On Design Language Systems 01: IBM

One of my key professional activities is writing and designing brand guidance systems for companies and organisations. It has been a pillar of my practise for over twenty years. So I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to help people understand their organisation’s visual identity systems, use them effectively, improve them logically, and extend them thoughtfully.

Spread from Manuals One. ©Unit Editions.

As a corporate design aficionado, I have enjoyed spending many evenings pouring over esoteric design details in my copies of Unit Editions’ handsome publications Manuals One and Manuals Two. These two books, reproducing a rich selection of corporate design and identity guidelines from 1963 through to 2008, are an unrivalled design reference resource.

Cover of Manuals Two. ©Unit Editions.

However, examining the requirements of corporate design from the sixties and seventies inevitably got me thinking about the differences in how organisations use design today. At the simplest level, the underlying principles of corporate design still stand; while many of the various technologies of production, manufacture, and distribution have altered significantly, evolved, or have been replaced completely. At the more profound level, it is the ways that companies operate, organise themselves, deliver their services, and communicate with their customers, that have all changed most fundamentally in the last fifty years.

So it is worth asking whether the existing forms of design and brand guidance have kept pace with the ever-changing nature of the commercial entities which are their subject matter.

That line of thinking eventually leads one to enquire: what should designers strive to give as the most useful design guidance for the ever-increasing scope of digital expressions which are central to all experiences delivered by today’s organisations? While organisations will always require some form of brand guidance, I no longer think that itself is sufficient any more. I believe that the most interesting organisations today are having to evolve a more valuable approach of also defining their overall design experience frameworks. These frameworks are more all-encompassing than traditional brand guidance systems.

Four Design Language Examples

I think it is worth investigating some examples of the novel kind of design experience frameworks that I have in mind. These four organisations have each addressed different aspects of the overall corporate challenges to be expressed by design. They form a useful basis for study as they have made much of their design experience framework systems available online. These four sites are all rich in information and each is well worth delving into.

— IBM Design Language
To establish a unified digital experience across many digital products delivered by one global organisation.

— Google Material Design Framework
Towards a consistent digital user experience across many digital products delivered by multiple organisations, (but stewarded by one).

— BBC Global Experience Language
To establish a shared framework for a widely diverse range of content delivered by one global organisation.

— UK GDS Government Service Design Manual
To establish a shared framework for the digital delivery of a whole country’s public services.

(I like the elegance of IBM’s term ‘Design Language’, and will use that for the rest of this article.)

For the multinationals who are now the prime exemplars of these new corporate Design Languages today there are also larger strategic imperatives driving their investment in building these sorts of design systems. As such, their Design Language initiatives are just one strand within those organisation’s broader coordinated strategies: addressing their pressing need to engage with, and leverage, design far more seriously than before. (And also their equally important need to be seen as doing so.)

About Design Languages

The parameters of each Design Language depend on the characteristics of the each organisation’s products or services. For some organisations their Design Language would have more of a visual design emphasis. For others it would primarily address experience design, and for another group it would focus on digital design.

It is important to observe that all of those novel Design Language systems are discrete, and each is separate from their organisation’s brand guidelines. That point may seem somewhat nuanced, but awareness of that distinction is key to understanding the value that is unlocked by such Design Language systems.

Design Languages are primarily about designing the experiences of using an organisation’s products or services. They do not concern themselves with how an organisation communicates, promotes, explains, and sells what it does. Brand Guidelines are about designing those messages and communications around the products and services. The Jobs-To-Be-Done of these two complementary systems are different, so their incentives for excellence diverge.

So comparing them would be of little value. However, I think there is something to be achieved in exploring some contrasts between these two classes of organisational systems. My own professional experience primary concerns brand guidance systems, and my dissatisfaction with their inherent limitations has lead me to investigate Design Language frameworks.

Not every organisation has the need for a Design Language system. In contrasting Design Languages with brand guidance systems, I think that a critical, almost philosophical, difference is that a Design Language must start from the basis that everyone agrees that *design is what the organisation does*. If an organisation’s culture excludes that shared belief, then agreeing upon any shared Design Language is not relevant. Therefore, one significant issue to be aware of is that building any Design Language inevitably requires decisions about how broad or narrow an organisation’s definition of ‘design’ truly is.

Some thoughts on IBM’s Design Language

Starting with the first of the four organisations on my list, I have familiarised myself with the IBM Design Language system. Introduced in 2014, this is a significant organisational effort to collect a corpus of the essential principles of design that apply to IBM’s customer’s experiences of using all IBM products.

IBM delivers hundreds of products with a global organisation of around 380,000 people. Given that IBM is now building a substantial internal design function and is hiring ambitiously to populate that division, it needs a cohesive design system to operate at a global scale, and at the pace of the Internet economy. Explaining the reasons why design has become such a priority now, at this particular point in the lifespan of a one-hundred-year-old organisation, is beyond the scope of this article. For an insightful overview of their design vision and priorities watch this presentation by Phil Gilbert, IBM Design’s General Manager, at this year’s IBEC ‘Better Business By Design’ Conference here in Dublin.



IBM’s new Design Language system aims to bring a renewed focus on human-centred, empathic thinking to what has been an engineering-driven culture. This is now a critical corporate imperative in today’s world, where it is the experience of using digital products and services that is delivering true competitive advantage, more-so than brand reputation or authority. This has not traditionally been the case in the Business-To-Business sectors IBM operates within, but has now become one of the critical metrics for success.

A feature graphic from the IBM Design Language website. ©IBM 2015.

IBM’s Design Language is evolving. It cannot remain static. Their online Design Language resource records the current state of what has to be an ongoing dialogue within IBM. As IBM’s brand guidelines are tools for certain internal audiences, such as marketing managers, and external design and advertising agencies; so their Design Language is a shared framework for IBM’s designers and developers to build the organisation’s products. As such, IBM have structured their Design Language into four sections on Experience Design, Visual Design, Interaction Design, and Front-End Design.

A feature graphic from the IBM Design Language website. ©IBM 2015.

IBM’s Design Language does not instruct their designers how to achieve any particular desired design outcomes, rather it provides a shared conceptual framework. The system is primarily concerned with outlining their high-level design principles and is not intended to be an exhaustive explanation of every aspect of design. (IBM has an ever-growing cohort of trained designers on staff, who will be carrying such design fundamentals around in their heads.) So it is not a suite of integrated design elements providing libraries of digital assets and resources, like Google’s Material Design. Nor is it an out-of-the-box design toolkit, such as Twitter’s Bootstrap. Yet, in publishing most of their framework online, they have also expressed greater ambitions for its wider adoption outside of IBM.

My reaction as I read through the IBM Design Language site was that, although it is already a large corpus of information, I initially thought it was perhaps too high-level and lacking in specifics. In many paragraphs, the authors could have extracted every single sentence to serve as the title for a sub-section detailing how to deliver on that specific statement or goal. However, when I had read and absorbed everything, I understood how their intent was not to specify the answers to all design problems with a toolkit of detailed design patterns. Rather their goal seems to be build an extensible framework which they can improve and refine over time with further inputs as IBM’s designers apply it to ever more real-world products and services.

A feature graphic from the IBM Design Language website. ©IBM 2015.

The significant focus of the IBM Design Language is on design-for-use. They aim to build products which serve as tools that make their customers more effective and efficient. One relevant quote from their framework is that: “a design is not done until a person interacts with it.”

An important outcome of keeping their Design Language at a high-level is that aspects of the IBM Design Language can also inform design thinking. So the organisation can apply their core design methodology to many types of business use cases.

“To emphasise how Design Thinking is not solely about visual design, IBM have used this approach with internal teams creating APIs. In the case of an API there is no UI at all.” 

‘IBM Design: Think before you speak’ – Creative Intellect UK

Additional benefits of developing a Design Language

The key benefit derived from the effort expended in defining a Design Language lies in the organisation’s enhanced design output. That said, they also seem to deliver ancillary benefits as well.

One benefit of a Design Language is as a tool which sets a baseline for all design conversations and feedback within an organisation. Some of its utility must arise from the act of taking certain aspects of design discussions off the table. It must allow the organisation’s design leadership some additional leverage when having the kind of conversations that start like this. “Today we all need to focus on this specific aspect of this design challenge – as our high-level design principles are already in place and so are not for interrogation as part of this project.” Brand guidelines also play the same internal management role for communications design projects.

I can see Design Languages also providing better organisational focus through educating internal clients; by better explaining aspects of what designers do. So that, when evaluating design work, internal clients can hopefully display a greater understanding of the various strata of thinking underlying the design decisions being reviewed. Considering Design Language frameworks through that lens, then they do not need to be exhaustively comprehensive. (Any expanded encyclopedic version, if it was ever to exist, could be a dedicated resource for the organisation’s designers alone.)

Language-In-Progress

The defining characteristic of all Design Languages is that they are never finished. They are an artifact of an ongoing conversation that each organisation is always having with itself. As such, rather than being outsourced to external design agencies or brand consultancies, the onus is on organisations to develop, manage, and steward their own Design Languages. The organisation needs to own design.

The macro-trend of the resurgence, increasing relevance, and importance of in-house design departments is a significant topic I have addressed in previous posts and will return to again. John Maeda recently published an insightful contribution to that ongoing discussion: Why Design Matters More than Moore’s Law.

The potential of Design Languages

The theoretical ideal of an organisation’s brand guidance system is as a platform for establishing a complete, coordinated, and coherent suite of messages, communications, and brand experiences. It must strike a fine balance between the quotidian, tactical, operational requirements and the long-term vision and goals of the organisation.

Unfortunately, in practise, many brand guidelines become used politically. Rather than opening up the complete range of possible expressions within any brand framework, they can become more focused on limiting options. Effectively, they become used as one mechanism to corral the divergent incentives and strategy taxes which exist within the organisation’s power structures. Robert Jones, the Head of New Thinking at Wolff Olins, has written about this limitation of brand management in companies lacking a shared unity of purpose.

It most likely may be naive to imagine that corporate Design Languages can deliver on some of the ideals which brand guidance systems still struggle to achieve. Particularly given that such design initiatives are inevitably subject to the same organisational political forces that influence brand management activities. Yet perhaps the fact that Design Languages have user-centred mindsets embedded within their foundations may make them less prone to being undermined by organisational priorities.

To me the most interesting aspect of the potential of  Design Languages lies in applying design thinking, methods and insight to the core of what organisations do as opposed to what they tell people about what they do. Writing as someone who enjoys problems requiring systems-thinking solutions, I am fascinated by the intellectual endeavour involved in developing a complete Design Language. It is a significant challenge; one I would relish contributing to.

Home page for IBM’s example designs section. ©2015 IBM.

Instagram and the Startup Branding Conundrum

At the time it was acquired by Facebook in April of this year, Instagram was given a greater valuation than The New York Times (1). Working within the branding industry I find that have trained myself to operate within an accepted convention that the optimum path to business success involves developing and deploying the full suite of conventional branding and marketing tools.

The Branding Design Consultant worldview holds that, in addition to an essential coherent brand story and the necessary connection with its customers, a company also requires the complete formal apparatus of brand identity assets, brand guidance systems, and brand tone-of-voice to achieve optimal effectiveness. What intrigues me is how high potential technology startups can now short-circuit, or even dispense with, most of this apparatus and methodology — and sometimes do so on a dramatic scale.

Logotype Similarities #7429

Exhibit A: Perla logotype for Aldi’s own-brand toothpaste.

Exhibit B: Laya logotype for rebranded Quinn Healthcare.

Looking at the ‘a’ characters, this seems to be a popular choice of typeface this year…

All pairs in the ‘Logotype Similarities’ series are presented without comment and without drawing any conclusions.

Michael Bierut: Seven Home Truths

Michael Bierut. Photo: Con Kennedy

Pentagram partner Michael Bierut spoke on the second day of the Offset 2012 in Dublin in March. His insightful, inspiring and entertaining presentation was structured around seven home truths which he had uncovered over the course of his design career at Pentagram.

I am posting his seven home truths here with visual references to each case study as an aide memoire for myself more than anything else. No further comment is necessary.

Notes on the Wim Crouwel Retrospective

I recently attended the major Wim Crouwel retrospective exhibition at the Design Museum in London. It was in inspiring look at a fascinating body of work. Here are some thoughts and observations from considering the work on display.

The work collected in this exhibition tells me a story of a designer leading his clients. His aesthetic choices always standing somewhat apart from, and superior to, his client’s briefs. The formal experimentation comes before the message. There is a tangible sense of Crouwel pursuing his personal design theories and interests and working out a unique visual language. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It makes me think about the role of the designer as a leader, as a pathfinder, and as an investigator. (Even if Crouwel himself does seem to perceive himself as the deliverer of objective responses to those briefs. Although I do not see that.) To co-opt a somewhat overused design metaphor, he is not designing the perfect translucent glass to contain the water of the message. Crouwel’s work has different ambitions than that.

Corporate identity systems 
Crouwel’s corporate work exemplifies exemplifies a strict modernist graphic-led school of corporate identity. His methodology starts from a strong European sensibility in contrast to the more American approach of branding-led corporate identities. It is a visual layer of systematisation and pattern and colour. His aesthetic presents as predominantly logic-based rather than emotional. His is a rational and orderly universe. As the Designer (with a capital D) he considers the matter in hand, works everything out systematically and then all of the required elements slot precisely into their preordained places. His approach to corporate identity is very much a pattern language. It is concerned with corporate identification through badging and definition, occasionally to the expense of the specific messages to be communicated.

Brand marks 
His predominant approach to designing corporate marks is founded on mathematical, geometric, and angular symbols. He has explored this approach comprehensively throughout his career. So much so that the inherent limitations are readily apparent in this exhibition. His mark for SHV is a 45 degree triangle. His Teleac mark is a circle within a bisected square. Working at this level of graphic abstraction, there is always the danger of painting yourself into a corner over time with nowhere left to go. Ultimately you end up arriving at symbols such as the Deutsche Bank mark: a diagonal line within a square. How much useful differentiation can be achieved in the marketplace once every business entity has adopted a symbol based on some combination of Platonic shapes and Euclidean geometry? The pitfall of relentlessly and endlessly drilling-down within the single solution set of reductionist geometric brand marks is that you end up with a suite of visual identities which are so minimal that they cannot help but tend towards the generic. That leaves the downstream design teams in a situation where it is only in the manner of how they choose to use those generic symbols in application that provides the unique signifying aspects of each corporate identity system. At that point the relevant questions then become: how complex is that visual system which you need to construct around the central corporate symbol, and how useful and feasible is that system to operate? Unfortunately, the full details of the broader implementation of Crouwel’s identity systems is mostly not shown at this exhibition beyond a set of brand manuals.

Abbé Museum Posters 
In the exhibition space of the Design Museum Crouwel’s striking poster designs came off better than his corporate identity work. There is never any comparison to seeing actual printed examples of large size posters to gain the true sense of their visual impact. This suite of posters deploys a visual language of words and typography, not of imagery. It is a formalist language and expects its audience to be visually literate to a certain degree of sophistication. Any humour or emotion in the work is restrained within visual playfulness and formal experimentation. His work in corporate identity design has to have far broader appeal and be less niche, it cannot be as coded. The inventive use of flat solid colours was refreshing to my eyes. Where so much of today’s printed design work tends towards a reliance on four-colour process printing and everything seems overly-graduated and shaded. It was inspiring to be reminded how much can be achieved with just two flat colours and overlaying inks, always working within strict technical limitations.

These two amusing anecdotes were described within the exhibition. In 1973 Crouwel redesigned the Dutch phone book and typeset it in all-lowercase letters. Talk about a quintessential designer-led move. Unfortunately it was not well-received. They had to reprint it typeset back into the traditional style. In 1974 Jan Van Toorn designed a prominent Dutch calendar. Van Toorn’s aesthetic choices so offended Crouwel that he redesigned the entire calendar in a Modernist mode and then sent it to Van Toorn — along with his critique of the original design and justifying his improvements. So he is obviously an opinionated man.

One final impression that I gleaned from this exhibition is just how influential Crouwel’s work and the broader Dutch school was on a lot of the design work being produced in Dublin in the late eighties and early nineties, back when I was in NCAD and starting my career.

Implications of Multi-Variant Brand Mark Systems

© City of Melbourne

© London Olympics

© MIT Media Lab

Technology now supports the implementation of complex brand identity systems where the most fundamental elements, such as the brand mark, may now readily have multiple variations (examples include MIT Media Lab, Aol and London 2012 identities). In practice, what is the trade-off between the flexibility and freedom of expression and the overhead of time and resources needed to make such identity systems work effectively?

Nine Recommended Books on Branding

I have curated this short list of recommended books on brands, brand design and other related branding issues for a lecture on corporate identity and branding that I am giving at the School of Art, Design and Printing in the Dublin Institute of Technology. I am sharing it here as it may be of broader interest.

Achieve Better Value From Your Design Spend

In today's market conditions, organisations need to achieve maximum value from their creative agencies. By investigating cost over-runs on design projects, I have identified opportunities for efficiencies and savings. Internal practices and behaviours can add inefficiencies and costs to the relationship between you and your creative agencies. Putting these suggestions into practice may result in superior outcomes for less expense.

Assess current design investment
Review where your resources are being spent on design today. Are all of your current communications materials required? Have any recurring design projects outlasted their usefulness? Evaluate all outputs of those projects and consider which you can abandon.

Rationalise brand identity
Many organisations still use redundant variations within their brand identity, with non-standard variations of logos and symbols developing over time and replication of effort in designed materials; from low-cost items such as business cards, to high-cost investments like websites. Standardise the design and centralise the production of your communications collateral.

Rationalise sub-brands
Organisations succumb to logo-creep, whereby individual units, departments and projects develop their own identities. How much is it costing you to maintain these? Are they detracting from your core brand identity? Which can you dispose of? Of those remaining, have you clarified and standardised their relationship with your core brand identity to manage them most efficiently?

Standardise core design decisions
If you do not have identity management usage guidelines, now is the time to invest in this essential management tool. Think of a concise, relevant document bringing tangible benefits; not a massive folder taking six months to produce. Many organisations constantly re-invent the wheel when using the core elements of their brand identity. Make fundamental decisions about how your brand identity is to be used and then record them. The instant benefit is that this allows your people to concentrate on important decisions about content, rather than discussing logo sizes.

Clarify project objectives
In my experience the single greatest cause of cost over-runs on design projects is additional chargeable hours being added when briefs change mid-stream, often due to differences of opinion within the client organisation. ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ is too often the mantra. Take extra time at the beginning to organise your thinking and clarify your project’s objectives with all relevant parties. Doing so ensures you get best value from your agency’s time.

Pursue value-added creative services
Are your creative agencies merely delivering on what you asked for, or are they truly adding value? Does their business insight help you to achieve your communication goals? Successful creative relationships are those where the client has the most trust in their agency. Seek out agencies who give you the full benefit of their thinking and experience and offer a useful external perspective that challenges your preconceptions.

Set realistic time-lines
Project time-lines often over-run without planning for internal decision-making requirements. Always factor in your internal reviews, particularly for executive sign-offs. Will your project need board approval? If so, then integrate upcoming board meetings into your schedule. Often an eight-week project can stop dead for weeks awaiting the next monthly board meeting.

Maintain momentum
Review internal decision-making practices. How many layers are in place? Are there any you can bypass? Design projects benefit from focus and clarity in decision-making. Drawn-out review processes can create more heat than light. If a project disappears into a maze of sub-committees, the creative impetus may have dissipated when work restarts months later.

Have your agencies only do things once
Certain definable tasks, such as typesetting, always take a certain number of man-hours. Who gains if your agency has to charge for typesetting a second time because of a rewrite? If people within your organisation will not review text until they see a fully typeset layout, perhaps it is time they review their own practices.

—
My article was originally published in the September 2008 edition of Business Plus magazine.

Flexible Branding And Brand Governance

The challenge of Flexible Branding requires organisations to focus on brand governance not on brand mechanics. 
In all professions new ideas come along that stir things up amongst practitioners. Currently there is a lively discussion within the branding profession about the merits of a new category of what we can call ‘Flexible Branding’ corporate identity systems in contrast to those of traditional ‘Static Branding’ corporate identity systems. 

What is Flexible Branding?

In essence Flexible Branding is a way of implementing large-scale brand identity programmes which leverages the affordances of the complete range of brand channels and delivery technologies now available today. Rather than having a set of monolithic static design standards as its primary focus it is about having one consistent core idea at the heart of the brand, delivered with a more diverse range of variable visual expressions of that core idea.

Where can you see Flexible Branding in practice today? 

The international branding consultancy Wolff Olins is a key proponent of this new methodology and is implementing Flexible Branding systems for high-profile organisations worldwide. Their, mostly misunderstood, brand identity system for the 2012 Olympics works primarily as a visual theme that is adopted and co-opted by its myriad partners and is then customised to their each of their needs. The (Product) Red brand is probably the highest-profile example of a Flexible Branding system that is engineered specifically to accommodate and co-exist with multiple brand partners. Some of the world’s premier brands, like Apple, American Express and Gap, have already released products within the (Product) Red branding framework.

In many regards the practice of Flexible Branding is not new. Television stations have already been using some variant of this approach in different forms over many years. Their unique brand identities have always had to co-exist with those of their programmes and also have had to accommodate diverse ranges of subject material. Think of the ways that the classic BBC2 and MTV brand marks of the eighties and nineties morphed to suit their programming.

Just to be clear: Flexible Brand identities are the opposite of uncoordinated, unmanaged and ad-hoc brand identities. Flexible Branding is not analogous to the scenario whereby the new Marketing Manager (or worse, the new agency Art Director) makes changes to an organisation’s brand identity for internal political reasons to make their impression or to override their predecessor’s work. Nor is Flexible Branding analogous to those brands that use multiple unintentional variations of their brand identity through simple mismanagement, disorganisation or inertia.

Taking an optimistic stance, there can seem to be a strong aspect of what could be called ‘selfless branding’ underlining the core philosophy informing the development of this approach to branding. While technological developments and cultural trends are facilitating its adoption, the key internal driver has to be an understanding of, and acceptance of, the more nuanced and sophisticated relationships between different organisation’s brands. Some of the new realities of the way businesses operate imply a greater degree of mutually beneficial inclusivity. This inclusivity runs counter-intuitive to the mindset where brands are used to build a power-base or to establish a zone of exclusion.

The majority of brand identities are still managed using a command-and-control mindset, with the brand as a monolith and where consistency is the ideal. Aspects of this approach will remain necessary, since so many organisations have fragmented and uncoordinated brand identities. Clarity, coherence and systematic thinking are always going to be required, but they are now a hygiene factor rather than a unique differentiator. The defining branding challenges today are the requirements for flexibility that are now part of the marketing mix.

In addition to their primary marketing message, many branded communications now also have to carry the weight of a secondary function expressing all of the various relationships between the different partner organisations; each of varying stature and degrees of importance. You would be surprised at how much time effort and expense goes into coordinating and negotiating all of the compromises required.

It would be risky to dismiss Flexible Branding as merely designer’s folly, rather it is one valid response to the multi-faceted marketing environments that brands now have to operate in. That said, letting it all hang out creatively and being opportunistic and whimsical with your brand is not what this is approach is about either. I foresee many marketers falling into the trap of adopting the surface trappings of Flexible Branding without grappling with the underlying organisational, structural and cultural foundations that must be in place to deliver on this.

Whither conformity?

Thinking in terms of templates and standardised structures will get you to a certain point, but when you need to move up to the next level, they can hold you back by stifling innovation. It is that old truism that you need to know the rules before you break them.

Great brands always make whatever they do look effortless. Deceptively effortless. Such great brands are not template or consistency-driven. Rather, their appearance can be enjoyably diverse in application, but their core brand idea always, always, shines through.

Confident world-class brands simplify consistently and constantly. Whenever their internal organisational structures may have become visible in their marketing, they reel it back in and present one unified face to the world. This often requires substantial effort behind the scenes to make it work and sophisticated marketing skills to manage. It also needs clarity, direction, vision and focus across the whole organisation: in short Brand Governance.

Three levels of brand management

It can be useful to use a three-level hierarchy to structure your organisation to best steward your brand.

Firstly there is the Operational level. This is where your brand assets are distributed and brand management tools, such as your brand manuals, are used to inform and to monitor applications. Historically, this tactical level has been given the greatest attention and resources.

Above that, at the Strategic level, are your brand processes and policies that direct your operational decisions. Discussions at this level could include architectural questions such as: when do you create a new sub-brand; which parts of your organisation have their own distinct brand variants; and do those relate to your master brand? This is the territory that has expanded most over the last twenty years, fueled by brand consultancies and strategic branding advisers.

The third Brand Governance level is where ownership and stewardship of your fundamental brand idea ultimately resides. Just as corporate governance resides with your board to minimise risk and ensure effective oversight of your organisation, so should the governance of your brand lie with the most senior personnel who have the ability to effect change across the whole organisation and the authority to ensure that it actually happens. Do you have a Director Of Brand on your Board?

It is evident that the practices of branding are going to become more complex to manage within large organisations as branding becomes more flexible. It will need wisdom and vision to steward brands and create optimal value in the long-term. Thus it becomes essential that brand responsibility evolves upwards within your organisation. Brand Governance can help overcome problems at the operational level, such as where branding could be co-opted as a tool for internal power-play and castle-building.

A better compass

While some rule-based systems will always be required at the Operational level. Existing rule-based methods of brand management can reach their limitations when confronted with the complexities and the flexibility required today. Increasingly brands may have to do a lot of their development in public as the overall pace of business accelerates. Drafting comprehensive brand management documents which aim to foresee all possible eventualities has always had an element of crystal-ball-gazing about it. Even more so today when you do not have the time or the luxury to construct the perfect theoretical branding system before putting it into operation. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has an axiom that “real artists ship”, and so it is with branding. Get it working, then get it out the door, get feedback and iterate to improve. Repeat, repeat and repeat.

When your organisation operates in the Strategic and Governance levels of branding everything becomes far more subjective. Branding guidelines, not rules, are what you require here. You need a good compass because there is no map. To succeed you need to build-in the ability to change and evolve your brand at the Operational level and to react tactically. In this ever-shifting landscape you will depend on strong, coherent Brand Governance so that you never lose sight of your ultimate goal.

Have a look at this recent brand identity for The Southbank Centre in London, also by Wolff Olins. Its visual appearance is constructed uniquely for each individual application from a defined suite of visual elements.

The Google brand revels in the flexibility of adding date-specific themes to their search page logotype: from the seasonal Christmas and Saint Patrick's Day themes, to the more unexpected and idiosyncratic – such as the fiftieth anniversary of the Lego brick.

As a starting point, step back and think about your own brand in a different way. While the Flexible Branding approach resolves some challenging branding issues, it is not suitable for all use-cases. But, if your brand has a particularly broad variety of visual applications across multiple channels and if your brand consistently needs to operate in varying degrees of association with many other brands, then a Flexible Branding methodology may prove beneficial.

Where so many organisations seem under-resourced to manage their existing static brands, how many shall be willing to commit to the overheads of actively managing Flexible Brands? The primary overhead being the higher calibre of marketer that will be required. Principally, to succeed at the top level you can only hire marketers who empathise with, and have the faculty to realise, the true potential of your brand. Furthermore, in the long-term, this can not ever apply just to your brand managers and marketers, but to every single individual who delivers your brand experience.

The key takeaway here is that the best marketers need to think more like entrepreneurs than bureaucrats: experimenting, revising and iterating, rather than laying-down blueprints intended to remain inviolate for years. While it may be seen as somewhat self-defeating for someone in my position as a Brand Consultant to state this in print: it is axiomatic that great brands are built by great companies and not by great brand consultancies.

Postscript – Relevance of Flexible Branding to State agencies

State-related brand identities operate within a constellation of co-dependent, inter-related brands. They rarely ever even appear on their own any more, but are always supported by partner brands, funding bodies, inter-departmental initiatives and the like. In my experience the interplay between all of these brand identities is awkward at best and confrontational at worst. Too often, there is an unconstructive 'battle of the brand manuals' where competing suites of co-branding statutes have to be reconciled. Obviously this is far from the optimal use of everyone’s time and energy. In this context it can be informative to learn from innovative brand thinking that has met and overcome similar challenges in realms outside of the State sector. The principles of Flexible Branding may prove to have beneficial application to many State agency corporate identities. Whether the multiple organisational and political agendas in play could ever make such a brand outcome achievable is another matter altogether.

Update
I revisited this topic in 2011 with a post about the time and resources needed to implement a Flexible Brand Identity: Implications Of Multi-Variant Brand Mark Systems.

Identity Design Systems And Co-branding

Considered thinking about corporate identity today tends towards systems with some capacity for formal play built into them, rather than merely focusing on maximising uniformity, as tended to be preferred before. This can be delivered on a sliding scale. At its simplest iteration it means building in enough variety to allow for appropriate modulated treatments in different scenarios. All the way up to very sophisticated, free-flowing identity systems.

One sophisticated approach is where I have developed a suite of decision-making trees for my client for various applications. ‘If the advert format is tall and narrow and the constituent branding elements required are X, Y and Z, then the correct approach to using them falls within this class of patterns.’ This is a scenario where I am showing the user conditions and matching those with their desired outcomes and asking them to make some decisions as to how best to achieve those outcomes within the palette of opportunities available to them. I like to think of it as the designer’s role as one of defining the idea-space of the identity system and then letting its users explore the landscape within that topography.

Contrast that concept with what so many organizations still want, which is branding equivalent of lego blocks. All of the visual elements locked together in one immobile set of ratios and relationships that can merely be dropped into place. The design equivalent of ‘place tab A into slot B’. This methodology results in co-branding relationships that are consistent across all applications, but it is a crude sort of consistency. Almost by definition this is going to be inappropriate (or at least sub-optimal) in many many applications.

What this often boils down to operationally is, where do you want the expertise to lie along the chain of responsibility? Or where does the organisation choose to deploy its resources. If an organisation wants its most junior personnel to knock together documents and adverts using modular graphics in MS Word, that is a valid choice for them. But it seems unrealistic, in that scenario, for them to then be concerned about measuring the ‘brand efficiency’ of their outputs. The greater fallacy is then believing that the solution to the problem is to build better templates. Or, as it is often phrased ‘templates that are easier to use’.

I will add more posts about this topic as I build out my thinking...

A4 Marketing

“Today I will be showing you all how to make your very own marketing communications. All that you will need to get started is one sheet of A4-sized paper (white, or coloured if you prefer), your very own laser-printer and one roll of sticky tape...”

After conducting a number of visual audit projects over the last two years, within a broad mix of retail, banking, and office environments, I have identified one of the most unsung, yet all-prevalent, marketing and communication channels in use today. Sure your Creative Agencies will try to talk you into investing in ambient media, viral marketing, corporate blogging, SMS advertising or building a virtual showroom within Second Life. Whatever. Put all of that high-end marketing to one side — the real ambient medium du-jour is the humble A4 laser-printed page.
I have encountered the same scenarios in every location that I have audited. Both in supposedly visually managed customer-facing environments, such as bank branches and High Street retailers, and in more visually cluttered environments, such as offices. Look around you, there are always lots of A4 pages taped up everywhere. The desktop publishing revolution is alive and well and is now part of our environment
Some of the most blatant examples are notice boards choked with a collage of current and outdated pages accreted since the last big clean-up. Any editing and prioritising of notices is usually non-existent. When everything is equally important then nothing is really communicated.
Why does this happen? Often it is a case of people being proactive and attempting to be helpful to their customers: trying to pre-empt and answer common questions. Not so helpful are the ‘go-away’ signs that only serve to make the customer feel like a nuisance.
Other scenarios involve staff on the ground having to address some larger design issues which fall outside of their immediate remit and are imposed from higher up the corporate hierarchy. I have seen self-service kiosks where the affordances of the chosen user interface and product design were so counter-intuitive that handmade instruction signs had been taped onto the terminals to somehow manage the barrage of queries about how to use them. Ad-hoc directional signs also fall into this category (particularly memorable are the delightful sort with multiple-angled or U-shaped arrows).
Microsoft Word is the default design tool for these A4 Marketers. The exquisite feature that produces such beautiful pseudo three-dimensional headlines is particularly beloved of the more creatively-inclined of these ad-hoc marketers.
Unfortunately, on the client side, too many corporate identity teams see this sort of tactical messaging as unworthy of their attention. This is a mistake. If you do not give staff appropriate and useful tools to address their needs they are going to find their own way. Then on the designer side the unpalatable truth is that, in my experience, most designers have little or no facility with Microsoft Word. (Mea culpa.) In their view, if a template file is not being constructed in Adobe InDesign or Quark XPress then it is not worth their time.
If you are happy with your client’s customers experiencing a lot of their contact with your client’s visual identity in the form of centred all-capitals instructions set in Times New Roman Bold (or even better, Comic Book Sans) then you are not doing your job. I believe there is an unmet requirement for identity management systems that include mechanisms addressing the ad-hoc communicative needs of staff. Facilitated via a suite of appropriate digital templates, useful examples and straightforward guidelines or frameworks. The availability and distribution of these ought to be centrally managed, but their use should be decentralised throughout the organisation.
Delicious Tags: Branding | Corporate Identity | Graphic Design
Technorati Tags: Branding | Corporate Identity | Graphic Design

It Is All Too Similar, And Yet It Is All Too Dissimilar...

Is your brand undergoing a period of consolidation or diversification? I have observed this organisational pattern where the approach to brand identity management follows a cycle over five to ten years: consolidation, followed by gradual drift towards diversification, then re-consolidation. It can be useful to examine where your organisation is positioned on that continuum.

The benefit of the O2 visual branding system is that it has become instantly recognisable to consumers. All you really need are some shades of dark blue and some bubbles and people will know that it is a communication from O2.* However, to achieve such a high level of recognition involves some interesting trade-offs on the marketing and design side of the equation.

As this class of strongly homogeneous and distinctive visual style is excellent at presenting the master corporate brand, it must, of consequence, be weaker at separating out individual products, services and offers. Think about it: the suite of posters for pre-pay mobile offers that you see in O2 store fronts this week are never going to be all that visually different from the preceding week’s posters for a different service offering. This implies that O2’s marketing teams are going to have to work harder coming up with the core ideas associated with promoting each of their individual products and services.

In my experience, one of the key reasons why visual brand identity systems devolve into inconsistency is that product managers (or whomever owns the organisational briefs informing the marketing department's creative briefs) are often measured by their results at the level of their products and, crucially, not at the level of overall brand performance. This implies that they have some incentive to make the creative work associated with their personal fiefdom as different from the master system as they can get away with. This is why so many design briefs begin with some variation of “...this new product/service/widget is very special and unique and really needs a design that stands part from, and above, whatever we happen to be doing over here, over there, and also over there...”

This push-and-pull between (for lack of two clearer terms) the top-down design centralisation imperative and the bottom-up design autonomy impulse from the tactical managers is a key generator of many design and branding briefs.

Hypothetically, this is how that organisational dynamic typically plays out.

Firstly, the head of Corporate Marketing looks at the collective output of the company and throws her arms up in despair. To her everything has become inconsistent, it looks more like the output of a group of companies rather than the one coherent corporate entity that she needs to communicate.

Consumer research can often reinforce her opinion. Although when brands have a strong and distinctive, yet relatively inflexible, visual system, consumer research often reveals a desire for some more diversity between the individual marketing elements. Conversely, a more varied, looser visual system usually researches as needing more consistency to help it all hang together. (Go figure.)

To resolve this inconsistent brand identity drift, a detailed brief for a new Unified Visual Style becomes the basis for a tender process. A branding or design consultancy is commissioned and produces the new visual system which then unites the design of all of the communications material to the required degree. This new identity system rationalises and coordinates the current state of the organisation’s master brand and sub-brands. It reflects the current structures of the organisation. If the brand consultants do their job, it will be forward-looking, with as much future-proofing built in as is feasible. Obviously no-one has a crystal ball. For example, how many brand guidance systems can have factored in the arrival of the new social media applications at this stage?

* Disclosure
I tend to use O2 as my example when discussing this topic, as I find that their established visual style has such high recognition that everyone knows what I am referring to. BFK has done some work for O2 in the past. However, as of this writing in 2007, I have not dealt with anyone in that organisation in more than three years.

Speak To Me/The Emotional Type

Dalton Maag Exhibition 03
Originally uploaded by Aiden Kenny.

“How many flavours of vanilla do you want?” — Bruno Maag.

I brought the studio over to the Image Now Gallery for a look at the Dalton Maag typography exhibition ‘Speak To Me’. It was very interesting to see the complete typeface creation process from initial rough sketches on A3 marker pads all the way through to detailed technical film tests.

We also attended Bruno Maag’s lecture ‘The Emotional Type’ at DIT in Mountjoy Squrae. The talk was well titled, as he is an emotional and animated speaker. It is always good to see someone so passionate about what they do. I also think that we always need to have such monomaniacal characters around who obsess about details like the inconsistencies of the diagonal strokes in the light-weight characters of the headline font for The Guardian newspaper, and where the pixels fall in the lowercase O when they are displayed in our interactive television guides. Admittedly I am probably more interested in type and typography than most, but I don’t ever think I would have the mindset to grind my way through the creation process involved in producing the 700-odd characters he was talking about for the standard four-weight Latin A font package he produces for most of his clients.

His talk was wide-ranging in its scope and fairly humorous in spots: touching on some non-conventional topics as typo-porn, the joys of metal type and going to the UK National Type Library and fondling a flirty Fette Fraktur. Indeed.

We also learned why never never to use Helvetica (never) and why if everyone used the nigh-perfect, yet arid, Univers then Bruno would be out of a job. London Underground and Typhoo Tea did not fare well under his withering gaze either.

The headline quote above was his response when asked about the role of custom font creation in brand identity programmes and the observation that so much of that work today is variation around a theme of ‘warm, soft and friendly’ humanist sans-serif typefaces.

Hasta La Vista (Baby)

Microsoft launches Vista into the consumer market today. What seems curious is that there is little or no big print media push on the launch day. I had a look in this morning’s Financial Times and The Irish Times and there are no adverts at all, certainly none of the full-page extravaganzas that you might expect based on previous launches, just some small editorial in the business sections. Somewhere at home, I have kept the edition of the FT from the day that Windows95 was launched. I am working from memory here, but the reason that I held on to it was that not only did Redmond run a four-page centre spread advertorial, but Apple also ran interference with a double page ad for MacOS and IBM ran another double page for OS2/Warp. (Now that takes me back.)
It seem that in today’s marketplace the arrival of a new OS is just not as remarkable an event as it once was, even five years after the previous major iteration of Windows. I imagine that the majority of the consumer market is going to migrate to Vista by upgrading their hardware rather than purchasing the boxed OS off the shelf at PCWorld. I also find myself agreeing with those commentators who predict that this may turn out to be the last big Microsoft OS launch proper, with their future model being one of more frequent incremental iterations pushed out over the internet. The question then arises as to whether the need to create marketable brand identities for OS product releases will evaporate in that future. For example, I do not know whether I am running Gmail 2.6, or Gmail 3.1, or Gmail Ultimate Edition, as it is always just essential Gmail to me. The cloud is always up-to-date.

Silver At GDBA Design Awards 2006

They even made the light bulb orange this year.

BFK and UCD took the silver award in the primary corporate identity category at the Irish Design Effectiveness Awards last night. Our rebranding of UCD was recognised for the contribution it has made to the university’s new focus and to achieving its strategic objectives. I got to collect the award with Eilis O’Brien from UCD, and the craic was good in Jurys last night. Although David McWilliams did himself no favours as compère, with a rambling stream-of-conscious unscripted riff drawing some analogy between the design business and a nostalgic reverie about shifting girls at the Wesley disco. After George Hook crashed and burned two years ago, this event is getting a bit of a track record for hosts who start off with “I do not know anything about design, but let me tell you what I think...” and then go rapidly downhill from there. However, despite that it was a good night.

Adding this year’s award to the two silvers we won in the corporate identity category last year, we are now establishing the consistent track record in the category that I set out to achieve. We have five IDEA awards in our boardroom at this stage. Everyone in the company contributed something of value to our work for UCD, so well done all round.

Design Week finishes up tonight with Richard Seymour speaking at the Sugar Club. My abiding image of Mr Seymour is of him designing a motorbike on his Channel 4 programme by (skilfully) attacking a block of styro-foam with a chainsaw! On that basis I expect some attitude and personality overlaid on an informative lecture.

Technorati Tags: BFK | UCD | GDBA | Corporate Identity | Branding

‘Control’ Is Not Control

Dave posted some interesting thoughts over at the Type4Screen blog.
“Traditionally good typographic design has been all about control of the page, but designing for ever-changing content on multiple screen types running multiple browsers set to multiple widths on multiple OS’s offers anything but control.”

Reading this makes me realise some of the cross-overs between the role of today’s electronic media designer and the corporate identity aspect of being a brand designer. In essence, both are designing more by describing and defining the visual space within which a brand or website potentially expresses itself, rather than by designing the individual expressions therein. To succeed you need to cecede some control from the centre and allow interpretation at the periphery.

For the electronic media designer, her design decisions are codified in electronic style sheets and templates that are interpreted (more-or-less consistently) by software, with pages then generated dynamically by content management systems. In the case of the corporate identity designer, her guidelines are more loosely interpreted in the minds of company personnel and of their agencies: an ever-expanding cadre of design, advertising, web, marketing, events and PR companies. Reflecting the fluidity and pace of today’s business realities, the form and content of today’s corporate identity guidelines is far more streamlined than those fractally-detailed doorstop-sized publications that were popular up to the nineties. Now there is much more emphasis on the establishing the unique principles which underlie the visual system, rather than on specifying every design feature down to the nth degree. An analogy which I am fond of is that it is about mapping out the general area of potential. Pointing people in the right direction and then letting them explore the terrain to find their own best solutions within that space. It is about defining the gamut of potentiality. You need to build in enough flexibility to accommodate the range of potential applications and enough consistency to create a cumulative impression in the minds of your audience.

Moving up a level, this can all be seen as another manifestation of the long-established trend within the overall discipline of management away from the traditional ‘Commander and Controller’ role towards a mentoring role that works to create an environment where people can best achieve their own potential.
Look beyond the design industry, similar ideas are being utilised in broader contexts. The idea of giving over some control is often the central tenet of today’s most disruptive business models. Increasingly, the most innovation and the greatest growth is in those websites which establish a framework for, and then facilitate the creation of, user-generated content. I am thinking here of the likes of Blogger, YouTube, Delicious, Squidoo, Digg, Facebook, and various other Web 2.0 innovators.

To quote Douglas Coupland: “Control is not control”.

Can Do How Now?

Are the blogosphere and tagspace already fostering an evolutionary response in corporate verbal identity?Looking at the new DHL adverts in the last few week’s editions of The Economist, with their high-impact Hollywood-blockbuster aesthetic, I was intrigued by the organisation’s new corporate positioning statement: ‘The Do-How People’.

The syntax of this sentence jars with me. My first thought was that perhaps it reads better in the original German. The communicative intent is obviously an organisation that combines a ‘can-do’ spirit with some serious ‘know-how’. That the ‘Do-How’ resonates with the D and H in DHL, adds the mnemonic hook that justifies the brand consultant’s fee.

But really: ‘Do-How’? Surely there must be more elegant ways of expressing the desired concept? In these instances I always ask what underlying strategy would inform the decision to agree on that particular form of words?

In this instance, is it possible that this may soon become related to ‘tagging’ the corporate brand? One of the core ideas that I took away from Bruce Sterling’s E-Tech keynote speech was that of naming your concepts so that they are tag-able as much as Google-able. (Bear with me regarding those hyphens.) A quick check against Sterling’s ‘Spime’ meme on Technorati demonstrates how his naming strategy successfully facilitates my joining the conversations about that topic.

By implication, stewarding a brand today also means making it tag-able. Think about the Corporate Marketing function at most large multinationals, their corporate name is a given and unlikely to change soon. When their corporate name functions as a tag in the online environment today, it will be equally denoting critical conversations as well as favourable conversations. (The most clichéd example being the ‘Why X-Corp Sucks’ class of web page.) So in this environment, a novel tactical strapline can become a more useful asset than was previously the case. And, I suspect, the more novel it is then so much the better. We may begin to see a Darwinian evolution of somewhat ungainly taglines as brands compete to put up some bait for the folksonomies.

Getting back to ‘Do-How’ as a novel tag. A quick Technorati tag search for both the ‘Know-How’ and ‘Can-Do’ tags leads to a lot of varied content. Unfortunately a similar search for ‘Do-How’ tags does not yet lead to anything related to what people are saying about DHL today.

Perhaps now is the time to revive the humble word ‘Tagline’? It has fallen out of usage in favour of the more grandiose-sounding and value-added flavours such as ‘Corporate Positioning Statement’.

Delicious Tags: Branding | Corporate Identity | Tagline | Folksonomy | Tags | Do-How
Technorati Tags: Branding | Corporate+Identity | Tagline | Folksonomy | Tags | Do-How

Vodafone Brand Mark Evolution

I see that Vodafone have refreshed their brand mark. A poster outside Clonsilla train station featuring the new three-dimensional, gradient-shaded iteration of their quote-mark symbol got my attention yesterday. A bit of digging on Wikipedia reveals that ‘Vodafone is gradually phasing-in the new 3D logo version in some countries’.


I had already noticed that Vodafone have been implementing a new bespoke corporate typeface over the last few months. This has followed in the wake of their make the most of now repositioning. What caught my eye at the time was that they had implemented their new typeface all the way through to the text in the routine promotional form letters that I receive as a customer. It is too often the case (due to licensing costs) that the New Corporate Typeface only ever lives in above-the-line and agency-created communications, while the vast majority of direct customer interaction remains typeset in some pre-installed Arial-esque font family. (For that reason, I would be interested in seeing Vodafone’s updated suite of presentation templates.)

A more subtle visual evolution has been their switch in emphasis from communications that predominately feature red with white elements reversed out, to a white field with red elements overlaid. Which has the effect of dialing back the cumulative impression of their brand from being overtly brash to a somewhat more considered tone.

This subsequent move to typeset their logotype in this new typeface (Vodafone Sans?) and refresh the treatment of their symbol surprised me at first. But after some thought, I can see the benefits it will bring them. One of the increasingly key functions of their brand mark will be as an element within the on-screen interface of the next iteration of consumer smartphones. Their old logotype with its clever little quote-marks-within-the counters motif is just not going to execute effectively given the limitations in the pixel-scarce environment of today’s technology.


As all of the mobile operators rush to brand their user’s experience of online services accessed wirelessly, having a symbol that can work equally well as an icon, and uses some of the aesthetic tropes of today’s 3D desktops icons, is no bad thing. Picture this symbol as an icon on your desktop beside Skype. In design terms there is a definite nod towards Doug Hamilton’s identity for Three in the evolution of the quote symbol. Three’s brand mark concept of a brushed metallic, technological exterior revealing a colourful, communicative heart seems equally applicable to this new quote mark treatment. I also see echoes of the SonyEricsson sphere. A symbol that is most effective when it is realised in three dimensions on mobile handsets. How long before the current screen-printed Vodafone branding on handsets is replaced by such integral fabricated branding? Especially considering the escalating power struggle between the handset makers and the operators and the shift represented by Vodafone’s own-branded ‘Simply’ handset.

Trying to analyse the change from the existing flat colour treatment to the new 3D mark also makes me think of last year’s rebranding of DC Comics. Where that company realised that the vast majority of its consumers never encountered the brand in its core printed product. So their new brand mark is designed to work best animated in the credit sequences to films like Batman Begins, and television shows like Smallville and licensed video games. How it looks on the cover of their traditional 32-page comic books is far less important today.

Altered circumstances: adapted brand.

Technorati Tags: corporate identity | branding | logo | vodafone

Lecturing on Corporate Identity – Phase Two

I completed my second day with the third-year students at IADT just before going on my week’s holidays. (Yes, that was one month ago. I composed this post on my Palm and could not complete it due to a few very busy weeks.) I spent a fascinating afternoon reviewing and discussing the student’s solutions to the project’s corporate identity brief. They were commissioned to create the identity for a fictitious nation state.
It is challenging to make the mind-shift from art-directing in the morning to lecturing in the afternoon. It is a new skill for me to master: but one that is rewarding on a number of levels. I found it very encouraging to see how effectively some of the students were able to grasp the overall principles underlying the discipline of corporate identity; particularly given that this was their first opportunity to do so. It was also refreshing to see how willing some of the students were to pursue options far beyond the scope those we would normally have the opportunity to explore in the more accelerated timescales of the professional world. Having such freedom to explore really is the primary opportunity afforded by studying design at third-level. Reality will dictate so many constraints once young designers start working on real-world projects with real budgets.
My only disappointment on the day was that so much of their work was undermined by multiple typos and outright spelling errors. Given that the fusion of words and images sits at the core of the discipline graphic design, I was worried by their seeming inattention to the ‘word’ half of that equation. Although that is a problem I see more and more of in the professional sphere as well. But that can be the topic of another day’s blog post.
(These camera-phone images are a totally arbitrary cross-section of some student’s project work. Therefore probably not covered by this site’s CC licence.)

Technorati Tag: Corporate Identity

Double Silver at GDBA Design Awards 2005

Two of the corporate identity projects that I led for BFK won Silver IDEAs at last week’s GDBA Irish Design Effectiveness Awards*. The rebranding of Campus Oil, which included the creation of a new brand mark and the redesign of all of their retail forecourts and their fleet of vehicles, took the Silver award in the category for identity projects with a budget (including implementation costs) exceeding fifty thousand euro.

The work I have been doing for the exciting Welsh technology startup DeepStream Technologies was awarded Silver in the other corporate identity category. I have not won an IDEA award since 2001, when I picked up a Gold for my Pigsback.com brand identity. So winning two together on the same night was pretty rewarding.

The IDEA awards ceremony itself was better than last year’s, although I am probably biased – having not won anything last year. I do not think I was fully with-it at this gig though, having gotten up at five in the morning to catch the red-eye ferry to Holyhead for an intensive half-day meeting in Bangor and then rushing back for the awards that evening. Consequently I did not do any schmingling: a few drinks with my team beforehand and a quick departure once the ceremony was over.


Now I need to find some time to peruse the new GDBA Annual to see who has joined and who has left and which companies are working for which clients. Although at first glance I wonder what happened to Dynamo? They were the winners of last year’s Grand Prix award and not even members this year. There must be a story there...

(It would be terribly remiss of me not to note that GDBA membership is corporate, and that all awards are given to companies and not to individuals. Of course.)

Technorati Tags: GDBA | BFK | DeepStream | | Campus Oil
Links: Campus case study | DeepStream case study