8 Sign of the times
I had dinner here in Palm Springs a few years ago with Mr and Mrs Donald Salem. A dinner party. Black tie – ridiculous in Palm Springs. My neighbour at my table was a lovely young lady, and she asked me suddenly: ‘Why did you put two xxs on Exxon?’ I asked her: ‘Why ask me?’ She said, ‘Because I couldn’t help seeing it.’ I replied, ‘Well, that’s the answer.’
— Raymond Loewy1
Take two corporate logos. Each one belongs to a company whose name begins with ‘A’. Neither name bears any relation to what the business does. In each case, their chosen symbol is an image of an apple with a leaf sprouting from the top and a bite nibbled out of one side. But there the similarities end, because everything else about those seemingly identical logos is different, as are the companies they belong to.
One of them is Apple; and the other is Ann Summers, which, far from being a global technology group, is Britain’s biggest chain of sex shops. By any definition, they are an odd couple, which should make it all the more surprising that they have adopted such similar visual identities, especially as each of them has done so successfully. The golden rule of corporate identity design is that the result should reflect the spirit of the company by symbolizing what it stands for, how it behaves and what it can realistically hope to achieve. Both Apple’s and Ann Summers’ identities do. How can what sounds like more or less the same motif symbolize two such diverse organizations, yet do so accurately?
The explanation is that, although the components of the two identities are similar, the ways in which their respective designers have executed them are not. The choice of colour, shape, typography and exactly what the apple alludes to are very different in each case. And it is those design details that send us the visual clues with which we can work out what the symbol is trying to say.
First, Apple. Steve Jobs and Steve ‘Woz’ Wozniak picked the company’s name – originally Apple Computers – when they founded the business in 1976. Not only was Jobs fond of fruitarian diets at the time, he had recently returned from pruning the apple trees at the All One Farm, a commune near Portland, Oregon, that he often visited at weekends. There were rational reasons for the choice of name too. ‘It sounded fun, spirited and not intimidating,’ Jobs explained, years later. ‘Apple took the edge off the word “computer”. Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book.’2
The original logo was drawn by Ron Wayne, who was helping to set up the business, as an illustration of the seventeenth-century scientist Isaac Newton hatching the theory of gravity after seeing an apple fall from a tree. He drew it in the ornate style of Victorian children’s books and the artwork of their favourite late 1960s Bay Area rock bands. The following year, it was replaced by a simpler symbol devised by a local graphic designer Rob Janoff in the shape of an apple. He produced two versions: one of a whole fruit; and the other of one with a bite taken out of the side. Jobs picked the latter on the grounds that the unbitten apple looked too much like a cherry,3 although a favourite theory of Apple mythologists is that the bite alludes to a computer byte. (Equally popular is the myth that the symbol is a tribute not only to Newton’s theory of gravity, but to the death of Alan Turing, the gifted British mathematician who was at the forefront of computer science from the mid 1930s until his suicide in 1954. Turing killed himself after being convicted of ‘gross indecency’ with another man and subjected to chemical castration. A half-eaten apple was found near his corpse, fuelling suspicions that he had laced it with a deadly dose of cyanide.4) As a finishing touch to Apple’s motif, Janoff added stripes in the colours of the rainbow as a nod to the rainbow flag flown by Greenpeace and other counter-culture groups, as well as a cheeky pastiche of the monochrome stripes in Paul Rand’s IBM logo.
Apple’s emblem has since lost the stripes, but kept roughly the same shape of apple, rendered as a solid block of colour, generally in shades of grey, black, white or silver. The company has been equally particular in its choice of typefaces. When the Macintosh computer was introduced in 1984, Apple adopted its own version of Garamond, an elegant sixteenth-century serif font. In 2002 it switched to a sans serif typeface, but chose an unusually curvaceous one, a customized version of the digital font Adobe Myriad.5
What do we see when we look at Apple’s identity? Something that is elegant, confident and disciplined: sophisticated enough to appreciate the work of a great scientist like Isaac Newton, but not too serious to baulk at naming itself after a fruit. Even so, the logo also suggests that Apple is no longer quite so subversive that it wants to be associated with political activism or to be seen as a brattish upstart poking fun at a corporate titan like IBM.
And what does Ann Summers’ identity say? The name is an abbreviation of Annice Summers, who was the secretary of the company’s founder, the former actor Michael Caborn-Waterfield, when he began the business in 1970. She left soon afterwards, and he sold out to the brothers Ralph and David Gold in 1972. Their strategy was to introduce sex shops to the mass market by locating them on busy shopping streets rather than back streets.6 If they were to succeed, it was important that their new customers, especially women, didn’t feel embarrassed when entering the stores, and they kept the name Ann Summers because it sounded suitably warm, friendly and familiar. Ms Everywoman, in fact.
The Golds also needed their stores to seem sexy and fun, which is where their take on the apple motif came in. Rather than alluding to scientific history, their company’s apple refers to the forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve failed to resist in the Garden of Eden. Whereas Apple’s symbol is round, Ann Summers’ is shaped like a heart to evoke love. The leaf resembles a flame to signify the heat of passion, and the bite represents the consequences of succumbing to temptation. Even the typeface is playful in style, with flirtatious touches, such as a diagonal stroke in the centre of the ‘e’. And the colours of the brand name emblazoned above each Ann Summers store are gaudy shades of pink and red, to symbolize flesh and sex respectively.7
In short, Ann Summers’ corporate symbol is as different from Apple’s as the story of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace is from Isaac Newton’s discovery of the theory of gravity. When we see those two symbols, we understand the distinction instinctively by decoding the visual clues they contain. People have responded to signs and symbols in the same intuitive way throughout history. All the visual cues they have picked up on were designed in the sense that they were conceived and executed with the intention of conveying a specific message, even though it is only relatively recently that professional designers, like the ones responsible for Apple’s and Ann Summers’ identities, have been paid to produce them.
Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny’s Honeycomb Vase made by thousands of bees
Cow benches, designed by Julia Lohmann
The Pig 05049 book, designed by Christien Meindertsma
A replica of an illegal computer recycling plant in Christoph Büchel’s 2006 installation, Simply Botiful
One of the richest sources of intuitively designed symbols is political activism. The raised fist has been an emblem of protest for a succession of radical movements, from the 1917 Russian revolutionaries and anti-fascist insurgents in the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s, to the Black Power movement in the 1960s and recently for some of the Occupy anti-capitalist groups. But its origins date back to ancient Assyria, when Ishtar, the goddess of love, war, sex and fertility, was depicted raising a clenched fist to symbolize strength in the face of violence. However often we have seen that emblem in different guises since then, we still recognize what it is saying because it was so well chosen – the physical gesture of clenching and lifting your own fist really does make you feel stronger – that it has become inseparable from its original meaning.
The same can be said of one of the oldest peace motifs, the olive branch. It derives from ancient Greek mythology, when the gods Poseidon and Athene were wrangling over the city of Athens. No sooner had Athene contested Poseidon’s claim to own the area around the city by planting an olive tree there, than he furiously challenged her to one-on-one combat. Zeus intervened and insisted that their dispute be settled by arbitration. All of the gods and goddesses were summoned to vote. Zeus abstained, but the other gods voted for Poseidon and all the goddesses for Athene. As the sexes were represented equally, the gods were outnumbered by dint of Zeus’s abstention, Athene won by a single vote, and Athens became hers.8 To this day, the phrase ‘passing the olive branch’ is used to describe an attempt at peacemaking.
New symbols have since been coined to represent different needs, desires, ideals and fears. Some of them are instructive, and are intended to regulate our behaviour or to tell us to perform particular tasks. The decision of the sixteenth-century Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde to replace the words ‘is equal to’ with two parallel horizontal lines of identical length, thereby inventing the equals sign, ‘=’, is an exceptionally successful example of designing an instructive symbol. In his 1557 book The Whetstone of Witte, Recorde recalled having become so bored by the ‘tedious repetition’ of writing those words that he decided to abbreviate them to ‘=’ on the grounds that ‘no two things can be more equal’ than those lines.9 Not that Recorde’s brainwave was recognized for its design merits at the time – though neither was the invention of another instructive symbol when Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach, Bartholomew ‘Black Bart’ Roberts and other early eighteenth-century pirates added diabolic skulls and crossed bones to their flags.10
Throughout the twentieth century, one of the most important roles of designers was to help people to understand what was happening in the world around them by devising signs and symbols that conveyed useful information and offered guidance, alerting them to possible hazards, or showing them how to find their way from A to B. Think of someone who is taking their first flight and trying to work out where to go in the labyrinthine environment of an airport, an artificial space, much of which may be devoid of natural light and where the consequences of not being in the right place at the right time can be dire. How could they cope without well-designed signs, like Ruedi Rüegg’s at Zurich Airport? The same applies to trying to navigate the tangled mass of tunnels in a subway station, where you are below ground level with no means of identifying your location other than the signs, which you may need to read at speed, while distracted by crowds of passengers and garbled announcements, as New Yorkers learnt to their cost before their subway signage was rationalized.
An impressive example of this form of instructive symbolism is the British road-sign system designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Until then, most roads in Britain had sported a motley assortment of signs in different styles, sizes, formats and states of disrepair, which had accumulated over the years with the old ones remaining, however dilapidated they had become, after new versions were added. The result was confusing, perilously so for motorists, who would become accustomed to deciphering one type of sign only to have to waste valuable time puzzling over another, and risk being distracted from what was happening on the road. The graphic designer Herbert Spencer illustrated how chaotic the roads had become by photographing each of the hundreds of signs he came across when driving along the A3 from central London to the recently opened Heathrow Airport in 1961, and publishing the results in consecutive issues of Typographica magazine.11
By then, Kinneir and Calvert had been commissioned to design a signage system for Britain’s newly built highways, but they owed their appointment to the type of nepotistic coincidence that often determines such decisions. The chairman of the government committee responsible for highway signs was Colin Anderson, who also chaired the shipping company P&O-Orient Lines for which Kinneir had devised a brilliantly simple labelling system that helped the staff to track the passengers’ luggage as it was shuttled between ships.12 Other European countries were constructing highways at the time, and typically left signage design to the engineers, who tended to treat it as a peripheral project. Britain may well have done the same, if Anderson had not remembered how effective Jock Kinneir had been at P&O.
He and Calvert were charged with devising a coherent system of signs that could be understood quickly and easily by motorists wherever they were in the country and whatever the weather, even when driving at speed. Every element was rigorously tested to ensure that it was as clear and consistent as possible: the style and size of the lettering; whether the letters should be upper or lower case; the size of the spaces between them, and of the borders surrounding them; the colours; what the signs would be made of; how they should be supported; how high they should stand above the ground. The prototypes were tested at Hyde Park in London and on the newly built bypass at Preston in Lancashire. The results were so successful that when Herbert Spencer’s exposé goaded the government into taking action to improve the country’s road signs, Kinneir and Calvert were the obvious choices to design them too.
Both the highway and the road signs needed to provide clear, coherent ways of using letters and numbers to indicate distances, speed limits and to tell drivers where to turn off on to other roads. This was why Kinneir and Calvert devoted so much time to ascertaining whether their choice of typography, the order of information and its positioning was as clear as possible. But the signs also required a means of alerting drivers to whatever they might find along the route. Whether they were approaching a bridge, bend, tunnel, steep slope, ford, one-way street, dead end, roadworks, junction or level crossing, there had to be a sign saying so, just as there needed to be signs to forewarn them of the risk of debris tumbling on to the road, or of cattle crossing it and bringing the traffic to a halt. Kinneir and Calvert decided that the most effective solution would be to produce a series of pictograms, each illustrating a particular feature of the roads or possible hazard.
Kinneir took charge of devising the overall system, and Calvert of the pictograms. Stylistically, they needed to be as uncomplicated as possible to ensure that drivers could understand them instantly, even when squinting through torrential rain. They also had to be recognizable to people of different ages and backgrounds in different parts of the country. Calvert drew most of the symbols as silhouettes in solid simplified forms that a child might have sketched, depicting people’s heads as circles, for instance. For the ‘children crossing’ sign, which was to be positioned near schools, she referenced her own childhood memories by basing it on a photograph of her leading her younger brother by the hand.13
The overriding objective was clarity, but she also imbued her pictorial symbols – and Kinneir’s meticulously ordered system – with a human quality. Their signs fulfilled their designated function of telling British drivers exactly what to do and when to do it, but did so courteously. Many of Calvert’s symbols remain intact today, more than half a century after she designed them. Some have inevitably been tweaked or replaced, but the results seem so unsatisfactory in comparison that they often act as forlorn reminders of the originals. The signage system that Margaret Calvert created with Jock Kinneir has been imitated all over the world, literally in the case of some countries, which have imported some elements intact. Many subsequent examples of inspired instructive signage, such as Benno Wissig’s 1967 system for Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam,14 Adrian Frutiger’s sadly neglected scheme for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and Ruedi Rüegg’s signs at Zurich Airport, have owed something to their work.
More recent instructive symbols have been the products of intelligent reinvention, rather than being designed from scratch. Take the @. No one knows for sure where it came from. One theory is that it was introduced in the sixth or seventh century as an abbreviation of ad, the Latin word for ‘at’. Just like Robert Recorde when he abbreviated ‘is equal to’ by inventing the equals sign in 1557, the scribes of the day are said to have wearied of writing out both letters, and decided to combine them by curling the stroke of the ‘d’ around the ‘a’. Another explanation is that it originated in sixteenth-century Venice, when it was adopted as shorthand for the amphora, a measuring device used by local tradesmen.
Whatever the truth, the @ came into its own in the late nineteenth century when it appeared on the keyboard of the first typewriter, the American Underwood, in 1885. It was then used as an abbreviation of the accounting term ‘at the rate of’. Even though its use diminished over the years, the @ remained a typewriter key and, as a result, appeared on early computer keyboards. It is thanks to its inclusion there that the @ has enjoyed a second coming.
In 1971, the American computer programmer Raymond Tomlinson was preparing to send a message from one computer to another in the first email. He wrote the addresses of the sender and recipient in computer code, but needed to translate it into a form of wording that we ‘civilians’ could understand. Having decided that the first half of the address should identify the user, and the other half their computer, he looked for a means of indicating that he or she was ‘at’ that machine.15 The @ seemed perfect. Not only was it convenient to use, by dint of being on the keyboard, its old meaning was reassuringly similar to the new one. At least it was to the few people who still used it. By the early 1970s the @ was used so seldom that it could embark on its new role as the symbolic equivalent of a comeback kid with very little emotional baggage from the past, in an inspired exercise of design thinking.
The same could be said of another recently reinvented instructive symbol, the #, known as the hashtag, pound sign or number key. (An attempt in the 1960s to rename it the ‘octothorp’ or ‘octhorpe’ failed.) Like the @, the # was an early fixture on computer keyboards, where it was chiefly used as an abbreviation for ‘lb’, or a pound in weight. But some manufacturers demoted it from the keyboard by making it one of the secondary symbols, which are created by pressing several keys simultaneously. The # did, however, fulfil a useful function on phone keypads, where it was often used, together with the star key, when callers performed remote functions, such as retrieving voicemail or making credit card payments.
The ubiquity of the # eventually won it a dynamic new role as a Twitter identification tag. On 23 August 2007, the San Francisco-based tech activist Chris Messina, known as FactoryJoe, sent a tweet asking: ‘how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?’16 Eager to find a way of enabling himself and fellow tweeps to follow particular themes by logging on to a collection of all the tweets on those subjects, he suggested attaching # as a prefix – to, say, ‘#buck-minsterfuller’ or ‘#tsunami’ – as a means of achieving this.17
The take-up was relatively slow until San Diego County in southern California was ravaged by wildfires in 2007. More than half a million people were forced to leave their homes, and thousands of buildings destroyed.18 A local web developer, Nate Ritter, decided to track the disaster by posting regular updates on Twitter and used the hashtag ‘#sandiegofire’ to flag them to anyone who wanted to know what was happening.19 By providing sorely needed information to people in a perilous situation, his hashtagged tweets demonstrated how effective Messina’s idea of reviving the # as an instructive symbol for social media could be.
Inspired though such motifs are – and the @’s reinvention has won it a place in the design collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art20 – another type of emblem with a different role can be equally useful: the descriptive symbols intended to identify individuals or groups of people and to explain what they have in common. The raised fist and olive branch fall into this category, as do newer political symbols, such as the pink triangle, which became a popular motif for gay rights groups in a tribute to the homosexual prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, who were identified by it in the official records.21 Equally eloquent is the circular anti-nuclear symbol devised by the British designer Gerald Holtom in 1958 for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s protest march from Trafalgar Square in London to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Hampshire. It consists of a circle enclosing two diagonal lines and one vertical, which represent the semaphore signals for the letters ‘N’ in ‘nuclear’ and ‘D’ in ‘disarmament’.22
A more formal genre of descriptive symbols dates back to the ancient heraldic motifs adopted by aristocratic warriors in the mid twelfth century for use in battle. Originally, these emblems were conceived as tactical ploys to identify individual soldiers in combat, such as those fighting for the English king Richard I in the Crusades, who had become difficult to distinguish once they took to wearing full armour. Their coats of arms – or armorial bearings, as they were called – were attached to their shields or breastplates where they were clearly visible, and afforded extra protection to the wearer. Soon, the same symbols were being worn by warriors’ squires, and then by their foot soldiers, priests, clerks, tenants, servants, the labourers who tilled their land, and anyone else claiming to be associated with them. Eventually there were so many abuses of coats of arms, with people sporting heraldic motifs to which they had no rightful claim, that some countries introduced laws to regulate their use.
Cities, towns, villages, schools, universities, churches and sports teams have all adopted their equivalent of Crusaders’ armorial bearings over the centuries, always with the same objective of identifying themselves and imbuing the people who have an allegiance to them with a sense of belonging. Businesses have done the same. Corporate identities, like Apple’s and Ann Summers’ fruit motifs, are among the commonest forms of descriptive symbols, so common that a typical Western consumer is said to be exposed to several thousand of them every day.23 If you doubt that you see quite so many, just think of all the logos you spot, but do not necessarily notice, on food packaging in the fridge, trucks driving by, carrier bags crumpled in the gutter, advertising billboards, ticket stubs, websites, building signs, T-shirts, corporate stationery, email signature pickers and television commercials.
Many of the earliest corporate identities resembled aristocratic coats of arms, largely because fledgling companies wanted to reassure prospective customers that they were robust and reliable, rather than spivvy fly-by-nights who were likely to rip them off, or disappear after a few months. To that end, they sought to present themselves as being as powerful and enduring as the landed aristocracy. Pretentious though this sounds, it was a prudent strategy given that until the late nineteenth century most people bought goods from local shopkeepers, craftsmen or other suppliers whom they knew personally. Even tinkers and travelling salesmen tended to be familiar to their customers because they stuck to the same routes. Once businesses began shipping their goods further afield on newly built roads and railways, they needed to find other ways of convincing people who had never actually met them that they were reputable and trustworthy. One solution was to identify their products, trucks and paperwork by branding them with distinctive symbols. Often, the same companies also wanted to persuade their employees that they were powerful and imposing: qualities associated with the feudal warlords of past centuries. Traces of these faux heraldic emblems are still visible in some corporate logos, including BMW’s and Fiat’s, whose circular motifs look as though they could have come from warriors’ shields. Grander still is the emblem of Santa Maria Novella, the Florentine perfumery, which adopts the same shape as a traditional coat of arms, topped by a crown, in a regal palette of royal blue and gold.24
Other companies have plumped for symbols that say something about themselves, by describing what they do or what they stand for, rather than claiming aristocratic authority. A popular option was to try to replicate the personal nature of traditional trading by identifying the business with a signature, so that it looked as if someone, usually the founder, was endorsing its goods. Some of those signatures were genuine. When a young American broom salesman, Will Keith Kellogg, founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1906 to make breakfast cereal to his recipe, he printed his signature on every packet.25 The Kellogg Company has used variations of it ever since. Similarly, the extrovert Australian industrialist Macpherson Robertson named his confectionery company MacRobertson in the 1880s, as an abbreviation of his own names, and chose a fancy version of his signature as its motif. His ‘signature’ was written in neon lights above his factory in Melbourne and became a local landmark.26
Some signature logos are fictitious and were created to give the impression of belonging to a particular person. The recipe for Coca-Cola was invented in 1886 by Dr John Pemberton, a wounded army veteran turned pharmacist in Atlanta, Georgia, who hoped to sell it as a headache cure. Once it went on sale at a local soda fountain, the company’s bookkeeper Frank Robinson suggested calling the cure Coca-Cola after two of its main ingredients, coca leaf extract and kola nuts, whose ‘k’ was replaced by a ‘c’ to make the name sound catchier. Robinson wrote it out in the then-fashionable ornate style of lettering known as Spencerian script.27 Coca-Cola was a hit, not as a headache cure, but as a pick-me-up (probably thanks to the traces of cocaine in the coca leaf extract it then used, and to the caffeine in the kola nuts), and the Coca-Cola Company still uses the Spencerian-style signature as its logo.
Another approach was for companies to illustrate the things they made or did in ‘biographical logos’. The French luxury good house Hermès was founded in 1837 by Thierry Hermès, the orphaned son of an innkeeper, who opened a workshop in Paris to make horses’ harnesses of such high quality that Europe’s wealthiest families vied to buy them. These days, Hermès is better known for the very long waiting lists to buy its Kelly and Birkin bags, but it still makes harnesses in the tiny saddlery tucked above its flagship store on rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, and its corporate symbol is an homage to Thierry Hermès’s trade: depicting a man in a top hat and breeches standing beside a smartly harnessed horse pulling a nineteenth-century open-top carriage.28 The red and yellow logo of my favourite football club, Manchester United, looks like a heraldic coat of arms at first glance, but on closer inspection sports a couple of footballs and a perky devil brandishing a trident in a nod to the ‘Red Devils’, the nickname given to the team in the early 1960s.29 Originally the name belonged to a local rugby team, but when Manchester United’s manager Matt Busby heard it, he suggested that the club should adopt it as a suitably feisty name, which was likely to unsettle opposing teams. The new nickname became so popular that the red devil motif was added to the club’s official visual identity.
Similarly, the logo of Citroën, the French car company, sports a pair of upturned chevrons in a nod to the ingenious gear-cutting process that its founder, André Citroën, discovered on a trip to Poland in 1900. He began the business by using that process to produce gears in the shape of chevrons.30 Decades later, NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, introduced a biographical logo in 1959, officially known as the ‘NASA insignia’ and unofficially as the ‘meatball’. Designed by an employee, James Modarelli, it consists of a spacecraft orbiting the letters N, A, S and A in a starlit sky (the stars really do look like the dimples of a meatball) beside the elongated V shape of the latest hypersonic wings. As well as speaking volumes about the NASA team’s passion for exploring outer space, it alludes to the amateur design tradition there. It is customary for a member of the crew for each mission to design a commemorative patch for the entire team to wear on their spacesuits. The meatball was nudged into retirement in 1972 when NASA adopted a new logo, the futuristic ‘worm’, as part of the Federal Design Improvement Program implemented by the Nixon regime. But when NASA was restructured in 1992, after a traumatic period in the 1980s, the meatball was reinstated as a rousing symbol of the good old days of the space race.31
Fond though space nuts are of the meatball, design purists may have considered it dated of NASA to have commissioned a biographical motif in the late 1950s. By then, businesses no longer wished to be associated with one person or a particular product as if they were traditional mom ’n’ pop shops. In an era when multinational conglomerates were diversifying into new industries and opening offices all over the world, corporate success was equated with speed and scale. Go-getting post-war corporations sought descriptive symbols that conveyed an aura of dynamism and sleek inscrutability, rather like the mid-century modern skyscrapers, which many of them had commissioned as their headquarters. This was the heyday of the anonymous corporate symbol, often consisting solely of the company’s name – or initials – spelt out in a specific typeface, like Paul Rand’s I, B and M emblem. A well-designed corporate identity was regarded as one that was both distinctive and memorable. At the time, the consensus was that it should look exactly the same wherever it appeared, which Rand achieved brilliantly in his masterly handling of IBM’s symbol.
First, Rand did not start off with stripy initials, but restricted himself to selecting a more modern and refined typeface to spell out I, B and M. As Steven Heller explained in his monograph of Rand’s work, he waited until he had won his client’s confidence before suggesting the stripes. As well as making IBM’s otherwise rather mismatched initials look more coherent, he argued that the stripes gave those letters an authoritative air by evoking the skinny parallel lines that act as anti-forgery devices on the signature sections of legal documents.
Second, Rand realized that ensuring the identity was executed to the same high standard wherever it was used would be just as important as what it looked like, and probably trickier to pull off. Like many post-war multinationals, IBM owned factories, warehouses, offices and showrooms all over the world, and the implementation of its identity would be delegated to different designers, draughtsmen and printers in each location. Printing standards varied from place to place, and many of the designers were accustomed to doing more or less what they wanted. One enterprising employee at IBM’s production plant in Poughkeepsie, New York, had invented a cartoon character, Ogiwamba, who featured prominently on the factory posters. Inevitably, he and his peers were not best pleased at being told to jettison their ideas and to obey Rand’s edicts. Undeterred, Rand held regular briefing sessions with groups of IBM designers at its Manhattan headquarters and summoned them to his home.32 Sometimes they repaired for informal meetings to his favourite local restaurant, Gold’s Delicatessen in Weston, Connecticut.33 Rand wrote two lengthy documents – ‘IBM Logo Use and Abuse’ and the less ominously entitled ‘The IBM Logo’ – in which he specified how the identity should be applied in different contexts.34 Experts in printing, paper and typography were hired to visit the various IBM offices around the world and to lecture the staff on best practice.
Other companies did their best to make their own visual identities as distinctive and consistent as IBM’s, but few succeeded. Nonetheless, the most memorable ones have become part of daily life. The ‘golden arches’ in the ‘M’ of McDonald’s refer to the oddly shaped yellow arches that its co-founder Richard McDonald added to the architectural scheme for the fast-food chain’s first drive-in restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1953. Having judged the original proposal to be dull, he decided to liven it up.35 Then there is the secret joke in FedEx’s logo. Next time you see that symbol, look at the shape between the letters ‘E’ and ‘x’. It is an arrow, which seems entirely apt for a business whose purpose is to move things quickly from one place to another.36 There is even an optically illusory effect when the logo moves. Watch a FedEx truck as it pulls away, and note how much faster it seems to go when you focus on the ‘hidden’ arrow. The same thing appears to happen when you see a Nike ‘swoosh’ in motion on the side of a pair of running shoes.37
The swoosh, like McDonald’s golden arches and FedEx’s secret arrow, is instantly recognizable, largely because we see it so often, always looking more or less the same. But corporate thinking no longer favours homogeneous logos to the degree that it did when Rand was imposing his visual will on IBM and wrangling with Steve Jobs over the position of the ‘.’ in ‘Steven P. Jobs’ on his NeXT business card.38 A new school of thought argues that such symbols may be more effective if they can be adapted to suit different purposes and contexts. There have always been examples of these dynamic identities, but they were relatively rare until recently.
Probably the most famous is the Michelin Man, alias ‘Monsieur Bibendum’, who was designed in 1898 by the French illustrator Marius Rossillon, known as O’Galop, as an emblem for the tyre company owned by the brothers Édouard and André Michelin. Several years before, they had spotted an oddly shaped pile of tyres during a visit to the Lyon Universal Exhibition, and Édouard had remarked to André that it looked like a man.39 The brothers remembered this when they were looking at O’Galop’s work and spotted a poster for a German brewery with a portly Bavarian drinking beer from a tankard engraved with the words ‘Nunc est Bibendum’.40 The boozy Bavarian bore a distinct resemblance to the humanoid pile of tyres the Michelins had seen in Lyon, and they asked O’Galop to draw a man made from tyres as a corporate motif for Michelin, then christened the result ‘Monsieur Bibendum’.
But Michelin’s mutating identity remained an exception, until the video music channel MTV went on air on 1 August 1981 with a corporate logo which was designed to seem different every time – or almost every time – the audience saw it, just as they would expect the channel to be playing different music whenever they tuned in. It was the work of three young designers who worked together as Manhattan Design in a tiny room on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street in New York. One of the three, Frank Olinsky, had a childhood friend who worked for MTV’s owner, Warner Amex, and invited them to submit a design proposal for the new channel’s identity.
They decided early on that the core of the logo would consist of a large ‘M’ accompanied by a smaller ‘T’ and ‘V’, and that the effect should look spontaneous, rather than corporate. When Olinsky was a boy, one of his favourite TV shows was the children’s cartoon series Winky Dink, which made an early stab at interactive television by asking viewers to intervene at key moments by drawing on a sheet of plastic film placed over the television screen to suggest how the star of the show, an affable character called Winky Dink, might get out of trouble. He decided to do something similar with MTV’s logo. After blowing up a photocopy of the ‘M’, he took it out into the stairwell and added the ‘T’ and ‘V’ with a can of black spray paint so that it looked like the graffiti tagged on the New York streets. His friend took the result to show his bosses, and relayed their comments to Manhattan Design. Some of their suggestions were implemented, such as adding the words ‘Music Television’ beneath the initials; but others were rebuffed, including an insistence that any variations of the identity should be limited to an ‘approved’ palette of colours. Seibert and the designers argued that MTV should give carte blanche to all of the designers, artists, animators, film-makers and illustrators who would customize the logo over the years by depicting it covered in fur, dripping with paint, bursting into flames, splattered with blood or frozen in ice.41
The logo’s success showed how appealing a dynamic identity could be, especially for MTV’s young viewers, who had grown up in a visually saturated culture that gave them shorter attention spans than their parents, and heightened visual expectations. The work of cultural theorists like Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard had created an intellectual blueprint for deconstructing imagery in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1980s even people who had never heard of them or their writing could work it out for themselves, often instinctively. Not only had they become adept at decoding the messages encrypted in visual imagery (just think of how much more discerning we have become about typography since we have been able to choose typefaces from the Fonts menus of our computers), but their response to signs and symbols was very different. Rather than regarding homogeneous images as reassuringly authoritative and familiar, they dismissed them as dull; and far from being flustered or irritated by mutating imagery, they found it exhilarating.
MTV made its debut a decade before the World Wide Web went live in 1991. Once the Internet era began, attention spans became even shorter, visual awareness higher and the desire for distraction greater, all of which made dynamic identities more appealing. Digital technology also rendered them cheaper and easier to produce. It is easy to underestimate how brave Michelin was to plump for the constantly morphing Monsieur Bibendum as its motif in the late 1800s. In the era when corporate symbols were generally seen in print – whether on posters, company stationery, newspaper and magazine ads, or on signage – they were extremely expensive to make, especially if there was more than one version. Quality control was a problem too. The more variations there were, the greater the difficulty of ensuring that they were printed and installed to the same standard. But if corporate symbols are intended to be seen primarily online, like Google’s and Twitter’s, they can be adapted quickly and easily, at very little expense.
For online brands like those, this is just as well, because they have few other opportunities to engage with the people who use their services. No helpful sales assistants or attentive waiters. No friendly postmen, couriers or receptionists. For most of their customers, subscribers or visitors, the only hints as to what those organizations are like, and what they stand for, are whatever they see on their computer or phone screens. It stands to reason that the impression is likelier to be more favourable if they are intrigued or entertained by what they find there, rather than looking at the same thing repeatedly. What would you rather see? An identical set of letters spelling the name Google, or the naffest of its holiday logos? I would prefer to wince at the latter.
Saks Fifth Avenue, the City of Melbourne in Australia, Aol., the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, the Brooklyn Museum, the Casa da Música in the Portuguese city of Oporto, Channel 4 Television, Haus der Kunst in Munich, the London 2012 Olympic Games: for better or worse (in the case of the London Olympics), more and more organizations have plumped for dynamic identities. Even companies that still favour consistency have become a little more lenient. The jauntily illustrated penguin symbol that appears on Penguin’s books has looked more or less the same over the years, with occasional variations, except for the Great Food series of paperbacks featuring food writing, which also sports a livelier version of the company motif, dancing a jig and defying anatomical logic by holding a knife with the tip of one wing and a fork with the other.42 Not all organizations suit hybrid identities, notably the ones that we prefer to think of as being trustworthy, dependable and unchanging. As the Canadian designer Bruce Mau put it: ‘MTV has a dynamic identity because they are dynamic, and I want them to be. But I don’t want my bank to be dynamic. I want them to be conservative and radically stable.’43
Other dynamic identities have faltered for practical reasons, such as British Airways’ ill-starred attempt to depict itself as an international, rather than a national, brand in 1997 by commissioning artists from all over the world to create ethnic emblems for its tickets and tail fins. One problem was the public outcry in Britain, where the new strategy proved unpopular. The former prime minister Margaret Thatcher disliked it so much that she draped a handkerchief over a model of a BA aircraft at an official function. Another difficulty was that air traffic controllers reportedly found it difficult to identify BA planes, because they all looked different. BA’s arch-rival Virgin Atlantic took advantage of its plight by introducing BA’s old symbol, the patriotic Union Jack, to its livery, and BA eventually dropped its controversial identity.44
Even the most successful hybrid identities find it hard to overcome the challenge of finding a distinctive name and descriptive symbol or set of symbols in an age when there are already so many. The surfeit of identities explains the plethora of made-up, sometimes silly names. Why call an insurance company Aviva? A management consultancy Accenture? A camera the Exilim? A car the i-MiEV? Another car the Th!nk? Not that the only foolish names are made-up ones. An irredeemably bland apartment block being built near my home in London has the howlingly inappropriate name Avant Garde Tower.45 A hotel in the Bloomsbury area of the city once sought to cash in on local literary lore by dubbing a restaurant ‘Virginia Woolf’s Burger Bar’ in a nod to the novelist, who had lived nearby, and later rechristened it ‘VW’s Brasserie’. British design buffs still wince at the memory of the naming of the first large hovercrafts to go into service between Britain and France in the 1960s and 1970s. The French vessel was christened Jean Bertin in honour of a pioneering hovercraft design engineer, and the British one Princess Margaret after the Queen’s younger sister, who was not noted for her interest in either design or engineering. But made-up names often sound even sillier than ‘borrowed’ ones. After all, if you have been given the chance to invent a name from scratch, why choose something stupid?
Another legacy of the dearth of – and frenzied competition for – original names is the craze for adding punctuation marks and other irrelevant symbols to corporate names and jumbling upper- and lower-case letters together, seemingly illogically. It is true that having taught ourselves to converse in the new digital languages of tweeting, texting and emailing, we have become more permissive about grammar and spelling, and more adept at using symbols on our keypads and keyboards as abbreviations. But some of the results are risible. Vélib’, the Parisian cycle hire scheme, is a victim of this trend, as are the Th!nk and another electric car the G-Wiz. The i-MiEV suffers on two fronts: so do Aol. and Toys ’R’ Us.
Yet it is still possible to design new symbols that are intelligent and inspiring, as the anti-capitalist activists in the Occupy movement proved in autumn 2011.46 If anyone had written a design brief for Occupy’s visual identity, it would have sounded impossibly daunting: to create a series of signifiers which would be distinctive and memorable, but versatile enough to reflect the geographical and political diversity of a leaderless movement composed of hundreds of disparate groups embracing different causes. Whatever was chosen needed to work on home-made banners in Occupy’s camps and protest marches, as well as on the Internet, particularly on Twitter, Facebook and the other social media sites with which local groups rallied support. The clinchers were that you would not be able to force any of those groups to adopt whatever you came up with, because they were free to choose whether to do so, and you would have to conceive and execute the identity for a pittance, ideally for less.
The original group picked a name, Occupy Wall Street, which could be adapted to suit any location: Occupy Winnipeg, Occupy Warsaw, Occupy Wellington, and so on. All of the subsequent groups took that name, but were free to pick and choose which other elements of Occupy Wall Street’s identity they wished to adopt. Among the most popular choices were the slogans, such as ‘We are the 99%’. Originally a reference to the concentration of personal wealth in the United States among the richest one per cent of the population, but versatile enough to apply to other countries, it also explained a complex economic concept clearly and persuasively, but was concise enough to be included in tweets without breaching Twitter’s one-hundred-and-forty-character limit. Similarly, lots of Occupy groups took up variations on the slogan ‘Sorry for the inconvenience. We are trying to change the world.’ The wording may have varied slightly, but the meaning was consistent, as was its wit.
When it came to choosing visual symbols, the most ubiquitous ones included a traditional motif, the raised fist, that rooted Occupy within the trajectory of past protest movements, and the #, which seemed resoundingly contemporary, thanks to its reinvention as a Twitter identification tag. Not only did Occupy emerge with an original, versatile and stunningly effective identity, it treated the # to yet another new role, this time as both a descriptive and an instructive motif, which was equally effective and honest in either role.
An Objet Thérapeutique, designed by Mathieu Lehanneur, to help people to take the correct doses of prescription drugs
An Objet Thérapeutique pen that dispenses analgesic for acute pain
Each dose in a course of antibiotics is peeled off this Objet Thérapeutique in a layer
Mathieu Lehanneur’s ‘Tomorrow Is Another Day’ in the palliative care unit of the Diaconesses Croix Saint-Simon Hospital in Paris