Br&

And back to the beginning

2010-10-12T05:42:00.000-07:00

An update on the ongoing Gap logo saga. Gap Inc. have released the following press release:

http://www.gapinc.com/public/Media/Press_Releases/med_pr_GapLogoStatement10112010.shtml

“Since we rolled out an updated version of our logo last week on our website, we’ve seen an outpouring of comments from customers and the online community in support of the iconic blue box logo.

“Last week, we moved to address the feedback and began exploring how we could tap into all of the passion. Ultimately, we’ve learned just how much energy there is around our brand. All roads were leading us back to the blue box, so we’ve made the decision not to use the new logo on gap.com any further.

“At Gap brand, our customers have always come first. We’ve been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back. So we’ve made the decision to do just that – we will bring it back across all channels.

“In the meantime, the website will go back to our iconic blue box logo and, for Holiday, we’ll turn our blue box red for our seasonal campaign.

“We’ve learned a lot in this process. And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way. We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community. This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing.

“There may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes, we’ll handle it in a different way. “

I'm embarrassed to be a designer today.

A company has designed a new identity, it was signed off and made public. No one has to like it, but it was legitimate work.

We're supposed to embrace the new and be open minded as creatives, yet everyone jumps on the bandwagon and bashes the new logo because it's new and different.

It amazed me how conservative the design community has proved itself with this whole thing.

I'm also sad that a company would bow to public pressure so quickly. If a company signs off a new identity then that should mean they have the confidence to defend their decisions. The fact that gap have reneged on their choice after only a few days shows poor leadership.

Imagine is the london 2012 olympics hadn't stood firmly behind their logo. Public opinion was very divided but now everyone is used to it and it works well.

This design was never given a chance and as designers, without having seen the new gap logo work in context or even have a chance to live properly, we've already shot it down. This is a dangerous precedent to set.

I guess the only good thing that came out of this, is that AIGA persuaded gap not to try crowdsourcing, a practice that is even worse for confidence in professional design.

AIGA president Debbie Millman contacted Gap and made sure they knew the AIGA's position on spec work:

We did not…just send the anti-spec treatise. We would like to give them the opportunity to have a considered discussion as opposed a public one-sided bashing.

That being said, I have made my personal point of view very clear: I firmly believe that crowd-sourcing and spec work is about designers giving their work away for free. But it is also about an abuse of power. The ‘client’ has it all. The designer has none. Unless, of course, we say no.

If nothing else, this whole episode shows that the online community have the power to affect large corportations. These companies are starting to re-think the way they engage with their customers.

Gap - a timeline of a new logo

2010-10-08T05:59:00.000-07:00

It's been 3 days since Gap unveiled a new logo on their website and the dust has started to settle. However, things are still confused and the press has been quick to pick up on the public reaction (read internet reaction) to the new logo. Here's how things played out:  

Tuesday 5th October 
As ever, first to react were design bloggers, forums and Tweeters. I first saw comments on the new logo in the evening on tuesday 5th October. The first parodies appeared the same evening. Cue pastiches of the new logo replacing 'Gap' with any other word ending -ap: Crap, Snap etc.  

The logo was featured on yourlogomakesmebarf.com that same evening.

   Wednesday 6th October 
The next day everyone awoke to the new logo and the audience grew. Twtter was alight with comments and links to the previous night's blog entries. 
A key blog entry has been on the iso50 site. They launched a logo redesign contest on wednesday which picked up momentum from its readership of designers. At time of writing there are a huge 238 entries.

  Brand New reacted quickly along with other major branding blogs  .

As a response to all the negative reactions, someone set up a twitter account on  behalf of the logo. It's written in his voice and is not the first anthropomorphic Twitter account for a logo, the iTunes10 logo having received its own in September.  

The criticisms continued and then Gap broke their silence and posted this on their official Facebook account: 

 "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."

This is the point at which I think Gap lost quite a large amount of control. To confirm the new logo is one thing but to decide so quickly (1 day after launch) to create a crowd sourcing project seems a rather rash decision.  

More mainstream sites picked up the news and it moved from being a design community story a more public one on sites like the Huffington Post and New York magazine

Not to feel left out the Old Gap logo then got its own Twitter account with some great tweets:

"Help…i've been taken hostage. Everything is dark and I don't know where I am."

Thursday 7th October 
The next day reactions had built up momentum, with the previous day's blog posts and tweets being quickly spread. 
All of this caused Gap North America's President, Marka Hansen to make a public statement on the Huffington Post, announcing that they will launch their crowd sourcing project in the next few days

Theories have been circulated that this whole exercise was a clever marketing exercise to bring media attention to Gap, involve the public and get them on side.
 

Friday 8th October 
The story has been picked up by mainstream and print media, featuring on ABC's site, Fast Company, as well as lots of fashion media.  

Brand New have published a great assessment of the story so far, including the anatomy public reaction to a identity launch (indignation, twitter accounts, logo contests):

 It seems that with the advent of social media and such immediate criticism of new identities, launches must be handled very carefully, with great care to explain themselves in a wider context and involve the public.

  If nothing else the backlash against rebrands of large consumer brands shows us that people feel passionately about their brands.  

This type of reaction is nothing new, however it seems it's becoming more frequent, people like having their say and getting involved. What once was just a knee-jerk reaction, a chat around the watercooler, is spread around the world and redesigned within hours of launching.  

The identity work is by Laird and Partners http://www.lairdandpartners.com/

Stupid water

2010-07-19T05:42:00.000-07:00

Water. We all need it to live, it's as simple as that. A basic human necessity.
For most, a simple glass of tap water is enough, a look into my local water board shows me that its treatment processes are enough to keep me happy that I'm getting clean drinking water delivered to my home, for a small amount per day.

Then there is the lucrative mineral water market, making people feel that this pure mountain filtered volcanic water is better for you, even though technically it contains more 'non water' elements (ie elements and compounds that aren't H2O).
This market has existed for a long time and seems to show no sign of slowing down.
On the contrary, if anything it is expanding into new and ever more stupid areas, testing the limits of human misunderstanding, preying of the most ill-informed members of society.

I'm talking not of soda, soft drinks and the like, but the new ranges of products that use and abuse the word 'water'.

These products actively use the word water for its healthy connotations with names such as 'Vitamin water' and 'Skinny Water'.

Of course as you might imagine, these products are anything but healthy.

Lets have a look at the nutritional information on these products and see what they contain, bearing in mind that water contains nothing nutritionally, 0 calories to be precise.

Vitamin water (591ml):

Let's just break down that table, and see some of the tricks at work here.
Firstly, one of the typical tricks used, the nutrition table is listed by 'Serving'. Of course, the bottle contains 2.5 servings. So even though you buy a bottle of 'water' you're supposed to only drink one third of it. Let's assume, like most people you drink the whole thing in one sitting, rather than save it over the course of 3 days.

You would take in 13g of sugar per 'serving' which in the whole bottle would be 32.5 grams of sugar. Doesn't seem like such a healthy product now does it?

'Skinny water' is as you would imagine much lower in sugar, I mean, it's called skinny water. But take a second to think about that name. Water is ZERO calories, so what could be more 'skinny' (ie low calorie) than no calories?
Well according to the nutrition information on the bottle, 9 calories is! Yep, skinny water contains 9 calories more than regular water, so how exactly is that skinny?

That brings us onto the Volvic 'A touch of' range. Presumably marketed at those who don't like the neutral taste of regular water, and want a chemical flavoured concoction.
To me this is the worst of the bunch. It's placed alongside the mineral waters in the fridge. It looks as close to the Volvic mineral water range as it can, and rides on the back of the healthy Volvic volcanic water campaigns. The drink is clear, not brightly coloured like, say, Vitamin Water (which is at least a clue to it being bad for you).
The big difference is that Volvic A Touch Of... contains a staggering 23 grams of sugar per bottle!
I'm sure there must be people out there drinking this drink, imaging it's actually good for them, which is why it's such a terrible piece of marketing.

So next time you're feeling thirsty, why not just go for some tap water, it's bound to me more healthy than this lot and let's not even get started on the environmental cost of transporting water around the world!

Can 'green' brands work together for one cause?

2010-06-16T05:40:00.000-07:00

Why do we need more green stuff?
The last thing the world needs right now is another product, we don't need more stuff. We need less.

If you really care then don't buy needless new products, re-use what you have and give money direct to charities who can more efficiently make some real change. Don't feel the need to get a 'thing' in return for your charity, that's just a selfish way of giving.

It seems like there are so many 'green' products out there, but the problem is, they are still products which are made in factories and have a carbon footprint. They're not helping anything.

How many excess canvas bags are there now in the world, because some genius decided to produce tons of them, poorly produced, probably made in china somewhere. They only last a few months, but definitely not a lifetime. A decent quality rucksack would be a better choice and was already on sale.

Come on, all of these (a small sample from Google) can't be needed, they cancel eachother out. which is my problem with most 'green' products:

In the UK there used to be lots of cancer charities that all competed for donations and did separate reseach, especially the two major ones. Then they decided that they had a common aim and should merge and share their research and work together, they formed Cancer Research UK funnelling more funding to one charity would help them all work to cure cancer. Now they are the world's leading cancer charity and do great work.

The same idea should happen with green products. One organisation curating green products, making sure they are truly green and produced in the best possible way. They should only sell the bare minimum number of products with the aim of reducing emissions with all money going to verified good causes.

A competitive capitalist market is really the enemy of the green ideal, we don't need lots of choice, just one good option. The 'green industry' is one market that would be improved by limited choices and less competition. A coalition with the same aims would be so much better.

So, nice bags, t-shirts, water bottles etc but I won't be buying, I have enough tshirts. I may donate to the gulf cleanup and other causes directly. Just remember that every product you buy announcing to the world that you are 'green' is still manufactured and will probably become tomorrow's rubbish.

Saul Bass on the cost of aesthetics

2010-05-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

Saul Bass, couldn't have put it better myself.

Hand painted advertising murals

2010-05-04T06:01:00.000-07:00

Recently the iconic DKNY mural in NYC's SoHo distract was removed :

Some don't realise that murals like this are still painted by hand in a minority of cases.
What used to be the main method for applying large-scale advertising is now a small industry of a few remaining practitioners.

This great documentary interviews a few of these painters and reveals how it's all done:

UP THERE from Jon on Vimeo.

Edit: here's a great site from the History of Advertising Trust called Ghostsigns, it's an archive of photos of old and fading hand-painted signs from around the UK. I'm glad someone is taking stock of the huge number of these old adverts that are still visible before they fade away completely.

http://www.hatads.org.uk/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=33

Haiku

2010-03-29T04:30:00.001-07:00

Rebranding Playboy (theoretically)

2010-03-22T06:51:00.001-07:00

This exercise in rebranding by San Francisco based designer Alex Cornell is a great piece of thinking.
He decided to give Playboy a new more upmarket positioning, more in line with Monocle magazine as opposed to Maxim magazine.

He gives a very detailed outline to the process of his design, and I think the finished article is just great. The perfect balance of humour and heritage, keeping just enough from the original mark, whilst signaling change.

You can read his overview on ISO50 blog:
http://blog.iso50.com/2009/11/24/rebranding-playboy/

and here's Alex's own site:
http://www.alexcornell.com/

When to use imagery

2010-02-07T12:53:00.000-08:00

Some brands use imagery to great effect. Some brands such as First Direct are almost purely typographic. But sometimes people need to learn when words will work more powerfully than imagery – especially when the imagery you have at hand isn't, shall we say, the most appealing.
Maybe whoever made this poster should learn such a lesson

Independent brand champion: Soda fanatic John Nese

2009-11-04T06:04:00.000-08:00

John Nese is a soda pop fanatic. In his store Galco's Soda Pop Stop he sells over 500 different brands or soda. Independent brands from all around the world. He is passionate about soda but more than that he is passionate about championing the unsung small businesses who would otherwise be put out of business by the power and size of the giants of the industry.
He sells cola of all flavours, root beer, floral sodas, even a cucumber soda. He despises the way soda is made these days, with high fructose corn syrup instead of natural cane sugar. He champions glass bottles because they hold the carbonation better than plastic bottles.

Watch this great interview with him:

This is a man who cuts through most of the marketing noise that superbrands make and looks through to the quality and authenticity of a brand. At the heart of the brands he loves is a good quality product that doesn't need dressing up. Brands need to listen to people like Nese more, his enthusiasm and passion for his trade are a better endorsement of a product than any advertising campaign could ever be.

Up & up

2009-10-09T06:47:00.000-07:00

This week here in the UK sees the release of Pixar's 10th feature film UP.
Reviews, as with the other 9 of their films are already glowing with praise. In Hollywood terms Pixar is untouchable, no other studio has had 10 consecutive hit movies from its inception. So far (and long may this continue) they haven't made a dud yet. Only 2006's Cars slightly underperformed, but even that grossed $462 million worldwide. Their most popular film to date has been Finding Nemo which grossed $866 millon. This explains why all their trailers begin with 'From the people that brought you Finding Nemo'.

It is often said that the reason they get it right every time is because their formula is simply that of telling captivating stories. Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter comes from a traditional animation background (he started his career as an animator for Disney) and although he was one of the pioneers of computer animation it's not what drives his approach. Pixar produces cutting-edge CGI but it's never for the sake of technical prowess, it only ever serves to enrich the story telling. This is something that rival studio Dreamworks could learn from.

This cartoon perfectly sums up my feelings toward Dreamworks(click to enlarge):

From a brand perspective Pixar are now in a very enviable place. They were originally backed by Steve Jobs of apple in the early days, he is still the majority shareholder. In 2006 Pixar was bought by Disney for $7.4 billon since their traditional animated output was failing badly. Jobs is now Disney's largest individual shareholder with 7%.
Since the buyout, John Lasseter has been made chief creative officer of Disney in general and Principal creative advisor for Disney Imagineering, this means that essentially he is now the creative director for all of Disney's output, including things like their themeparks, so we can expect all of this to improve greatly over the next few years.

After laying to rest their traditional 2D animation output in 2004 with Home on the Range, Disney is now reviving this due to Lasseter's new role. Maybe his enthusiasm comes from his heritage in hand drawn animation. This Christmas Disney will release a new 2D animation called The Princess Frog.

I think this proves what Pixar have known all along, people want great storytelling, it's not about the medium it's only about the communication. We'll see in a few months how the public responds to the return to the 2D approach, after the general trend for releasing movies animated in 3D, with 3D glasses it might be a welcome change of pace.

If anyone can oversee the change back it's Lasseter, as well as being a leading light in computer animation he is also great friends with the 'Japanese Disney' Hayao Miyazaki and has producing credits on several of the english language releases of his films such as Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle.

One of my favourite things about Pixar films is their attention to detail. I suppose when you work on one project for 3 or 4 years you have the time to add nice touches, in fact it probably maintains your interest in the project.

Here's a great article about all the hidden references in Pixar films:

http://jimhillmedia.com/blogs/jim_hill/archive/2007/12/09/a-special-where-s-wall-e-edition-of-why-for.aspx##

The Toyota Pizza Planet delivery van from Toy Story apparently appears in every subsequent Pixar film.

Given that Pixar productions overlap in their timelines, it is also possible for them to make hidden 'forward references' to future movies. Such as the boy in the waiting room in Finding Nemo reading an Incredibles comic book:

All of which brings us to the people and the culture of the company. It's widely known that they have slightly unconventional offices. Animators are encouraged to create their own space in which to work, feathering their nests with anything and eveything that inspires them, so they become immersed in their work:

In fact I noticed that even their offices' lobby has been the inspiration for the set of Monsters Inc. Notice the similarities?

Some of the many artists, animators and designers have blogs about their work and you can read interviews with Pixar artists here:
http://www.pixar.com/artistscorner/index.html

It's obvious that Pixar care a lot about their output, their people and the stories they tell. I'm just glad that this has lead to the success it deserves, hopefully their approach will be good inspiration for the correct way to run a whole range of creative companies.

I'll end this post with Pixar production designer Lou Romano's website. His colour treatments for UP are wonderful, and a great reminder of the many artists behind the scenes that contribute to a movie's look and feel:
http://louromano.blogspot.com/
(the first image in this post is by him too)

All LIFE is here

2009-10-02T05:47:00.000-07:00

Google has made every page of every issue of LIFE magazine (from mid 1930s to 1970s) available online in their Google books.

Great to read through, not just for the photography and articles but all the old adverts are fascinating

http://books.google.com/books?id=N0EEAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_all_issues_r&cad=2

Another Rand logo bites the dust

2009-10-01T06:45:00.000-07:00

The Yale University Press has, this week, updated their identity. Gone is Paul Rand's quirky asymmetrical slab-serif roundel and in its place is a simple piece of type set in Matthew Carter's Yale Typeface.

This move has been seen by some designers as sacrilege, because one should never redesign one of Rand's designs. Indeed the replacement has none of the charm or quirkiness of the original but I can see the strategy behind the change.

Before, while they shared the name Yale, there was still some ambiguity as to whether they were indeed related, or to how related their content was.

In general I think consistency is a useful thing, but in this case it's a shame to lose Rand's design since he taught at Yale himself for 30 years. Strategic alignment is one thing but let's hope we don't lose our sense of history and individuality completely.

[Article on Yale Daily News site]

Charging brands for your time as a customer

2009-09-24T07:21:00.000-07:00

Paul McCrudden, from my old employer Imagination, has started to invoice brands that he has interacted with for his time as a customer. A really interesting idea, the concept that we as regular, long term customers are of great value.
He has received payment from the the founder of Pret A Manger already for £62.
Read the full article on Paul's blog:
http://www.paulmccrudden.com/sixweeks.htm

Central Perk opens in London

2009-09-24T04:41:00.000-07:00

To celebrate 15 years since Friends started (and presumably so sell some related merchandise/dvds) Warner Brothers have set up a replica of the Central Perk coffee shop from the show. It opens today and sells real coffee, located at 67, Broadwick Street at the end of Carnaby Street, it's an interesting promotional device, to deliver a tangible experience from something that we normally only see as an image on our tv sets. Sure to be a hit with 20/30 somethings everywhere, even if Friends has now become a round-the-clock staple of digital tv, once described quite accurately by someone as 'televisual mashed potato' – bland, but comforting and reliable.

Cadbury's Fairtrade campaign

2009-09-24T04:26:00.000-07:00

I've noticed a recent and quite drastic change in Cadbury's advertising. A departure from the more recent abstract creatives (the drumming gorilla etc.). They have been acredited with the Fairtrade mark on the Dairy Milk bars. This is a big deal since Fairtrade used to be a niche concern, but this move by Cadbury's brings it to the most mainstream of mainstream chocolate brands, and pushes them above other brands like Mars and the ethically dubious Nestlé.

What's interesting is the ad campaign they are running, at first I thought it was an atempt to look 'ethical' and ethnic but after a tiny amount of reseach I discovered that it is in fact part of a larger campaign which involves Ghana. The poster features a mural like many that appear on walls all over Ghana. The mural in the ad is painted by a Ghanaian artist who comes from a family of cocoa farmers. They were painted for real on walls in Koforidua.

I'm intrigued to see where the campaign goes and how it is received but I'm impressed that as a brand Cadbury's are pushing the norms of a sector that is so often just about slow-motion shots of melting chocolate.

The campaign also includes the release of a single as well:

more info here:
http://cadburydairymilk.typepad.com/

Flash on the Beach 2009

2009-09-24T04:23:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday 23d September I attended 'Flash on the Beach' which was held in Brighton at the lovely Dome Theatre. It's an annual 3-day conference of Flash developers and designers. My day there was incredibly inspiring. Covering subjects as diverse as visualising patterns of prime numbers to audience motion tracking and generative art.

First up I saw Mario Klingemann talking about his love of maths and geometry, showing a variety of ways of visualising complex patterns, including ways of finding patterns in prime numbers by ordering them in different arrays.
He also showed an ingenius experiement to use the 140 characters of Twitter to embed images, creating a flash program that compresses and interprets an image to condense it down to the correct number of bytes to fit the character allowance.
See here his 'Mona Tweeta': http://www.flickr.com/photos/quasimondo/3518306770/
http://www.quasimondo.com/

Other notable speakers were Andre Michelle for his incredible audio generation and experimentation lab.andre-michelle.com

And Jared Ficklin for his experiemental approach to visualising sound, using smoke machines and flames, he was like the very best kind of science teachers. He works for Frog Design http://www.frogdesign.com/

Closing out the day was self-proclaimed 'rock star' of design Joshua Davis. My impression of Davis' work had always been that it was a bit 'samey' he approached each project with the same generative method: he writes some parameters of his design in Actionscript, runs the program and curates the output. However seeing him present a range of his work, I realised there is much more to his process than this, such as work with other artists and social interaction projects, what really came across was his endless and unrelenting energy and passion for all things visual. Yes, his work is essentially illustration and I struggle to truly class the results as graphic design but the process itself is almost more interesting that the final artworks and that is why he continues to be of interest.
http://www.joshuadavis.com/

Glamour on the street

2009-09-24T04:20:00.000-07:00

Spotted early in the morning in Finchley, North London. The statement belies the location.

The anatomy of a brand

2009-09-11T06:37:00.000-07:00

It's often difficult to describe the role of a brand designer. Consultancies are often given a hard time especially in the case of a public branding project (just look at the 2012 fiasco). People perceive a new logo as the culmination or even the sole result of a branding project and any associated cost is hung controversially on said logo.

For example, Wolff Olins' fee for 2012 is quoted as £400,000, which for the months of work for a medium-sized agency seem very reasonable. However, the media simplifies the project and arrives at the outrageous headline "£400,000 for a logo"
Cue, anger by the average man on the street, my kid could've done that for £400,000.

Branding of course is so much more than just a logo, in fact, the logo often comes as the finishing touch to a great deal of stategic thinking, business and market analysis, planning etc.
There are a host of cheap 'we'll-make-a-logo-for-you' websites eg these companies miss the point of branding completely (not to mention design!). The only way you can create a brand for a company is if you know some background information about them, their competitors, their future plans etc. Making a logo without creating the context in which it will live is pointless.

The logo is like the numberplate on a car, it's identification but it isn't the substance. If you want to update your car you need to do more than change the numberplate. You need to look under the bonnet, re-think the form and shape of the car, it's paint job, interior and everything else that goes with it.

One thing that is sometimes difficult to explain to people is the concept of a 'look & feel'. The look and feel (in my opinion), is everything visual or experiential about a brand aside from the logo. So colour, typography, supporting graphic elements, the movement and sound of the brand, the 3D design (environments) even tone of voice.

The best brands can be summed up by their look and feel alone with no need to show their logo. This explains the need for things like audio signatures (think Intel or Nokia), strong environmental design (you certainly know when you're in Apple Store and not because of the logo).

Here's a couple of colour and typography studies I created for a talk recently that sum up the look and feel of a brand without the use of a logo.

Evian taste test

2009-09-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

Still on the topic of water. I was having a conversation with a colleague about the merits of tap water versus mineral water. She was convinced she could taste the difference in a side by side comparison. I disagreed and said it was all in the mind, the power of marketing.

To settle this discussion I went out and bought a bottle of Evian and set up a very unscientific test. 10 glasses of water either bottled or tap for her to test.
I reasoned that testing only 2 glasses would leave too much to chance, the probability of guessing being too high at just a half.

So I set up the test, numbered the glasses and left her alone to fill out her answers on a post-it.

The results are impressive to say the least. She scored an amazing 9/10 correct. Although she did mention that there was a noticeable temperature difference in the waters so that may have given her some help.

On hearing about this another colleague said that he could also tell the difference, so he also completed the test, scoring a slightly less impressive 7/10.

What does this tell us? Well, not much since it was a tiny sample of people and equally small sample of water, but it did counter my expectations, my colleague lived up to her word.

My main issue is now having to work around a particularly smug individual!

Brands in the subconscious

2009-09-09T06:05:00.000-07:00

I recently decided that enough was enough, it was time to stop using disposable plastic water bottles. In a normal week I would buy one bottle of mineral water and then reuse the bottle, refilling it at the water bubbler until by the end of the week it had started to smell funny. I would then recycle the bottle and buy another one.
This cycle has lasted for a while, but I knew I should really just be using one permanent bottle.
So last week I got myself a lovely shiny blue Sigg bottle.
It was the obvious choice to me, it's metal and enamel lined to I can reuse it and scald it with boiling water to sanitise it each week.

This got me thinking, why was it an obvious choice?

I have never seen any advertising for Sigg products (that I can recall), I'm not a hiker or someone who they're targeted at, yet somehow I recalled the brand and it felt like the obvious choice.

Maybe it's because I was looking for a bottle for eco purposes and I knew Sigg was Swiss, which conjures up clean air and mountains. I'm interested in how brands can penetrate our subconscious and embed themselves comfortable, awaiting the opportune moment to make themselves known to us.

While we all think that we're immune to the daily bombardment of images and logos, the reality is that we absorb a lot more than we care to admit.

Thinking back to the times I've seen Sigg bottles tied to huge backpacks, those images and associations were all I needed to make my choice. The distinctive shape and form of the bottle only helped with this association.

On reading up a bit more about the Sigg brand is turns out they are pretty up on all things eco. They made special bottles for Radiohead and their crew for their tour. Their bottle design is in MoMA's permanent collection. I didn't know any of this until I read up on them but somehow it was implied in my subconscious when I made my purchase. I made a lot of assumptions which turned out to be spot on.

UPDATE: Interesting post about the history of dangerous chemical in Sigg bottels by Martin Bishop over at Brand Mix
SIGG's choice comes back to haunt ~ Brand Mix

Br&. begins

2009-09-08T04:58:00.001-07:00

After a significant time-out from my blogging activities I have resolved to recommence, and propose not to re-blog from other blogs but add opinion and criticism maybe even insight to the subjects I discuss.

My aim is to add content to the web rather than just regurgitate what's already out there. Original content, or at least original comment is my mission statement.

ready, set, go!