ml haynes design

I recently had the pleasure of working as a Pro Bono Consultant for the Taproot Foundation with the executive team at Marin Agricultural Land Trust. I chose to join this team as one of two Graphic Designers, feeling like I wanted to dive into a richly creative project and learn about this 30-year-old brand from the inside out. As you can see from the “before-and-after” examples above, it was quite a journey. And the arrival was a delight for all involved, myself included.

What started as an exercise in rebranding and reinvention became a deep and engaging process of discovery and development. And ultimately, for me, it became a process of re-confirmation: that to truly represent a brand, wholly new or decades old, I must find what is authentic and true to that brand and bring it to life in a way that sacrifices none of the essence and, in fact, illuminates and elevates that core in a way that resonates completely and without the need for guidance or instruction.

As the new identity is activated we will see how this refreshed brand is embraced and championed by existing stakeholders and supporters and understood by those who will only now discover it and come to learn about the brand and what it means to them.

The new integrated campaign for Dickies launched via online video “tough tests” last week. This initial offering — the first round of work from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners — shows 874 Work Pants taking a beating, literally, as they’re ripped apart by squealing choppers, torn and shredded by massive wrecking balls, and rolled down a meticulously groomed hillside.

Each black-and-white clip is a combination of the old “don’t try this at home” instructional film and “don’t try this with stuff you’ve paid decent money for” product demonstration. Taking what has been a staple of skaters, surfers, hirsute tradesmen, and wannabe rockers, the GSP team brings this brand to the hard core. You know those guys and gals: the ones with the biker chain clipped to their belt loop, the steel-toe boots, and the compostable lunch bag in their recycled rubber messenger bag.

Watching the series, I couldn’t help but think brand loyalists aren’t the type to be sold with old-school show-and-tell demos like these. They’ve been trained over a lifetime to be skeptical of these well-choreographed tests and product performances. Folks new to the brand are probably in the same place in regard to what influences their purchasing decisions. The rough characters who star in these films aren’t buying it either, and they certainly are not watching videos online. Hell, they’re still rocking classic rock radio in their pickup trucks for a good time.

What’s going on here? Choppers pulling a pair of pants apart. Levi’s denim tags sport a mule team doing the same and have been for decades. Product is attached to a swinging steel ball and aimed at a thick concrete wall. Check out classic commercials of the ’60s and ’70s, and you’ll see this has been a staple for more than half a century. It didn’t get more tough than a Timex watch attached to an arrowhead, shot through a pane of glass by a gentleman wearing a plaid flannel shirt.

What was that last “test” again?

That’s right. Those tough twill pants are worn by a gravity-loving, bearded hipster who simply cannot resist the urge to rock, roll, and bounce down a beautiful hillside obviously landscaped by a professional film crew and production team. Parkour, I think not. This guy likes a good tumble it would appear, and, well, it just isn’t that easy to get yourself a chopper at the last minute, let alone a wrecking ball without calling ahead. What better way to show the world that you — and your new pants — have earned the badass Dickies label?

One of the more interesting, and creative, areas of work for me is in naming — products, services, events or companies. The challenge is to conjure something never-before-heard-of yet comfortably familiar and resonant. Add to that the fact that any and all of these “things” must survive and thrive on the Internet and the project takes on more complication.

Being around long enough to have survived the time when clients insisted on names that began with the ubiquitous lowercase “e” and later the lowercase “i,” I remember (and not fondly) the painful twist the web put us all through. Thank goodness folks came to their senses — persuaded by the likes of me, another interesting aspect of this work — and adopted a more long-term view of the import and influence the process and outcome of naming has upon both brand and business vitality and longevity.

I’ll come around to visit this topic again, as I’m certainly keen on this type of work and the process required. That said, I had a good chuckle when I came upon this decade-in-review article from MarketingProfs and thought I’d share. Knowing your history — the good, bad and ugly — and taking the lessons learned is invaluable as I continue to find myself in this game of “name that company.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
27 jan 2010 2pm

As if to prove my point, Apple announces what will be one of the most talked about — and laughed about — names yet. Kudos to MadTV for having conjured this years ago.

Much has been written about AOL’s new logo, debuting December 10th. Just weeks away, this Internet dinosaur will attempt its third re-branding.

Common wisdom has it that the first logo was an inside job; no one has come forward to claim that iconic pyramid with mirrored swooshes and Mistral-like typography. The first logo re-design was done by Desgrippes Gobé, a 3D pyramid-to-pointer-effect and script-to-rounded-sans-serif and the identity went boldly, if not generically, into the future. Next month, as the brand spins off from the Time Warner mothership, the logo will see another reinvention.

The first, and most obvious, change is in the typography. Enough of a household name to go by three letters alone, AOL will now be represented by title case, sans serif letterforms followed by a period. And much has been made of this period, for sure. Sam Wilson, managing director at the Wolff Olins New York office — AOL’s go-to branding agency — claims the period in the logo was added to suggest “confidence, completeness… AOL is the place to go for the best content online, period.” Completeness, yes, when used at the end of a sentence or within an abbreviation. I’ll even go for the end of a phrase, heck, it’s advertising. But at the end of three letters? I would’ve loved to have been in that pitch and heard that rationale hit the fan.

The second change is in the visual representation of the brand, the changing images and backdrop to the letterforms. Counter to the plain and accessible typography, these images represent everything from finger-paint swirls to vignettes of fish. The type knocks out of each of these images in varying degrees of legibility and logic. I get the metal fist (AOL does music) and the scribble (AOL does self-expression) but I’m still wondering what AOL’s going to do with that fuscia blob of brain matter. Or is it bubblebum? Jordan Crane, Wolff Olins New York CD, describes it as “a mix of do-it-yourself and high production values, crazy stuff and elegant stuff… simple and engaging and bizarre — all the things the Internet is.” Again: rationale meet fan.

Tim Armstrong, AOL CEO, in an interview with paidContent.org, supports the decision to launch this unorthodox identity program as an expression of corporate creativity. “The hardest part about brands is everybody’s got an opinion. What really matters is how well you like our products and services… We looked at a lot of different brand treatments. We felt this was the one that captured what was happening at the company underneath the surface. People see AOL as a big turnaround, but there is so much creativity at the company now.”

A campaign rollout is still under consideration. You’ll need to go to the AOL web site to see the changes as the transformation takes place the evening of December 9th and into the 10th. This revolution will not be televised. Instead it will go out to the already converted who will be looking, as Armstrong suggests, for improvements in service and product offerings. If that means that they’re greeted by fish and rockers, and their email is announced in some auto-tune robotic tone, so be it. For the rest of us — and clearly those of us interested in the process and politics of corporate identity — this could be an interesting way to ring out 2009.

Monopoly City Streets, promoted as “you versus the world in the biggest live game of Monopoly in history,” is the love-child of Hasbro and Google. A gargantuan MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game), City Streets takes play out of the virtual world, into the streets (quite literally) and back into the virtual world. Players buy streets and engage in “property empire building on an unimaginable scale.”

Off to a less-than-stellar start, the game failed — quite publicly — September 9 when 1.7 million people tried to register simultaneously. As Hasbro prepares to punch the “reset” button on the game, most insiders expect that an even greater audience will push the limits of the registration tool. The re-launch is expected to be this week; the blog is currently working overtime.

I’m not especially keen on playing, keeping up with Bay Area real estate is enough “game playing” for me. But I will be watching the lifecycle of this game/campaign. I’ve been waiting for a brand to pick up the Google Maps API and use it to enhance both the brand and the consumer’s experience of the brand. Pete Cashmore over at Mashable shared this insight into the creation of the game: “What the coverage doesn’t mention is the level of involvement Google had here: while in theory this could have been built on the Google Maps API with little input from the search engine maker itself, all reports seem to indicate that Google had a direct role in bringing the game to fruition.”

Let the game begin. Again.

Sure, I’d seen the rumblings ’round the blogs and design sites. Read the rants of typophiles and fans of all things Swiss Modern. But this morning the discourse was taken to another elevation when I read this.

You know you’ve tapped into something when the New York Times weighs in. Either that or it’s a very slow news day at The Arts desk.

Go ahead. Google “Ikea” and “Verdana.” Then prepare to search through more than one million results, with everything from Flickr pages photodocumenting the grave deed to an “anti-Verdana” petition. Ironically, the latter came up on my screen in, wait for it… Verdana.

I’m going to go out on a limb and disagree with Marius, this particular petition’s author, and a league of fellow designers here. As a hybrid creative — comfortably positioned in both print and pixels — I’m challenged by designers and art directors who are so enamored of a typeface (and Futura plays a part quite often, coincidentally) that they refuse to see the limitations or liabilities within their design choices. I also understand what may well be the business driver behind the Ikea decision as well as others we see coming, seemingly, from boardrooms instead of studios.

I’ll be honest: Futura is a poor type choice for online. The modern curves and equally weighted lines that make this a classic face are nearly impossible to render on-screen. Readability is sacrificed and, counter to a designers intent, so is the very quality of the face. Just doesn’t work.

And as far as making a sound business decision, I’m of the mind that Ikea’s simply preparing a phase-out of their print catalog and migrating this sales material to its web-based sibling. The move might have been clumsy — pairing their logotype with the new-faced “2010″ on the catalog cover made me shake my designer head — but it was not the end of the world as so many have suggested. I wonder if those same designers would be in such an uproar about brand consistency across platforms if the company had made another decision altogether.

At the end of the day most consumers, and Ikea brand enthusiasts, won’t notice the change. Before the hub-bub would any of us really noticed?

[added 19 SEP 09]

This landed in my inbox today — Ikea chooses an ugly font — from Gerry McGovern. I’ve received his newsletter, New Thinking, for years and find that he’s always got something insightful and useful to share. This piece was particularly fitting and his perspective on the “why” of Ikea’s decision is spot-on, in my opinion.

The Greater London Authority (GLA) has issued an RFP for the rebranding of London. You can read the “call for entries” here and, in fact, request formal paperwork via the same pithy web page.

One firm — Moving Brands — of London has taken a novel approach to the challenge. They have opened up what has typically been a “top secret” process. They have asked the public to participate, and not simply as members of focus groups. They’ve put it all online and enabled commenting throughout. The site, built on WordPress with Twitter feed and YouTube embeds details progress on the project including the “plus” of working with Scott Thomas, Design Director of the Obama Presidential campaign.

Great insight into what branding — and rebranding — can be.