" brand object, in a crowded world of sphere/circle brand objects.

full story:
http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_logo_and_identity_for_att_by_interbrand.php#.VuLzvsf5wUE







Tuesday, February 2, 2016

NFL DROPS THE BALL

After XLIX years of tradition, wherein every single logo  for the Super Bowl (save the first) was designed with macho, gladiatorial Roman numerals...








Suddenly the NFL decides they will abandon the tradition and go with the Hindu-Arabic numerals (that's right America I said— Arabic numerals). They made a Super Bowl 50 logo.


Apparently V was okay, X was okay, but poor L just wasn't gonna cut it. Why? 

According to an article in Rolling Stone, the NFL has been test marketing "L" for nearly a decade and the response wasn't good. The funny part is that the driving force against the letter's use was pure superstition.

The NFL came to believe, or believed from the start, that the letter "L" was too closely associated  with "Loser."

And this is where market research fails us ladies and gentleman, because you know what— it doesn't matter a whit what the damn logo looks like. People will always scoop up any memorabilia for the sake of (duh) the memory of the event. Caps, t-shirts and all manner of swag would sell no matter what the design was. 

I think, in the end the real loser is the NFL for breaking tradition. And funny thing is, according to RS, when Super Bowl fifty-one rolls around, the NFL will return to Roman numerals with the inexplicably okay Super Bowl LI.