A wave of bad design has taken afoot in the branding design sector. Not sure when it started exactly, but its roots definitely trace back to the good work done at Apple, when the Aqua/bubbly/2 point oh/whatever-you-want-to-call-it movement started. With Xerox recently entering the fray of high-profile, substandard creativity, it seems there is little hope but to keep our collective fingers crossed for a time in which we again will take a nod from the Modernist movement, when simplicity ruled and it was more about substance and form than style.

Today, what we see is the march towards peak visibility (read: over-the-top glossiness) and that’s a damn shame, because what serves the brand better? An initial wallop over the head or a lasting impression and long-term consumer resonance. I’d go for the latter if I was signing-off on a million-dollar (or god-knows how much) campaign. It seems the people making the decisions at the top are either clueless or ok, they are just clueless, there is no other option. Taste isn’t a virtue acquired with wealth, unfortunately.

I remember back in the 80’s when I heard that the “new” NBC logo was done for a million plus and how that sat squarely with me for quite some time. What I couldn’t get my arms around was how basic the logo was and how it could command such a figure. Ultimately, it was discovered that it was essentially a rip on a Nebraska broadcasting network’s logo. It was astonishing that after all that, it wasn’t even an original idea. I remember they later hastily slapped a stylized version of the peacock logo on top of the new “N,” but it was short-lived.

Now, of course, things are much, much worse. We’ve become a cookie-cutter design society, reaching for gimmicky Photoshop filters and templates with reckless abandon. We’re past the point of no-return, it seems, and high profile embarrassments by notable firms, such as in the case of the London 2012 Olympics fiasco are increasingly becoming the norm. For me, the biggest insult came when my heroes work was being desecrated by obnoxious agencies with no regard for history or greatness. Case in point, FutureBrand’s abysmal re-take on Paul Rand’s classic UPS design. There’s also poor Saul Bass spinning in his grave on being shown the “new” AT&T disaster launched in 2005.

Fortunately, there is still good work being done, as evidenced on Tony Spaeth’s excellent resource Identityworks, most notably on recent works like the Obama campaign, Embarq, Delta Airlines, Intel, Chevron and the Bank of New York, to name a few.

Tags: identity, logo

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 9:37 am and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.