A few important pieces of advice for brands trying to leverage their provenance came out of our discussion:

- Visual cues are very important, and help telegraph the association between brand and provenance. But the root personality traits are also critical to extend the provenance beyond the expected, superficial cues.

- Brands must think about a holistic customer experience. In the case of a company like IKEA, nods to its origins go beyond furniture and permeate every part of the experience (including the Swedish meatballs and Swedish gummi fish served in the cafeteria).

- Consistency is crucial across all touchpoints, both online and offline.

Read the full article, and the rest of my thoughts, here:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3009750/where-do-you-come-from-tips-for-creating-a-powerful-provenance-for-your-brand

Lead by Artistic Director, Septime Webre, the Ballet was originally founded as a school in 1944. As one of the pre-eminent ballet organizations in the United States, the Company has built an international reputation for presenting bold performances by choreographers from around the world.

The theme for this year’s gala was Hemingway’s life in the Paris of the 1920s and drew its inspiration from the Ballet’s performance of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Working closely with Webre and his team, Sullivan created a rich and colorful identity for this year’s program. Fueled by images of Parisian café culture, late night jazz and typography reminiscent of the era, the identity is a celebration of Hemingway’s spirited life during that time.

When I think of these two qualities, I think of the timeless beauty of Paul Rand or Saul Bass’s work – harmonious plays of contrast, proportions and form, with design as a synthesis of form and content is twice true in logo design. There are not many more powerful combinations than a strong concept and a simple form.

But the Doodle Test fails to account for one of a logo’s most important qualities that a designer can’t provide at the time of presentation: Longevity. For this, we must evaluate with what I like to call the Time Test.

Look at classic logos like those of BMW, Coca-Cola, GE, Woolmark, and IBM – all of these logos have been around for quite some time, and hopefully won’t be changing anytime soon. (Most of them changed slightly over time, but the change was gradual.) Yet, we live in an age of immediate feedback; a time in which corporate identities change on the whims of a few executives or the unsatisfied masses. 

It’s important to note that while these opinions are always appreciated, immediacy is not always good. Some ideas need time to marinate in our collective unconscious; knee-jerk reactions of the crowd can ruin even the most visionary idea. When we let the Time Test run its course, good logos get even stronger, and the weaker ones get replaced. 

Let’s take a look at some recent (and not so recent, but still passionately discussed) logo redesigns and assume that the clients and the designers had all the best reasons for doing what they did.

USA Today

Stephen Colbert called the big blue circle “a piechart of people who are confused by the new logo.” It’s certainly a bold statement. The logo is strongest at its basic form as a blue circle, combined with a customized version of the typeface Futura. But the concept falls apart in application and the different variations. Trying to fit everything in the circle is a conceptual trap, but I applaud the management of USA Today and Wolff Olins. It takes balls to make such a bold statement. Or at least one. One giant blue ball.

eBay

eBay got boring. The old letters were a little goofy, but they had personality, they wanted you to be with them, to play. They were bouncy, jumping up and down and over each other. The new logo tried to retain some qualities of the old one, but failed. The playfulness is gone, replaced by the sterile corporate boredom. Transition from a startup to a respected corporation doesn’t have to be this dry.

University of California

Wow, how people hated this one. Dissenters signed petitions, complaining that the new offering missed the tradition and timeless beauty of the original. But the truth is, the original logo was neither timeless nor beautiful: Its most exciting feature was the word “of,” which was at least set in an italic serif font.

The new logo, may it rest in peace, wasn’t a thing of timeless beauty either – but at least it was a nice representation of a forward-looking educational institution. A nice blue letter U disguised as a book and a dynamic yellow C, the University of California had created a solid, ownable mark that felt fresh and friendly. But as is all too common nowadays, emotions won, and the university leadership failed to stand behind their own strategy.

JC Penney

Even if Gotham wasn’t around back then, this logo looks like it was created in 1980. The square flag concept feels dated, and so does the execution – it seems as if the logo fell through a sifter of countless focus groups. Simplicity is key with a logo, but there has to be at least something substantive; this is just safe and boring without a real idea.

weightwatchers

Paula Scher’s first idea is often a brilliant one, but unfortunately, the new weightwatchers logo could have used a few more rounds of perfecting. Set in a heavy (of course) typeface, the logo is not losing weight, but color. It uses the same concept that is used for the Thinner brand of scales (their letters do lose weight, but they are unfortunately ugly). The type works well for bold statements, but just using a gradient in a logo is not enough to convey transformation.

Summary

It’s important to remember that a logo is only one element of a visual identity system – each brand is an entity, with its own specific characters consisting of a number of complex features. And while it is true that a logo alone is not a brand, it very often has to stand alone, carrying the brand’s message by itself. Focusing on one or two key strategy pillars usually works better than a “talkative” approach, in which a logo tries to say everything at once.

No logo will ever please everybody and it shouldn’t. Pleasing the crowd is a road to hell and produces average work at best. All that should matter is the client’s objectives and quality of their product combined with the designer’s integrity and craftsmanship.

Design legends stand no taller than the mighty Storm Thorgerson. In his shadow the likes of Peter Saville, Neville Brody, Barney Bubbles, Vaughan Oliver and Malcolm Garrett pale in significance.

Yes, each of these equally important design heroes surely helped invent the design landscape that we're all so familiar with today. Yet, in comparison, Storm Thorgerson’s work reigns supreme in an industry cluttered with manufactured pop and empty promises. Nothing compares conceptually or creatively to his covers for Atom Heart Mother, Wish You Were Here, Peter Gabriel, Houses of the Holy, and of course Dark Side of the Moon. 

To some perhaps an acquired taste, Thorgerson’s work at times defied rationalization. Born out of a period in music that brought Prog-Rock to the masses, his covers were, in many ways, a sign-of-the-times: complex, intriguing, ambiguous, overtly detailed, amazingly surreal and in terms of technical execution, far beyond the art of Photoshop that we all now take for granted. 

For a long time, album cover art was seen as the bastard child of graphic design. And if it hadn’t been for the ground-breaking work produced by Thorgerson and his peers, none of us in this industry today would be paying any attention to any aspect of design - offline, online, physical, intangible, experiential or otherwise. And personally, if it also weren’t for the series of books he produced along with Roger Dean, titled ‘Album Cover Album,’ I would never have developed an obsessive passion for record cover design. Part reference book, part bible, each edition paid homage to the then unknown pioneers of modern 21st century design – Saville, Garrett, Oliver, Brody, and Bubbles – to name a few.

Thank you Mr Thorgerson for helping me get to where I am today and why. I hope you’re resting in peace on the dark side of the moon, although I really wish you were still here.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But is that even the case anymore? As the way we view content changes and as the desire to receive information on mobile devices grows, our experiences are increasingly stripped down to only the necessary elements. And while content remains king, how we visualize it has become even more important.

Sullivan and the Type Directors Club of New York are proud to present: After the Jump. A one-day symposium that brings together some of today’s most inspiring industry leaders to discuss how technology affects human behavior and how those effects impact design and typography.

After the Jump
Friday, June 7, 2013, 1-6pm
Cooper Union, Rose Auditorium
41 Cooper Square
New York, NY 10003
Purchase tickets

EVENT SCHEDULE

1–2pm
Jamie Neely (TypeCast): Prototyping web typography.

2:15–3:15pm / Panel Discussion
Lisa Strausfeld (Bloomberg): Type and data. 
Deroy Peraza (Hyperakt): Meaningful design for the common good.

3.30–4.30pm
Oliver Reichenstein (iA): Responsive design and typography.

4:45–5:45pm / Panel Discussion
Ian Lord, Andrew Mahon, Lev Kanter, Zeke Shore (Type/Code): Don’t go chasing waterfalls: design and development as one fluid process. 
Andy Mangold (Friends of the Web): Content has changed, so must design.

6–8pm
Afterparty Above Allen @ Thompson LES Hotel, 190 Allen Street, New York, NY 10002. Have a drink on us and rub elbows with the event’s best and brightest.

Purchase tickets

SPEAKER LINEUP

Jamie Neely Typecast, Belfast
Jamie Neely was co-founder of Front, a web strategy, design and technology studio and is now the Creative Director at Typecast, which was recently acquired by Monotype. “We believe that as sites become more responsive, devices proliferate and screens shrink, typographic decisions become even more important and influential on site success.”

Lisa Strausfeld Bloomberg, NYC
Lisa joined Bloomberg in January of 2012 to build and lead a new team dedicated to creating consumer-focused interactive data products based on the company's unparalleled data, analytics, and editorial content. Strausfeld joins Bloomberg from Major League Politics, a start-up she founded in 2011 to quantify and visualize government performance. She was a partner at the international design consultancy, Pentagram, from 2002 to 2011, where she and her team specialized in digital information projects including the design of large-scale media installations, software prototypes and user interfaces, signage and websites. Strausfeld received the 2010 National Design Award for Interaction Design and holds five patents relating to user interfaces and information architecture. She has degrees from Brown, Harvard, and MIT.

Deroy Peraza Hyperakt, NYC
Deroy Peraza is a founding partner and creative director at Hyperakt. Deroy works at the crossroads of social entrepreneurship and design and relentlessly searches for meaningful challenges. He loves juggling vastly different projects such as data visualizations, brand identities, website interfaces and inventing products such as ChampsRing.com and LetsSwap.it.

Oliver Reichenstein iA, Tokyo, Zurich, Berlin
Oliver Reichenstein is the founder and director of Information Architects, the Tokyo-Zurich and Berlin-based design agency. “I was never satisfied with the state of the web. Websites were — and still are — always too noisy for my taste. I didn’t really understand what was missing until I discovered typography.” iA has created its new website with responsive typography and a custom-built responsive typeface.

Ian Lord, Andrew Mahon, Lev Kanter, Zeke Shore Type/Code, NYC
Type/Code is a studio of designers and developers who invent, communicate, build and refine. “We collaborate with ambitious clients who want to bring powerful ideas to life. We find clever solutions to hard problems. We love to immerse ourselves in new domains. We strive to make complicated things beautifully intuitive and powerfully functional.”

Andy Mangold Friends of The Web, Baltimore
Andy Mangold is co-founder at Friends of The Web and co-host of On the Grid. The Friends of The Web team builds websites and mobile applications and is, “passionate about making practical products that are delightful to use.”

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Event sponsors

• Consumers aren't as engaged with celebrities. With the continued success of professional sports team and university credit cards, it seems only natural that a celebrity brand would carry the same weight. But celebrities simply don't conjure up the same connection as these lasting bonds.
• Celebrities aren't as permanent as the product. Consumers view credit and debit cards as products they'll be affixed to every day for years to come — with the impermanence of celebrity, it's understandable that consumers aren't willing to commit to these cards.
• No relationship exists between the celebrity and the product. Branded products have a far stronger appeal to the consumer when the endorser has a firm relationship; few consumers associate entertainers with mature financial sense, and therefore cannot see a connection.

Read the full article, and the rest of my thoughts, here: 

http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/11/pf/bieber-prepaid-debit-card/

The Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS) has been a world leader in the field of ocean sciences for more than 100 years. As one of the world’s premier ocean research facilities, its work informs scientific, financial, educational, and industrial programs across the globe, using ocean science to help improve the world in which we live. 

However, their website did little to convey the importance of its mission nor the context of its work. Recognizing that the underwater world is at the core of everything BIOS does, Sullivan reimagined the institute’s digital presence showing how BIOS’s individual research programs impact not just the ocean, but all of humanity. The new site captivates users with a truly immersive experience, one that can be appreciated by both scientists and ocean lovers alike. 

View site.

- A logo change is effective and successful when it represents where a company is and where it's going. Nevertheless, it's key that consumers shouldn't feel like they're dealing with a different entity after the change.

- The logo must fit in with part of a bigger corporate strategy. eBay, for example, kept its colors to retain recognition -- but updated its design to effectively communicate a more mature, grown up organization.

- Organizations sometimes must make a clean break from their past, and a new logo can help accomplish this. The Livestrong Foundation's recent redesign disassociated itself from founder Lance Armstrong, and developed a new logo that subtly emphasized the word "foundation" -- driving home the point that what supported Livestrong, more than its famous leader, were the countless individuals working to help the organization grow.

Read the full article, and the rest of my thoughts, here.

After decades of grant making, the Ms. Foundation for Women, a national organization dedicated to eliminating barriers facing women in the U.S., decided it could no longer serve as a behind-the-scenes activist.  The “war on women” had to be met head — and heart — on.  It was time for the Foundation to assume a more visible role, as advocates on the national stage.

“We’re not done” was the powerful theme Sullivan developed for the Foundation’s new brand strategy and identity. Yes, there has been a lot progress on women’s issues.  Still, there is still significantly more to be done, especially resisting the forces that want to reverse hard won successes.

The Foundation’s new logo and visual system combine to form a powerful platform, reflecting the organization’s growing leadership role, as well as its strength and credibility. In addition, the bold, confident presentation elevates compelling content.

The identity has been activated across a number of channels, including the 2012 Ms. Foundation Annual Report – a critical communication that engaged and inspired donors to take action. 

Results

The Foundation’s website traffic has jumped significantly, and the 2012 Annual Report had to be reprinted after just three months. Those associated with the Foundation couldn’t be happier: “I’m so proud to be a part with this organization,” said one major client.

Sullivan’s work was recently featured on Brand New’s website.

Sullivan Creative Director, Richard Smith, is featured in this month’s Desktop Magazine, detailing his collaboration with the band Depeche Mode – which began as a record cover design for the band’s album ‘Violator,’ and became a 10-year journey that touched everything from vinyl to CD’s, custom merchandising and more. Richard writes:

“For the band’s single ‘Barrel of a Gun’ I decided to create an anarchic collage of handwriting, scribbles, and paint strokes that were scanned, and composed in QuarkXpress along with multiple layers of stencil type, repetitive text, and bitmapped textures. I really let my hair down and used and abused the photos and tools at hand to create a controlled canvas of chaos.”

See the full story in the March 2013 issue of Desktop Magazine.