Mobile Phone as a guiding light!

A couple of days back, I got to know how useful a mobile can be! I did not use it to make / receive call, nor did I use the mobile:

as a Digital camera
as an Audio recorder
as a Video recorder
for Multimedia messaging
as an Email client
as a Web client
as a Gaming platform
as a Documents viewer
as a Computer
as a Music player
as a TV
as a Wallet
as a Bar-code reader…

…actually I did not use my mobile at all. I got help from a person who, like me, had come to watch the Kannada movie ‘Anna Bond’ at Santhosh.

As I entered the hall, it was pretty dark, and I was searching for, firstly the Row – ‘A’….that was slightly easy, as there was a very dim light on the bottom of every corner seat in the centre. But finding seat numbers 30 & 31 was a task. I imagined myself to be an archaeologist trying to first find and then decode cave drawings! I found it impossible to see anything written on any part of the seat or the wall! I thought I saw something like ’30′ there on the seat…but on a closer look, it was the sponge popping out from the torn part of the seat cover!

Then I just turned around and saw lots of lights from mobiles, using which everyone was finding R 24,25…S 11 & 12…B 3 and 4….OMG! What a genius that person must have been who fitted a torch into a mobile…or the person who made the mobile screen itself so bright! Am sure he / she was a movie buff, and had been in the same situation that I was currently in.

Just as a person without a watch asks a person wearing one ‘Please, can you tell me what’s the time?, similarly, I asked the guy next to me, “Please, can you tell me which is your seat number”. He immediately pointed his ‘as-big-as-a-palm’ mobile towards the wall, where I could see 28, 29, 30, 31 so very clearly – I could see them in Arial Black, size 100, White colour!

A few years ago, all those entering the cinema hall had to rely on the lone skinny fellow with the dim blue torch to know their seat numbers. And he would act so busy, so pricey…as if he was the film director. Although he would yell at us, I would be amazed how he knew all the seat numbers so perfectly – he would stand near the door and tell us exactly where C 18 to 25 was, or where F 27, 28 was, or where an empty seat was, all this while talking to the Popcorn guy outside but pointing the torch to the exact position! I think this guy’s lineage can be traced back to the Madhyama Pandava – Arjuna!

However useful the mobile is, I miss the torch bearer, who was our guiding light, everytime we entered the cinema hall! As I came out after the movie, I saw him standing in a corner and looking at the crowd outside. Dressed in whites, he still had the torch under his left sleeve!

All in a day’s play!

A fan’s tribute to his favourite font

I love Helvetica.

Out with the old, in with the new – II

 
(All the above logos are properties of respective companies and have been used only for informational purposes.)

I met an ex-colleague from my previous ad agency a few days back. And we exchanged a few gossips going around in agency circles. It was nice to know what’s happening with our friends and some popular agencies. Amidst all this, we had some fun talking about logos and clients. He being a Client Service guy always tries to tell that it is not the logo that matters finally, but the service you provide. And I agree with him to an extent. Better to have good business with a bad logo rather than good logo with no business.

But certainly a logo IS important as it creates an image and a brand identity in the minds of people (who may later become your clients or customers).

So what makes a good logo?

A logo must be simple, timeless and instantly recognizable. Most importantly, a logo must have a meaning. As any designer would agree, a logo must not be dependent on color or 3D shading. And it should look good today and 50 years from now. This is possible by using simple geometric shapes and/ or simple contours creatively.

A couple of months back, I wrote a post titled Out with the old, in with the new. It was really nice to read your comments and opinions. Let us look into a few more logo redesigns that have taken place recently:

Cisco
At first look, this was what I felt: name has moved, bridge has been simplified, execution is pleasant, but am I seeing a hand with fingers sticking up? That was the first thing I noticed.

The new logo (designed by Joe Finocchiaro and Jerry Kuyper) is more consumer friendly than its predecessors. The old logo seemed somewhat rigid. This one is catchier. The number of bars on the bridge has fallen from 20 to 9. They have had their hard edges removed and a soft blue colour (Pantone 7477) substituted for aquamarine. The red (Pantone 187) goes well with it too. The typeface (Cisco and Cisco Serif) is fatter, more approachable and far superior to the earlier ones.

Good to see the bridge-in a-box idea dumped in favour of a more integral symbol-enhanced word mark, putting the emphasis on the brand’s greatest asset, the Cisco name. Gone is the intimidating word ‘SYSTEMS’. Now it’s just Cisco, very prominently showcased in red, thus making it the focal point in the logo. Effect: The eye travels first to the name, then to the bridge (which is a secondary element).

A bit of a trivia about the name: My friend’s dad, into his 70s,  settled in the US, gets confused with CISCO and Sysco - the latter is a US company that sells frozen foods to restaurants. The name “Cisco” is not an acronym, but an abbreviation of San Francisco. According to John Morgridge, the company’s first president, the founders hit on the name and logo while driving to Sacramento to register the company — they saw the Golden Gate Bridge framed in the sunlight.

Fujifilm
This logo looks very Japanese to me. Red and black are dominant Japanese colours, and the J has a nice thick-to-thin, almost calligraphic brush-like feel. Looks like the ‘tiny box’ is supposed to represent a mirror within a camera. It reminds me of the ‘S’ in Microsoft logo.

I feel the previous logo (used for 26 years since it was introduced in 1980) was stronger, and much more memorable. With some updating, I think it could have been modernized successfully. I’m surely going to miss the old film box. I always thought it was a cool typographic treatment.

Fiat
There’s a slight tinge of irony when you look at the latest Fiat logo: it bears a close resemblance to the one designed for the Fiat 524 of 1931, which remained in use until 1968. (The ’30s logo was the first to use a rectangular logo that blended into the new grille, in the shape of a shield with vertical elements.)

Fiat explains this resemblance by saying that the new logo is “designed to convey ongoing change, a sign of the past re-written in a modern key, which is particularly representative of Fiat today, a brand which is focused towards the challenges of the future, but also proud of its historical identity”.

The new logo looks modern with colour gradients, the inner vertical hatch and the edge design define a style that seems to follow the recent trends of digital graphics. The logo has a Web 2.0 feel to it.

Compaq
According to HP, the name ‘Compaq’ comes from ‘Compatibility’ and ‘Quality.’ Compaq’s current logo has more personality and looks stylish, and contemporary. It is a combination of C and Q, which resembles a thought bubble.

The new logo still uses the original Compaq red but with a sci-fi looking font. The Q is the highlight of the logo, and may be Compaq will use it independently on their machines and people will know which company it is from.

Out with the old, in with the new

(All the above logos are properties of respective companies and have been used only for informational purposes.)

The Oxford Dictionary defines a logo as “…a printed design or symbol that a company or an organization uses as its special sign.” Corporate history has shown that a logo is much more than that to a company. A logo helps attach adjectives to a company – tech-savvy, fast, smart, conventional, hip, boring! A change to a logo makes the audience sit up and notice (often rethink) about the company. The human mind has a tendency to attach personal or humane characteristics to something intangible as an organization image that helps the logo.

Changing logos is a way of advertising. It’s a pretty safe bet that you can perform (most of the time) a good redesign of your logo once. That can be interpreted (and explained) as an improvement and forward thinking. You do it too frequently and you may look like you’re unsure of who you are, or more importantly, who your clients are.

Recently, a few major companies have redesigned their logos. Except for a couple of them, the old logos looked better than the new.

Intel
Intel’s new identity is an improvement. The old logo, used for almost 37 years, was simply a lower-case version of the word Intel with a dropped letter “e” in the word. This new logo is a marked improvement on the old one and consist of a more modern font (Neo Sans) than Helvetica in the old logo. The new face has more personality without going completely overboard.

I was not entirely sure the circular bands were necessary, but that was when my friend from the company shared this bit about the Intel logo and mentioned that the main driver of the new logo was “one of our VP’s of marketing who recently joined Intel from Samsung – which I thought was kind of weird when he was first hired – but anyway, I thought it was good he was brining in some changes to “make his mark” on Intel. The thing that is most ironic about all of this (logo redesign) is the Samsung logo from where he came.” He then mentioned that the Intel logo is pretty much the exact chromatic inverse of the Samsung logo. Interesting.

Kodak
Kodak looks terrible. The typeface is too soft and vague. The two yellow lines look really out of place (they may be dropped in a few years just as VISA lost the blue and brown bands), and feel forced, as if they had to incorporate yellow into the identity somehow, so they pasted a couple of sticks in there. The lack of a logotype symbol greatly reduces the visual value of the logo. There’s nothing to remember now. The old Kodak logo (it served the company for more than 50 years) was instantly recognizable due to its distinct look. They just wiped away decades of branding.

AT&T
The logo looks more like a beachball with too much of a 3D for me. It will probably loose its clarity when reduced to small dimensions, unlike their old logo which held up well in any situation. I feel that the original blue-with-white stripes had more impact. The reversing of colours was not required. They should have made subtle changes. As for the font, it’s way too plain, and the ampersand doesn’t have any of the character from its earlier version. All in all, it is too much of a shift from the previous logo.

Unilever
Certainly Unilever logo was very much in need of a change. It was very industrial and cold. The new logo is warm and “friendly” but it is very complex. The movement to a script typeface I think was brilliant and that in itself gives a warmer feel. I always try to follow the rule “Maximum meaning, minimum means”. When designing a logo, one should not try to say everything all at once, which is the purpose of advertising and marketing. The logo should meet the preliminary goals of warmth and friendliness. In this case the goals are met, but then they are diluted by adding too many caveats. This logo says too much, it could be put on a billboard with a catchy tagline and be a great ad campaign in itself. All in all, I think it is better than average. I’d like to see how it holds up on a fax. Or embroidered on a corporate T-Shirt.

***

Logos have been around since early days of the Renaissance, the 13th Century. Goldsmiths’ marks, paper makers’ watermarks were among the first logos used in this way, as trademarks.

Even though the word “logo” comes from ancient Greek and it translates to “word” or “speech”, other cultures – the Babylonian, Assyrian, Mayan, Chinese, Egyptian also used pictographs to communicate words and ideas. Traders used to mark their wares with monograms to claim ownership and right to title of the goods.

But it is only in the last century that the logo started generating more interest (and more so particularly after the concept of branding was introduced by the likes of Pavlov and David Ogilvy). Modern history of logo dictated companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors who had similar working products to sell. And ever since they made their entry, logos have revolutionized the advertising world for sure.

Helvetica: Celebrating Golden Jubilee

Design: RK

It was 50 years ago that Helvetica, the most famous and popular typefaces in the world, was born.

The BBC site has a nice article celebrating the 50th birthday of Helvetica. The article looks at the typeface’s rise to popularity from the view points of both fans and critics alike. It even briefly touches on why people tend to choose the type they use and the strong visceral reaction some of these fonts cause. In all, it’s a good quick read on Helvetica and type in general.

(The comments are fun, including a number of really bad jokes, with a lot of people suddenly embarrassed that they are part of a discussion about something this trivial.)

Coming back to Helvetica, the font lends an air of lucid efficiency to any typographic message with its clean, no-nonsense shapes. It was originally called Haas Grotesk, and was designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger for the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) in Switzerland.

Linotype says: “In 1960 the name was changed to Helvetica (an adaptation of “Helvetia”, the Latin name for Switzerland). Over the years, the Helvetica family was expanded to include many different weights, but these were not as well coordinated with each other as they might have been.

In 1983, D. Stempel AG and Linotype re-designed and digitized Neue Helvetica and updated it into a cohesive font family. Today, the original Helvetica family consists of 34 different font weights, and the Neue Helvetica family consists of 51 font weights. The Helvetica family now forms an integral part of many digital printers and operating systems and has become a stylistic anchor in our visual culture. It is the quintessential sans serif font, timeless and neutral, and can be used for all types of communication.”

There is a film directed by Gary Hustwit called Helvetica, which had it’s world premiere at South by Southwest in March, 2007. Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture.

Helvetica is anyday one of my favourite fonts.

Related links:

• 50 years since Helvetica showed its face by Andrew Hoyem
• Helvetica: The little typeface that leaves a big mark
• For logo power, try helvetica
• Helvetica at 50: “Ya don’t look a day over 25.”
• The Scourge of Arial: Arial has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.

What’s Your Favourite Font?

Related link:
Times New Roman: End of an era
Helvetica: Celebrating Golden Jubilee