Pentagram’s new logo for the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art [SECCA] in North Carolina uses multimedia to provide a literally moving experience. The logo is animated with the initials of the organisation - an art gallery with a constantly changing collection – floating laterally and sometimes overlapping before moving in opposite directions. Conceptually it’s a neat solution which does beg the question: is multimedia changing branding?
The idea of non-static logos isn’t new, TV identities such as MTV and Nickelodeon have used motion for a ages, but the acceptance that the most important presentation of a brand will be on screen, challenges the designer’s priorities. That’s not to say printed graphics are redundant and in this instance the brand works on printed items such as stationery with randomly captured versions of the logo.
Branding is inevitably affected by the constantly evolving digital world and Companies naturally want to appear forward-thinking by taking advantage of new technologies and new techniques so animated graphics are an innovative way to achieve it. However, it does throw up some technical issues, for example Pentagram’s SECCA logo uses Flash technology which looks great on the website, but Flash isn’t supported on ipads or ipods proving that you do need to consider all the angles.
http://pentagram.com/en/new/2010/08/new-work-southeastern-center-f.php
Following a refresh of their site, in which the BBC has switched fonts from Verdana to Helvetica Neue on Macs – which looks very nice – and Arial on PCs – which obviously doesn’t look quite as nice, they’ve also published quite an interesting article on the whole question of ‘do typefaces really matter?’ As designers we’d admit we have a somewhat biased, perhaps even bordering on an OCD obsession with type, but appreciate not everyone feels the quite same. The article provides a reasonable view of both perspectives and is worth a read, even if one side of the 
argument is clearly wrong.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-10689931
bd2 principal Will Bentley has been invited to join the judging panel of the Marketing Industry Network Awards 2010. The awards will be taking place on Thursday 18th November, at the Ramada Jarvis in Manchester.
The Marketing Industry Network awards are open to entry for all creative and marketing agencies including digital agencies, creative agencies, media owners, PR companies, events companies, DM agencies, Media Sales Teams, Market Research firms throughout the whole of the UK including Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales.
Awards will be made across various categories including Social Marketing Agency or Team of the Year, Media Owner of the Year, Consumer Brand of the Year, B2B Brand of the Year, Rising Star of the Year, Marketing Director of the Year and Marketing Personality of the Year.
The Marketing Industry Network is the training and networking arm of The Drum magazine.
bd2 have designed and developed the brand and new website for Freshtl, a new business providing a range of services and products to enable online collaboration using leading edge ‘cloud’ based applications. These applications include LotusLive from IBM which is a collection of integrated collaboration tools and social networking services for business; Vondle Live to view large documents online without downloading; Vondle document management; Teampoint document control and compliance; RDP from IBM which provides a remote data storage and back up solution; And Bricscad a leading CAD platform.
More and more companies are discovering the benefits of working together online. With Cloud Computing there are no capital costs, no maintenance costs and no infrastructure costs. It works alongside your existing software and you only pay for the number of users you need. Freshtl are experts in Cloud Computing with a range of solutions to help businesses collaborate securely and effectively on line. bd2 will continue to provide a range of creative and marketing services to support the business’s plans which are for aggressive growth and flotation.
www.freshtl.com
bd2 have been selected, by Liverpool based Bullen Healthcare Group, as their creative marketing agency following a three way pitch. We were initially asked to develop a marketing concept and message to support the launch of a new and unique combined home delivery service. Collateral produced included a Welcome Pack, press ads for various industry journals, promotional items and direct mail pieces. We have since supported Bullen by designing various home delivery service communications for Discharging Nurses, Pharmacies and Patients and most recently we have designed both male and female brochures with medical illustrations along with exhibition banner stands in support of their new range of male and female prescription urology products.
Alastair Demick, National Marketing & Internal Sales Manager at Bullens comments:
“It was important that the creative for the launch of the new service was impactful but also unique to reflect the innovative nature of the service it was supporting. Advertising in our industry is sometimes guilty of including the odd cliché, so we needed our message to be fresh, loud and clear. bd2 understood this requirement and produced a solution that not only stood out from the other agencies, but clearly reflected the virtues of the service that we provide. We continue to use bd2 to provide us with design and marketing collateral and I’m delighted with the excellent creative we’ve received – which remains cliché free!”
Style magazine ‘Wallpaper’ commissioned design studio ‘Julia’ to create this stylish new font for their May issue about Brazil. Taking their cues from Brazilian architecture, they created the elegant ‘Copan’ – a geometrically precise but fluid title font in two sizes. ‘Initially we only knew what we didn’t want it to look like – there are good cliches and bad cliches about Brazil,’ says designer
Hugo Timm. ‘one of the prominent characteristics of Brazilian typography – as opposed to work from the UK or France – is that it’s quite informal and vernacular.’
http://www.wallpaper.com/art/Copan-font-by-Julia/4517
According to new research by UK Online Measurement company (UKOM), UK web users are spending 65% more time online than they did three years ago with the average surfer spending nearly a day 
- over 22 hours on the net – each month. Nearly a quarter of the average users’ time online is spent on social network sites such as Facebook, or blogs but communication [email] and playing games are also popular activities. Time online breaks down as 22.7% on Social networks and blogs, 7.2% on email, 6.9% on games, Instant Messaging is 4.9%, Classified/Auctions 4.7%, Portals 4%, Search 4%, Software info/products 3.4%, News is 2.8% and finally adult content is 2.7%. Which shows that people now spend more time on news sites than they do on adult content belying the digital myth that everyone online visits adult sites, that said, it is still in the top 10. The rise of social networking is due primarily to its organic nature which just mushrooms and mushrooms as more and more people plug more and more of their lives into it.
BP’s brand identity is a much referred to example – not least by us – of the effective use of rebranding to reposition a company and communicate a new strategy. Their original brand from the 1920s was a, occasionally tweaked, shield reflecting the rather colonial feel of ‘British Petroleum’. This was ditched in favour of softer, lower case bp initials to now represent ‘beyond petroleum’ and a new, almost floral and definitely ‘greener’ logo:
“BP is progressive, responsible, innovative and performance driven. Our logo – the Helios – symbolizes these values. Named after the Greek sun god, the Helios represents energy in its many forms. Of all the forms of energy that make up BP and its services, perhaps the most vital is the human energy our people bring to everything we do. This is what fuels our brand.” A brand consistently applied and brilliantly effective as a tool to reflect the transition away from an ugly oil company to a progressive energy business.
One of our other favourite references is a quote from brand guru Wally Olins “In everything the organisation does, owns and produces it should project a clear idea of what it is. This is achieved by consistency in purpose, performance and appearance.” It seems BP forgot the very first part of this basic principle of delivering on the brand promise.
BP are looking more and more culpable by the day with this weekend’s Sunday Times reporting that over zealous cost-cutting “Four successive accidents in America in 2005 and 2006 had shredded BP’s reputation” these included the Texas City oil refinery explosion that killed 15. Now t
he environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which also claimed 11 lives, may well drag the BP brand into the same kind of murky and deadly waters the pelicans and dolphins are trying to avoid.
However beautiful your logo, if your organisation does ugly things, if it doesn’t ‘walk the talk’ and if it doesn’t deliver on its promises then it will become a symbol tarred by those failings and will ultimately come to represent them.
Internet phenomenon Twitter has this weekend acquired Tweetie, a Twitter client for the iPhone and Mac platforms. Tweetie is one of the best mobile Twitter apps and will now be offered for free, instead of the £1.79 it currently costs in the App Store. Which doesn’t matter that much at the moment – although Tweetie for free isn’t a bad thing – but with their own mobile client, Twitter would be able to provide whatever updates or features they want – a URL shortener and photo uploader would logically be next. And if Twitter does acquire all the necessary components and offer them as a package, they’ll have total control of the medium.
Whilst we’ve always contested that a brand is much more than a logo – an approach perhaps best encapsulated by branding guru Wally Olins: “In everything an organisation does, owns and produces it should project a clear idea of what it is. This is achieved by consistency in purpose, performance and appearance.” – we use logos within branding programmes as the signifier, or flag, that an organisation ‘fights’ under, a hark back to the heraldic origins of branding. However, an interesting article in the current issue of Design Week by Simon Manchipp, gives pause for thought; as well as questioning the value of logos altogether, which is debatable, he does make a valid point that ‘brand worlds’ are of growing significance “They add depth to the brand name. They are the Adidas stripes down the side of the shoe or the leg of the tracksuit, at the entrance to the store and on the endframe of the TV ad. They are the O2 bubbles rising from the press ad, the decor inside the stadium, the animation on the mobile phone.” As we do, he stresses consistency and coherence in application and to gain cumulative impact based on use of colour, photography/imagery and typography to create an individual identity “Brand worlds are coherent [not just consistent] universal branding systems…They distinguish a product or service more completely, more deeply than any one-dimensional logo could ever hope to. They are varied, rechargeable, developing tools for brands.”
www.designweek.co.uk
Pentagram’s new logo for the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art [SECCA] in North Carolina uses multimedia to provide a literally moving experience. The logo is animated with the initials of the organisation - an art gallery with a constantly changing collection – floating laterally and sometimes overlapping before moving in opposite directions. Conceptually it’s a neat solution which does beg the question: is multimedia changing branding?
