blink digital graphics

Green Branding – Why Originality Matters

blinkdi1 — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 03:21:15 +0000

by Jerry Stifelman, The Change, Chapel Hill, NC

Category Membership vs. Brand Identity
If sustainability is the only thing that differentiates your business, then you’re positioning yourself to go out of business as soon as sustainability starts catching on. The twin essences of branding are consistency and differentiation. If you consistently use language and visuals that represent the overall sustainability movement instead of your core business — all you end up evoking is category membership, as opposed to an actual brand identity. Being a green business and basing your logo on the planet or a leaf would be like Toyota basing its logo on a set of wheels.

Think of sustainability as a lever, not a pedestal. Use it to give your brand an initial lift — as opposed to building your entire identity on it. Businesses are increasingly moving toward sustainability. In an era when Walmart is actively seeking to switch over to organic cotton (and they are), you’d better not hang your whole brand on the notion of organic.

Brand Appeal Beyond Green
The process of branding begins with understanding your institutional strengths – and it continues with integrating them into all points of contact with your audience(s). A cornerstone of American Apparel’s brand proposition has been “sweatshop free”. Yet the brand has always been about more than that. The soft cotton jersey they chose along with the tighter fits and founder Dov Charney’s unabashed enthusiasm for sexuality — gave the brand an alternative, youthful sensibility from the start. Early on, the company developed a brand culture that conveyed its enlightened labor practices as a part of a consistent image. An image that conveys authenticity, youth, and sexiness through clean 70′s style typography and deliberately non-slick photography. As American Apparel has developed its image as a trend-leader, it has also deepened its commitment to organics and renewables. Whatever you think about this controversial company, they have a lesson to teach in terms of integrating sustainable practices into a brand that has much broader appeal than your average ‘green’ apparel.

Another example is GE’s Ecoimagination initiative which combines sustainability (i.e., “eco”) with a core quality of the GE brand (i.e., “imagination”). The basis of the initiative has been to position sustainability as a natural function of GE’s longtime strength as an innovator.

Nau: Destined to Fail?

A not-so-good example would be Nau clothing, which recently went under. Nau presented a professionally crafted slick exterior with not much under the hood. The brand’s only reason to exist seemed to be to start a sustainable clothing company. While their sustainability initiatives may have been laudible, from a branding perspective there was little else to differentiate Nau from any other slick clothing company. There was no singular perspective, no core characteristics. Compare Nau to Loomstate, whose consistent use of black and white illustration and rural photographic settings create a distinctive brand persona that feels pure, natural, earnest and hip — without trying too hard.

Moving Beyond the Cliches of Green Design
Here’s some nuts and bolts counsel. A logo is precious visual real estate. It’s core job is to provide a visual identifier that belongs to you. To the extent you use common visual signifiers that belong to your category rather than your individual business — you fail to differentiate your brand. What does the Starbucks mermaid logo have to do with coffee? Nothing. But it has everything to do with Starbucks. Along the same lines, a leaf makes a middling logo for a green printing company. A drop of water is a bad choice for a water-harvesting system brand. And the planet earth makes a bad logo for an organic clothing brand. Similarly, typographical choices should represent the persona of your business, as opposed to a generalized leafy environmentalism. (Papyrus is only a good font choice if you want to look like every other massage therapist, conservation non-profit, or crystal healer in the country!)

If you can’t think of anything to associate your business with aside from your eco-goals, then find a different business that you are passionate about. Because business is hard and it’s competitive — if you’re not fervent about your core product or service, you will not survive. When my company chooses what clients to accept, one thing that we look at is how dedicated they are to the specific industry they’ve chosen. Because we have the absolute conviction that any higher-minded business owes it to their mission to outperform their competitors on all fronts, not just the green ones. (And indeed, we ourselves are passionate about the pursuit of creating differentiating brands.) If you can’t differentiate yourself, potential customers won’t be able to differentiate you either. The challenges of doing this are more than offset by the rewards. Not only will your business be better, you’ll have more fun in the process. Good, differentiating branding is a liberating experience.

Jerry Stifelman is founder and creative director of The Change, a brand-strategy and design agency that works exclusively with companies and organizations that make the world more sustainable, equitable or authentic.

David Airey Launches Logo Design Love

blinkdi1 — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:30:00 +0000

Today I’m unveiling my second ever blog launch (after this one), and you’re invited to take look. Logo Design Love is a new blog that devotes all its attention towards logo design.

I’ve been working on it during the past couple of weeks, and you might remember a while back when I asked for your advice on naming the site. Well, that was a few months back, in October, but client projects and a month off work put Logo Design Love on the back-burner.

DavidAirey.com is where I write about a broader range of topics – blogging, print design, advertising, web development etc. – but I wanted to launch a more focused site, that will help me (and hopefully you too) learn more about the craft of logo design.

There are a handful of articles / showcases for you to view, and I plan to add new ones on a weekly or twice weekly basis. Small things will change over the next few weeks, and if you find any bugs I’d greatly appreciate you letting me know. I’ve picked up a few blogging tips during the past 15 months, so fingers crossed they’ll get me off to a good start.

Here are a few of the blog posts currently on offer:

When Logos Look Alike

blinkdi1 — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:07:38 +0000

From Logodesignlove.com

It gets more and more difficult to create original logos. No matter how clever your idea, the chances are someone has come up with something very similar. Why is that?

Well, we’re all surrounded by the same influences and exposed to the same shapes, forms, and patterns. With the importance of branding in the marketplace, and thousands of designers working on similar projects, it’s obvious that ideas will, from time-to-time, look almost identical.

Here I have compiled a few similar logos, showing them side-by-side so you can see what graphic designers face today.

Sumpter & Gonzalez LLP and Stylegala

National Film Board (recently updated) and Virtual Global Taskforce

Carrier and Ford

Scottish Arts Council and Artworkers

NBC and Nebraska ETV Network

One Spa, Manulife One and Penzeys One Magazine

SimpleBits and LogoMaid (LogoMaid link directs to a Flickr thread with a fascinating commentary)

pseudoroom design and Cyberathlete Professional League

Ubuntu and Human Rights First

Graphic Design Blog and Peter GI

Star Sports and maltastar.com

Sun Microsystems and Columbia Sportswear

Applied Materials and Planned Parenthood

searchmash and smashLAB

Wise words

“Tell yourself at every step in the design process that someone has undoubtedly already thought of this and what can you do to really set it apart. In design, and particularly logo design, the pessimistic axiom that “everything has already been done” is becoming more and more true, and it is only the virtuous designer who can continue to stand out in a sea of sameness.”
— MIKE DAVIDSON

Others talking about logo originality

Originality in logo design, from Mike Davidson.
Sometimes a logo is just a logo, on CreativePro.com
History of the NBC logo, on etiziano.
The Quark logo, on Antipixel.
Quark reloaded, on Speak Up.
Which logo ripped off the other one? From Brian Yerkes.
Godbit logo imitation, on Godbit Project.
Hey Google! Where’d you get that logo? On ideasonideas.
Intel stole our logo, on EcoGeek.
Just how original is your logo design? On davidairey.com