Fresh Impressions on Brandmarks (from my 5-year-old)

I think it’s really interesting that his daughter hits not only on the brands that she (presumably) has direct experience with (e.g., Disney and Pepsi, which she refers to as the ‘pop from the pizza place’), but also products that she isn’t a direct consumer of (e.g., Starbucks and BP). It really is impressive that more often than not she either knows the brand name or the category it falls in. It seems to me that the ones that really stick in her mind the most are the simplest, which goes along with what I’ve always believed—simpler is often better. On some of the more complex logos (Boeing, for example), she doesn’t really know what it’s for (I’ll admit that I didn’t know what it was, either), but she just kind of says what she thinks it is.

I appreciated that when she sees the McDonald’s logo, she knows what it is right away, but she also adds something in that I never considered. She says that McDonald’s ‘M’ looks like it’s made up of french fries, which is a connection that I am sure I would have never made. It’s really amazing to see how young minds work sometimes, isn’t it?

My favorite part of the video, hands down, is when she IDs the Greyhound, Jaguar and PUMA logos each as ‘a cheetah,’ one right after the other. I never really thought about how much alike all of those logos looked.

Fun video…hope you liked it.

The AMA isn’t talking about plain, old sloppy Photoshop work like this Katy Perry ad. (Can you spot the bad Photoshop work here?)

No, what the AMA is talking about are ads where women’s bodies are drastically altered to a point where they make the original proportions of the Barbie doll seem realistic. They’re right, advertisers do use Photoshop to create bodies that do not occur in nature. I know this for a fact because I was a part of the problem a few years ago when I worked for a big ad agency. Our number one client was one of the biggest beer companies in the world and we used women in a LOT of our work. Most beer ads feature women because beer drinkers, by and large, are men. So it stands to reason that an attractive spokesmodel is going to get the attention of the guys who are drinking the beer.

In the advertising industry, when you see a photograph of a woman, you can be sure that it’s been gone over pretty carefully with Photoshop (Katy Perry photo notwithstanding). Photos are retouched and have blemishes removed, color is enhanced, flaws in the photo are corrected and so forth. But often, it doesn’t end there…especially in the summer ads where many of the girls are shown wearing bikinis. I can remember getting marked up photo sheets asking to have a woman’s waist reduced, arms and legs “tightened up” a bit, cleaning up shoulders, etc.

So you’d bring this photo into Photoshop and you’d start off by making the standard color and blemish fixes. Then you broke out your clone stamp tool (the Photoshop equivalent of a surgeon’s scalpel) and start chiseling away. I will admit it’s fun work because you are basically creating something that isn’t real and the challenge is to do it in such a way that millions of people (or tens of millions) are going to see it and you’re not going to leave any fingerprints behind. It’s a challenge. In the end, you’d end up with something like the photo below (I could have used a more graphic example, but many of them involved scantily-or-less-clad women, so I went with a family-friendly alternative).

At first glance, what you notice is that the color is much better in the second photo and that the models skin is lightened and blemishes removed. Now look a little closer. Notice on the original photo that her collarbones really stand out? Well, this would never do so let’s just go ahead and airbrush/clone stamp it a little to make them less noticeable. Now what? How about that little bulge on her right side. I know that it’s just her rib cage jutting out a bit from the angle the photographer has her standing at, but I think we should shave a bit off there. So now, instead of going down and cutting inward, it’s a more gentle slope. And to wrap it up, let’s trim her left side, too. As it is, she already looks skinny, but you know what they say about cameras adding pounds? Let’s shave a couple of inches off the left side just to smooth her about a bit. Abracadabra!

This sort of thing goes on all of the time in the industry and it happens with guys, too, but it’s different. I once worked on a big campaign which featured wresting superstar Bill Goldberg. They had all of these intimidating shots of this HUGE guy, but we had to go through and fix those photos too. Not with his physique, though, we had to retouch the grey in his beard. I don’t think the vanity came from the Goldberg camp, though, because if you look at his promo shot below, there’s plenty of grey. I actually believe the creative director on the project thought the no-grey look made him look cooler which meant we’d sell more beer. I want to meet the guy who made his beer purchasing decision based on the lack of grey hair in Goldberg’s beard. To him, I offer a hearty, “You’re welcome, buddy!”

So what’s the answer to all of this? I guess I come down on the side of Photoshop here because it’s one of the most powerful tools in the modern graphic designer’s arsenal (sorry for the mixed metaphor). And like any tool or weapon, they can be very useful or very dangerous in the wrong set of hands. I think that we, as a society, are very quick to point fingers and we spend time looking for someone to blame, but this isn’t Photoshop’s fault.

Cheese or Font?

Head over and give it a shot.

So what I am going to do is the same sort of thing, but with corporate logos which gives me a lot more to work with. There are a few different ways I can do this and I’m still sorting it out, but I’ll get it started either next week or the week after. I know this isn’t a terribly exciting post, but I wanted to mention it just so that nobody thinks I completely blew it off. Stay tuned.

So as you can see from the graphic above, for over 20 years the Gap had the classic Gap logo. Then last week they decided to spring a new logo on the world. The new logo, officially announced on October 8, went over about as well as the new Coke recipe back in the 80′s. People hated it and the internet was awash with critical tweets, Facebook posts and blogs (including this one).

A few days later, the Gap saw the light and killed the new logo and reverted to the original. There was actually an interesting in-between announcement when someone from the Gap (I can’t remember who and am not curious enough to look the name up) made the announcement that the new logo was just part of a process and that they loved the feedback from the public. They loved it so much, in fact, that they wanted crowdsource a new logo. Hey, everybody’s a designer! Send us your ideas for free and we’ll use it. Here’s a Gap gift card for $50. Thanks!

The only thing professional designers hate more than bad design is crowdsourcing. It completely devalues graphic design as a profession. I’ve written about it before and I probably will again, it’s just a way for companies to get something for nothing while turning design into a commodity. Naturally, the internet lit up again with protests from designers about what a stupid idea it was.

In the end, Gap made out okay from all of this. While not everybody knew about the logo change, they were one of the most hotly debated (not much of a debate, I guess, when everybody hates what you did) topics on the internet, even making their way into print and broadcast media. Suddenly, everybody was talking about the Gap. The chain received an overwhelming amount of feedback at no additional cost and were able to pull themselves back from the bring before it cost them a fortune (unlike Tropicana who took it in the wallet with their package redesign-and-reversal process). And in the end, Gap relented to popular demand, which gives people the feeling that Gap really does care about their customers.

It’s been suggested by some that this is all a PR ploy, but I don’t think so. Why not? Two reasons. First of all, if they were trying to pull something off, I think they’d come up with a better fake logo. This logo was too bad to have been done on purpose, I think. Second, the whole crowdsourcing thing. If they were being advised, that would have never come up.

I just think it was a very large company exercising very poor judgement. It happens.

Anyway, welcome back Gap logo, we hardly missed ye.

Recently I had an experience with Staples that served to reinforce the notion of employees being a vital part of your brand. I had to prepare some comps for a client meeting and sent them to Staples to have them printed. Generally, I use Staples for this sort of work because they have high-quality color printers, produce the work relatively quickly and aren’t too expensive.

I have had a few bad customer service experiences with Staples print center, mostly due to the inexperience of some of the people working there. By and far, though, my experience with the Bay City location has been positive.

On this particular order, though, I sent the files with EXPLICIT instructions, in hopes of avoiding any issues. The girl working at the copy center called me to confirm the order and that she would have them done very quickly. I went to pick the order up and it was wrong. The files, which were larger than 11″ x 17″, needed to be reduced to fit the page, but they were printed at full size and parts of the pages were cut off. The Staples co-worker told me that what I asked for couldn’t be done. I was really annoyed to have to pay $10 for work that was wrong, but the co-worker couldn’t fix it.

I was probably a little more curt with her than I would like to be, but I was furious. I had an 8AM meeting the next day and had to show up with bad proofs. The girl working there felt bad for me and talked to her supervisor (who was not in the store while I was there). The supervisor took it upon herself to call me and let me know that it was an easy fix and that the girl who ran the prints just needed to push one button. The supervisor offered to reprint everything for me and have it ready for me to pick up in the morning. I explained that I needed the prints an hour before they opened and she talked to the store manager—who comes in before 8AM—and told him what was going on.

She called me back and gave me the manager’s phone number so that I could come at 7:30, call him and pick up my proofs in time for my meeting. The supervisor’s follow-through was really impressive. And when I picked up the prints in the morning, the manager was both very friendly and very apologetic. By this time, all had been forgiven. Staples really did make up for their screw up and by going out of their way to make sure that I had what I needed, they reinforced what I already feel about them.

When I was a general manager for kinko’s (sorry FedEx, but I can’t bring myself to call it FedEx Office), we were at a managers meeting (in Austin or Cincinnati, I think) and we reviewed a customer service case study. The point of the study is that customers actually have a higher opinion of customer service from companies who have screwed up and recovered. Because this was almost 20 years ago, I can’t remember the actual figures, but the way it works out is that if you consistently perform very well, customers’ opinions stay equally constant. If you make a mistake and recover from it, overall approval ratings end up higher than if you had never made a mistake.

Staples is a great example of this very thing. Because they stretched themselves a bit to make sure that my needs were met, I really think very highly of their customer service. I was never going to boycott them or anything like that, but I’d be less inclined to go there if I need something. As of now, though, I will have no such hesitation.

Good save, Staples.

For example, I had a great post about Michigan State University’s proposed logo change and the furor that came from Spartan Nation. In the end, the University scrapped the new design—which really was an improvement—in favor of tradition. Their head-fake toward progress was adopting a different Pantone green. I’m all for tradition, but I think that there are times when a stale logo can stand to be freshened up. The new logo wasn’t a major change, it was just an updating of the current logo.

Doesn’t matter, though, because I never wrote the post. Or one hundred others just like it. I can’t fault myself for prioritizing client design and writing ahead of my blog, but I need to make the blog more of a priority. And that’s exactly what I am going to do. It’s the summer solstice today and that feels like a pretty good time to pick back up with the blog.

To the people who have come back time and again to see the same, old posts I wanted to say thank you for your continued patronage. I promise to work harder to earn your repeated visits.

Happy Summer Solstice, everyone.

It’s no great surprise that AOL has taken a pretty good beating in blogs around the world the past few weeks, after introducing their new…um…logoish thing. I was one of MANY, MANY people who took the time to comment on the logo and almost all of the commentary has been negative. It seems that almost everybody has a reason to hate the logo.

Alissa Walker wrote an article for Fast Company, allowing branding firm Wolff Olins to tell their side of the story. While I am not sold on the somewhat tongue-in-cheek explanation that the new AOL logo is the logo of the future, I think that AOL’s management and Wolff Olins make a good case for themselves. I don’t buy AOL chief of staff Maureen Sullivan’s explanation that scrapping the old name is “the lazy consultant answer,” I can certainly appreciate the idea of hiring Wolff Olins at least in part because they were in the very small minority who advised them to keep the name.

Have you ever heard the old saying about when you’re in a panic situation and everybody is heading for the exits, you’re better off heading in the direction they’re coming from because you stand a better chance of getting out alive? I can appreciate that. I think, were I asked, I’d advise AOL to keep the name simply because AOL is an icon, so I agree with keeping the name.

Again, I don’t care for the changing imagery behind the logo, but the imagery isn’t supposed to be the logo. The logo is the Aol. wordmark in front of the image. If you go to the Wolff Olins home page (linked above), watch the video. It’s a good demonstration of how the logo “works” in a motion environment. The videos produced are, as Walker says in her piece, quite good and make a strong case for the “invisible wordmark.”

I still think they’d be better served by having identified one image as their flagship logo for print purposes, but I at least get what they were going for. I don’t know that it’s the future of design, but I have to admit that I like their out-of-the-box thinking.

Even if you don’t care for the new logo, Wolff Olins certainly gets an A for process and creative thinking. So kudos there, Wolff Olins.

What I’m most curious to see now is how many people start mimicking the style? I only wish I could put together a graph correlating the number of mimics with the number of critics, because you can bet your ass that there is going to a lot of crossover in those two groups. We hate it today, but we can’t wait to steal it.

Woody Allen was quoted once as saying, “80 percent of success is just showing up.”

Often when I am speaking to high school or college classes, the question of how to be successful designer comes up. And more often than not, I quote Woody’s wisdom because it is an absolute truth that applies not just to filmmaking and graphic design, but just about any other path in life you choose to follow.

The best example of not showing up is something that happened recently in my attempt to have a print project quoted by a printer. I am not going to name the printer, but I will tell you that it wasn’t F.P. Horak, McKay Press or QRP. Those are the three printers I use most often and I don’t want anyone to think that I’m talking about them.

This particular project, I thought, was a good fit for another printer in the region. The printer in question threw up every single roadblock they could come up with along the way. Honestly, it was as if they didn’t want my work.

My first step was to find their website to get contact info. The Google search took while because I wasn’t 100% sure of their name (they have gone through some ownership changes). With the correct site located, I clicked through to look for contact info and trouble ensued.

Their site is a wide-awake nightmare. I couldn’t find the information I was looking for, contact info was buried, sales department names and e-mail addresses weren’t available, etc. I didn’t want to fill out a form to wait for a response because my experience with these forms is that response time tends to be slower.

I was able to locate a phone number, though, so I called which led me to a pain-in-the-ass phone tree. If you don’t know the name of the person you are trying to reach, you’re directed to a general mailbox. Since I couldn’t find any sales rep names online, I would be stuck in the general mailbox which often isn’t much better than filling out the online form, where response time is concerned.

I call back and hit zero a few times and get through to a live person. I explain that I need a quote and she isn’t sure who she needs me to get to. After some confusion on her part, I just ask for a customer service rep and says she’ll connect me to the person I need to talk to. The call goes through to an extension which promptly hangs up on me. I call back again and ask if I can speak to a living, breathing customer service rep, but because I don’t have an account manager, she can’t direct me to a CSR.

Finally, in frustration, I give up. The job was a perfect fit for them and it will be printing elsewhere. It isn’t the hugest job in the world, but it would probably be somewhere between 5–10 grand every month or two. How many jobs like this do they lose in the course of a week? There were several opportunities along the way for them to save the interaction, but they managed to miss at every step. All they had to do was show up, but they phoned it in and missed out on a decent, little revenue stream.

There is actually a humorous postscript to the story, too. About one week after being unable to get a quote, I actually get a call from the sales manager wanting to sell me on doing my printing with them. I told him that I was surprised to hear from him and told him all about what had happened the prior week. He is both grateful for the candid input and assures me that is not the way they do business. He asks if he could send me some material to look at about them and maybe set up a meeting. I understand that every business has bad days, so I tell him to send the info and we’ll get together after that.

Five weeks later and guess what…nothing ever showed up.

Chuckleheads.