Herb Lubalin on the creation of the PBS logo (as seen on Brand New)

Saul Bass on making money vs. quality work

Steve Jobs on hiring Paul Rand to design the Next logo (lovely quote at 1:20: “it takes at least ten years and hundreds millions of dollars to associate a symbol with the name of the company”)

A 1977 interview with Walter Landor.

Raymond Loewy was an allround designer, not only did he design the Shell logo, also:

Paul Rand on the definition of design (as seen on Logodesignlove)

I have to say that I’m very glad he started Zuriick because I can easily say it’s the best shoe brand I know, by far. The fact that McCaleb put purpose over profit back then is still noticeable. No distracting dominant stripes or swooshes on the side of shoes, just clever shapes, cool colors and almost always a purple sole. The only real noticeable branding (for a layman). As if they wanted to say “we do like it when you to show of our shoes so we’ll just put our trademark on the sole”, it’s paradoxal but makes sense at the same time.

Every shoe in the world is a form of self-expression. Very often a shoe makes you part of a group, big companies will encourage you to be part of that group, that feeling. Not Zuriick. I think the only thing people wearing Zuriick have in common is that they like to wear what they like, not just what they’re being advertised. If all brands in the world would be so passionate of what they make, my job as a brand identity designer would be over I think. Companies like Zuriick are what they make and would only look pretentious with a slick brand identity, they’d lose their innocence that makes them so appealing.

It is a scientifically proven fact that a company does better when they put purpose over profit, or at least communicate that thought. Zuriick is the perfect example of that I think. To prove my point, this comes from the about section of their website:

“They’re Zuriick, which means they’re not just made from premium materials: leather and canvas, stitches and lacing. Zuriick shoes are made from a lifetime of memories and experiences. They are conceived and designed by Michael McCaleb, a quiet guy with an eye for style and, lucky for you, a generous nature.”

I strongly advice you take a look at their website and I hope you’ll love them as much as I do.

In 2005 the ‘onderwijsinspectie’, the supervisory department of the Dutch ministry of education, published a damning report about the quality, or lack thereof, of education at Inholland. Since then the reputation of the university, which has ten locations with a total of almost 40k students, dropped. And continued to drop because every little mistake they made was magnified, well, you know how the media works. Even after Studio Dumbar was hired the slump went on, with good reason though: exam fraud.

So the reason the new brand identity is revealed at this time may just be good planning, ergo marketing. Fact is that they reveiled it in phases since the beginning of this year. The main focus I think was keeping the attention they had and try to better the public opinion, rather than creating something totally new and start with a clean sheet. Nonetheless it’s interesting to see what Studio Dumbar came up with, and why.

With the old logo containing a typical Dutch landscape, orange and use of fluorescent colors they were obviously playing the ‘Dutch-card’, hoping to provoke some kind of chauvinism: cozy but at the same time wanting to be the best, ‘the V.O.C. mentality’ as former prime minister Balkenende once called it. So we can easily establish they tried to associate their brand with a facet of the Dutch culture. What they didn’t encounter though is that the association was highly instable, because the Dutch culture withholds much more facets and prejudices. The link between the color orange and a mindless mob is not so hard to discover, and that’s something you’d rather not be associated with as a university, I suppose. A bad brand plus bad publicity equals disaster.

When you look at the new logo, purely the logo, we see that those association are gone now though you’d still recognize it as being Inholland’s logo. There is still the fluorescent magenta and the bold typography with the pointy terminals. The proportion has also improved for the better, try remembering a logo with a height/width dimension of 1 to 15 in a split second.

The facets of the Dutch culture the old logo was trying to refer to are now integrated in the brand itself and less obvious. Inholland’s new website is minimal yet clever: much white space combined with well chosen ‘loud’ colors poured into a grid system. Elements ‘De Stijl’ was also known for and are characteristic to the Netherlands. The award winning stop-motion introduction animation displayed below is seamingly trivial but intelligent at the same time. The associations are more abstract but far more solid than in previous logo/brand, no clichés and no room for wrong interpretations. To emphasize my point: all photographical material is staged, nothing is left to chance.

This isn’t your typical project when you want to create and amaze. Though Studio Dumbar was able to strip down the brand yet they kept it recognizable as being Inholland’s. With a striking website and a seemingly simple video they were able to convey the message Inholland so eagerly pursued. Once more one of my favorite quotes was proven right:

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

18-10-11 Edit: Just a day after I wrote this article the Dutch ‘choiceguide’ came out, an independent guide that rates the quality of education. And you guessed it: Inholland is officially the worst. The brand may be solid visually but I doubt if they’ll overcome this kind of publicity.

The Latin alphabet is most common worldwide, mostly consisting 26 characters. But the style of use varies a great amount over the ages. Have you, for example, ever been annoyed by someone writing an entire message in upper case (probably with ‘Caps-Lock’ active)? Yes? Good thing you weren’t born in the dark ages then, lower case didn’t even exist up until approximately 1300 CE. So in a way you could even consider ‘caps-lock typing’ retro.

Even more amazing is the fact there is an era (mainly +/- 200-600 CE) in which words weren’t even separated by space at all (or just a few),  a style called ‘scriptio continua’. And in a way that even makes sense, since you’ll probably pause two times in the sentence you are reading right now, unlike the 32 times the spaces between the words might suggest. That means an ordinary piece of text looked something like this:

Capital A

In the posts that will follow-up this one (as the #1 already indicated) I will also give an insight of how letters got to look the way they do today (without boring the hell out of you). Of course, starting with the letter ‘A’. As I said before lower case letters didn’t even exist until approximately 1300 CE. It was in that time people started to frequently write with pen and came to the conclusion the existing capital letters took ages to get right.

Due to numerous reasons the origin of most letters isn’t quite so certain as you might expect and the ‘A’ is no exception. It is clear it’s closest ancestor is the Greek ‘alpha’. The Greek probably adopted it from the Phoenicians, an ancient civilization that lived in the Middle East, Southeast Europe and Egypt until 539 BC.  The Phoenician had the word ‘aleph’ which means ‘ox’. The strange thing however is that the ‘aleph’ they used looks amazingly close to our capital A, but turned 45 degrees.  The Phoenician are said to have based their language system on the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the difference is though, the Egyptian hieroglyphs didn’t stand for a consonantal sound. Their language system was more like a giant rebus, for which the Phoenician had no room because they were mostly travelers. So, for each consonantal sound the Phoenician picked a hieroglyph and stylized it, narrowing the Egyptian system down from 7000 to 24 characters. With that, they laid the foundation of the system as we know it now.