17.11.08
Follow that sheep (part one)

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Recently we tried to persuade the marketing director of a ‘luxury’ brand that, despite our lack of significant experience in their sector, we’d enter it with our eyes open, with fresh ideas, unencumbered by the received wisdom of the sector, etc etc etc.

It was no great surprise when we weren’t selected. Nor was it a bolt from the blue to hear that they had shortlisted some ‘luxury branding specialists’. In difficult times it’s a gamble to appoint people on strength of thought rather than proof of pudding, let’s be honest.

The trouble is, appointing puddings often just exacerbates the ‘me-too’ look that many sectors develop. Let’s take luxury branding as an example. Flick through a recent copy of Vogue with your hand over the logos (we call this the ‘thumb test’) and it’s virtually impossible to differentiate one brand from another. And they all use Kate Moss as a model, just to make it even more confusing.

Stack luxury logos up on a slide together and, well, letter-spaced capitals are pretty much the order of the day.

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But luxury isn’t the only area afflicted. After the ‘hiccup’ of the London 2012 logo, candidate cities for the 2016 Olympics have retreated to the safe havens of ribbons, stars, hands, people, rings and the Olympic colours.

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If you were a visiting alien trying to decide which bit of earth to visit first you’d be forgiven for thinking that every country on earth was a riot of primary swatches populated entirely by jolly, colourful, excitable earthlings brandishing paintbrushes and giving away free hugs, beer or flowers at the airport.

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If you then got bored of the beach and fancied touring the world’s mass transit systems (well, you’re an alien on a scoping mission after all) you’d probably get your bus pass for one muddled with your carnet for another.

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And if you decided to trade in your Martian dollars to invest in some of earth’s ‘global’ companies, you might find yourself struggling to differentiate them too.

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But these trends aren’t just restricted to style of logos - it applies to colours too. The majority of financial institutions use blue, or would like too. (The easiest presentation you’ll ever make is to stand in a British boardroom and say ‘well we’ve thought long and hard about this and we think the answer is to write your name in caps, in blue’). Established charities love red. New charities love green. Emergency and breakdown companies love ‘alert’ colours like yellow and orange.

Obviously there are some logical reasons for all these choices – brushstrokes (in theory) signify freedom and vitality, yellows and oranges stand-out in headlights (so make logical breakdown colours), red equals blood so can be a powerful colour for appeals and grabbing attention, and so on.

Sometimes an early, classic piece of work is so enduring that it defines the look of a sector, so the identity developed for La Caixa bank in the eighties (in conjunction with Juan Miro) seemed to encapsulate modern Spain and struck a chord in tourist offices everywhere. Soon paper collages were the ‘must-have’ style for their logos.

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London Underground wrote the early visual code for transit systems at the beginning of the twentieth century. And then the post-war period that saw Canadian Railways, Japanese Railways and British Rail adopt ‘track’ based logotypes and symbols made the ideas open-source, for the world to adapt as their default setting.

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For designers and thinkers trying to provide something new in these sectors, breaking through this pervasive, herd-thinking behaviour is hard to do. By definition, standing out from the crowd can attract ridicule, and risk. But the longer you see herd-thinking first hand, the harder it becomes to defend it.

Maybe it was fine to follow, once. But not any longer.

This is the beginning of a series looking at how people and organisations try to break out of the mould, what succeeds, and what doesn’t. The images above are borrowed from a multitude of sources, and special thanks go to Brand New and Cicade dos Logos for the loan of some of the collections.

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