Brand New Conference is a two-day event hosted by UnderConsideration (co-founders Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit), with the main theme corporate and brand identity.

This will be the conference’s eighth year. Past Brand New conferences have been held in Nashville, New York, and San Francisco.

Lee has been a keen supporter of the Brand New blog since it began over ten years ago, and is happy to attend this conference to connect with this vibrant and engaged community. He will be in Chicago from Wednesday, September 13 and for the duration of the conference.

Connect with Lee to talk digital transformation and system strategy during networking time at the conference, or reach out to him on either of his social media platforms to organize a chat!

This will be the conference’s eighth year. Past Brand New conferences have been held in Nashville, New York, and San Francisco.

Lee has been a keen supporter of the Brand New blog since it began over ten years ago, and is happy to attend this conference to connect with this vibrant and engaged community. He will be in Chicago from Wednesday, September 13 and for the duration of the conference.

Connect with Lee to talk digital transformation and system strategy during networking time at the conference, or reach out to him on either of his social media platforms to organize a chat!

The post We’re Chicago-bound for the Brand New Conference. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Following the launch of the University of California identity, it seems a petition was sent around calling for the new logo to be kiboshed, with a return to the original UC seal. Well, 50,000+ voices have been heard.

From the announcement by UC Senior VP for External Relations, Daniel M Dooley:

The monogram was only a piece of the visual identity system — a new approach to typography, photography, colors and the like — that was developed by UCOP design staff.

Since it debuted in the past year, this new “look” has served the UC system well, replacing what was a clutter of dated materials that varied from UCOP department to department. And it has received praise from an array of accomplished design experts not affiliated with the university.

And yet, while I believe the design element in question would win wide acceptance over time, it also is important that we listen to and respect what has been a significant negative response by students, alumni and other members of our community.

Therefore, I have instructed the communications team to suspend further use of the monogram.

Armin at Brand New offers this perspective:

Happy now? By next week you’ll have forgotten about even signing the petition but, in the course of that, you have caused irremediable damage in the confidence of the leadership team at UC to even consider doing anything new or different anytime soon that would potentially help improve your university system to succeed. Enjoy your seal.

And boy is Armin getting an earful in the comments. No one there supporting the new monogram, of course, but they are taking Armin to task for not appreciating the public and alumni discourse that led to this decision.

I just wish they’d gone exclusively with this, which seems to also have been part of their plans:

Instead of this:

Which makes us all think this:

In the end, why all the variation? Seal vs monogram vs monogram with text vs monogram with the gradient fadeout. There’s no surprise things turned out this way when no one was willing to be decisive about how the monogram was to be applied.

The post University of California identity fallout. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

But you’re still left with the final logo, which starts, reasonably enough here:

But somehow ends up here:

This comment thread on Vimeo spells it out clear enough:

Tina: Does that logo really make you think, higher education?
Morgan: It makes me think the logo isn’t done loading.

And, as Gruber says:

It has no heft, no gravitas.

Shame, for all the well-put effort that otherwise went into building out a coherent identity for the university.

References
Brand New: IC, UC, We all C for California
Daring Fireball: UC Introduces New Logo
Mercury News: UC Introduces a Modern Logo

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Gap 2009:

American Apparel 2008:

Competitive hommage? How very, very peculiar.

And we’re not the first to notice.

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Sample execution: Take your classy, well established logo and replace the logotype with sterile Helvetica. Shrink the background of your logo so it becomes a handy little square and tuck that sucker behind the top left corner of your wordmark.

To be sure there’s enough contrast between your wordmark and this new dark square that’s obscuring the last letter of your name, add a nice gradient to lighten up the overlapping area.

Step 2: Share this sucker with the world!

You can do a big coordinated effort with press releases, signage and product updates, and so on, but that would imply a professionalism not at all in keeping with your design efforts so far.

Sample execution: Just drop this sucker on your heavily trafficked US Website and see what happens. You can save the regional website updates, product and signage updates, the Facebook and Twitter page updates to, well, sometime later.

Step 3: Respond to criticism with the nonchalance you applied to all your efforts thus far.

You’ve already shown your disdain for design by releasing this dog on the world, so when the criticism flows in, show how much you value design by inviting your users to fix the problem. After all, why spend money on something that’s just so simple to accomplish?

Sample execution: Write your fans on Facebook and Twitter asking for them to design you a logo for your multi-billion dollar company. Here’s a handy template for you to use:

Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We’ve had the same logo for 20+ years, and this is just one of the things we’re changing. We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.

The post A handy 3 step guide to cheapening your brand. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

While it sure is nice to see that classy old logo in the top left of the Canadian store, it’s some poor execution on the Web side that allows the whole site to load in a 250 pixel box.

Then again, this kind of poor attention to detail is exactly what I’d expect from a company sporting a logo like their new one. I thought Old Navy was their bargain property, but I guess they’re looking to bring Gap to new lows. Congrats, you’ve succeeded!

The post A design gap. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

We’ve done well to develop an internal naming process where we gather details about product, target, corporate personality, and competition before mapping out concepts which lead to related, suitable name options.

Even this process, however, invites surprise. Emotion can sometimes take the lead, as it did with Say Yeah, or you can find yourself staring down well-considered metaphoric, literal, and other options while someone comes in from left field with new party suggestions, as with Kipu.

Yet, in both of these cases, by understanding the product and recognizing the strategy behind it, we’ve been able recognize when we find a name that resonates with the company and product culture. In the end, it means we’ve settled on a name that makes it all the more easy to share our passion around the product. That’s really exciting!

Beyond that, you’ve got your due diligence to do. Trademark searching, domain registration (the most difficult area of compromise for any new product), along with linguistics and other research which is dependent on target and geography.

Marty Neumeier, who wrote the exceptional book, The Brand Gap, shared this slide a few years ago, highlighting key naming styles:

• Descriptive
• Suggestive
• Metaphorical
• Neological
• Historical
• Arbitrary

Once you’ve gathered product, target, marketing strategy, and competitive info, this is a good starting point for naming discussions. And if you want any help in this area, give us a shout. We love collaborating on such creative and fun challenges.

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The girls and boys at b5media both wanted some edgy shirts for sporting at conferences and the like. (We originally did some pretty birds chirping for the girls and they said, “No way man! We want dead bees too.” So we compromised and gave them some dramatic flowers.)

We took the lead from the ad sales brochure we did a couple of months prior and based the designs on those colours. With a white screen print, the multicolour Ts tied everything together.

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Here are all 24 buttons:

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