Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia has announced plans to buy Motorola, a longstanding player in the mobile space. The move comes after much talk about how Nokia continually failed to make a splash in the American market, largely by their lack of a flagship smartphone product. According to an article on Information Week, the deal is worth $1.2 Billion.

Nokia hasn’t been a player on the scale of Apple, Blackberry, HTC, and Motorola. Their N900 was the last attempt, but has already faded into the background.

But what we don’t realise is that Nokia is the world’s largest manufacturer of mobiles. They sell a million phones per day around the globe. With Motorola under their wing, will the brand finally achieve a universal dominance?

My concern is largely from a branding point of view. I don’t really care what label is tagged on my phone, as long as it works, but I do wonder whether Nokia will preserve the Motorola brand name, or if they’ll absorb it as they did Siemens to become Nokia Siemens. I think we can all agree that Nokia Siemens Motorola is a mouthful — might as well buy Sony Ericsson while you’re at it, to make it truly absurd. The most likely scenario is that they’ll keep the Motorola brand and operate in a completely unaltered state. Consumers will be none the wiser.

What would you like to see most? Are you a fan of the Nokia brand or Motorola? Does it even matter when product line sub brands like the Droid (and Droid X) have become the new name on our tongues? And who has a better logo?

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On Friday, Google made a bold, and ultimately silly, move in adding a background image to their famously stark home page. When users visited the site, they were greeted with a strange white-on-white version of their logo, which soon faded into colour, displaying a large, bright image (chosen randomly).

The Twitter and Reddit communities quickly rebelled, calling it a Bing clone, and Google reverted to their plain-Jane homepage. But the option remained:

You can now select a background image, if you like.

Google here has dodged a bullet. They came dangerously close to betraying their core values for the supposed allure of increased market share among competitors. For better or for worse, the starkness of Google’s homepage is part of there brand DNA, and the guiding light for the rest of their visual design style. Non-design, being so plain it almost doesn’t exist, is how people know Google. From their plain-text ads to their clunky office suite, it’s what Google is. So the lesson here is simple: stay true to your values! Trying to copy competitors by adopting their gimmicks is not only unproductive as a marketing strategy, but it’s a fast way to alienate your most fervent users — the brand ambassadors.

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In an ideal world, designers can create a brand from the beginning. They can help clarify the brand message, develop a logo that communicates it and then design marketing materials around that. But often designers don’t have that freedom. The marketing material is fixed and the challenge is to design a logo that not only communicates the core values, but fits the existing marketing material as well. Blues Revolution, a blues dancing organisation in London, United Kingdom, recently discovered how much of a challenge this can be.

Blues Revolution started with a sketch that they believed perfectly communicated their brand values. They wanted to show that their events were different, fun and funky. So they took a revolutionary image and gave it a bluesy touch.

But the famous picture of Che Guevara is a copyrighted image. Its use for commercial purpose is prohibited. It communicates the values, but not so irreplaceably well that it’s worth any potential lawsuit.

Not to be deterred, Blues Revolution developed a website without a logo. They enlisted the help of a designer and the website took shape, centred around a Sheppard Fairey-esque image of a saxophonist in an underground blues club. The brand values were all through the website, but the logo was missing.

To fix that, Blues Revolution turned to 99Designs. They found a helpful designer who went far beyond the strict terms of a 99Designs contract and produced a set of images that showed blues dancing and classic images of blues, together with a logo-type.

The designs were creative. They showed music and dancing and developed a clearly recognisable mark. But retro-fitting is a different challenge. The logos can’t just be attractive, they need to communicate brand values and fit within the existing design. Each of these images could have been the basis of the brand, but they didn’t use the ‘revolution’ concept and didn’t fit with the saxophonist. Having already developed the site, the saxophonist had become central to the brand message. For the logo to fit with that, it had to be much simpler.

In the final design, the ‘revolution’ element of the brand is communicated in two ways. The first is the typeface. Blues Revolution considered lots of military-looking typefaces:

The fact that the final typeface chosen bears a striking resemblance to the A-Team is entirely coincidental.

The second is a red star. Harking back to the original che design, but with ‘revolution’ communicated in a more subtle way, the final logo fits both the website and communicates the brand.

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This made me chuckle. Do you think it accurately portrays the various fast food brands? Should we really be afraid after all? Are fast food brands really a sort of legal organised crime. Basically.

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If you’re doing it right, you’ll leave 95% of your logo concepts on the cutting room floor, so to speak.

Tthe unsung heroes | Logo Design Love »

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Pantone Cosmetics Concept.

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News of airline merges induce a collective yawn in the general populous. No one cares. All airlines are the same, with a few striking exceptions (Emirates for luxury, Virgin America for innovation, JetBlue for straightalk, EasyJet for price). So when two corporate dullards announce they are merging, I didn’t exactly hop to the keyboard.

But now the proposed new logo has emerged, visible on the temporary website Let’s Fly Together. In short, United wins the name game, and Continental wins the graphic battle. Kinda like when a newly married woman changes her name, but gets to determine the religion of the children. Or something.

Trouble is, I think they got it backwards.

As far as naming goes, Continental sounds bigger, more grand, iconic, enduring, mythic, and geographically-taming. Yes, it also sounds more European, but let’s leave that alone for now. United, while part of the name of the country in which it operates, is vague, subjective, and perhaps outdated. Are the States really united? Or are they just geographically bound, tied together with 18th century ideals and a loose collection of archaic commerce laws. Doesn’t United sounds vaguely communistic as well?

And as far as logos go, the blue-only, dull serifs with globe icon is as hackneyed and outplayed as the cubicle in which is was conceived (in 1958). It screams corporate, 20th century blah, not innovative 21st century aspirations. A globe? Really? Couldn’t think of anything more interesting for an icon? In the lock-up, the word Airlines is larger than United, which just looks unbalanced. We known you’re an airline. (although now that I think about it, airline brands are so vague they could be for anything and don’t actually indicate anything to do with aviation (save for the occasional bird)).

My hope is that they will take on a more comprehensive brand identity update once the two companies have properly merged. It’s a great opportunity to reinvent airline branding in the same manner that the companies are hoping to reinvent their newly merged selves. But since the best brands are reflections rather than aspirations, we’ll either see something repetitive and corporate, or something woefully optimistic — pie-in-the-sky, if you’ll pardon the pun.

But just for the sake of graphic argument, here’s approximately what it would have looked like the other way:

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The third day is for discussion. Not simply the evolution of the Q&A following a talk, we’re here talking about the big issues in our industry and how it will affect our day-to-day in the future.

Issues to discuss? Spec work, of course. The ongoing need to defend our profession from the snipers and tire-kickers looking to get free work. Do they not understand what we do as a professional service? Or are they just cheap?

Also on the agenda, partnering with clients rather than being hired for projects at a time. Over the long term, only a partnership between clients and agencies will yield work that is on-brand, and aligned with whatever strategies have been devised.

Brand value is also on the mind. Not only in terms of dollars, but in that hard-to-quantify mystique and trust that brands build over time. Agencies and clients alike must invest in their work to build brand value over time. This isn’t an overnight process (we’ll leave that for the advertising folks).

Today, we’ve already heard one panel discussion, and will hear at least one other interview-style “conversations with”, which I look forward to. More is often revealed when not standing behind a podium, with rehearsed presentation. And in the spirit of openness and honesty, isn’t that what we’re really after?

So, let’s get talking.

I need coffee first.

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When you think about brands who are “doing it right” you probably think of names like Zappos, Apple, Amazon, Whole Foods etc., and generally you’re right. The trouble is that those are all big companies. But in this new era — where consumer can communicate with brands, and with one another — even small businesses can be perceived as the Good Guys and build that brand equity.

We of the millennial generation don’t care about Wall St. We don’t care if our employer is a public company, or if our supermarket chain spans across five states. What we want is a brand who is on our side, who thinks and operates as we do. Does that make us fundamentally selfish or does it simply mean that as consumers we’re finally demanding a more human connection?

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The theme of the conference is Reclaim The Future. And, strangely, it seems we’re actually on our way. Cheryl Swanson, conference co-chair, managed to brilliantly illustrate what we’ve all been thinking about the status quo. 2009 was a year marked with financial shenanigans and recession thinking, high unemployment, celebrity scandals, nationwide recalls, and political drama so please, leave the past behind us.

Yesterday, we heard from representatives at some of the biggest global consumer brands. In quick succession we heard from folks at Lego, Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Mars, to name a few. The focus of those companies, of course, remains to make money, and in that regard there is indeed some optimism. Numbers are up, which means consumers have money again and with any luck, the past year+ will soon be quartered in memory — another annus horriblus.

There is also much positivity in the realm of sustainability. More than simply recycling, the new mandate is to make packaging and products that are lower-impact from the start, sourced from new materials and produced in new manufacturing techniques which seek to close that open loop of sustainability. It’s a massive challenge, but for once it feels like we might actually survive beyond the year 2012, and won’t drown under the weight of so many styrofoam cups. Recycling itself will only grow and more and more items which once could only be tossed, can now be recycled.

In talking directly with industry people, it seem that business is picking up, which in turn changes the labour relations within these companies. We, as an industry, are connecting more with students, and with one another. In hiring we’re seeking to be more human and embrace the sort of small business thinking that makes us generally more happy, even when working within a large, global corporation. And of course as the market picks up and jobs are created and filled, the unemployment rate will drop, taxes will come back to the government, and so forth and so forth.

Optimism, much like fear and dissent, spread virally. Communication tools are unfolding and evolving like never before, which helps us spread the virus of change. What we saw in Obama’s campaign is now being applied to the economy at large. Finally it seems we’re getting the message — yes we can.

I’m excited to hear today’s talks, which are longer and meatier and will vary in their format. I’m hoping to see the optimism in people, their new willingness to chat and exchange ideas and possibly make connections for business. Let’s hope the optimism endures.

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