From left to right, above: NHL, then and now.

Last July, after millions of disappointed fans had endured a yearlong strike and a lost season of their favorite game, the NHL turned the lights back on in rinks across North America, and players hit the ice once more. The NHL was not the organization it had been a year earlier, but after being slammed against the proverbial boards it attempted to a brave face on the situation with—what else?—a new logo. The new logo is essentially the same as the old logo, except instead of orange and black it’s silver and black, instead of flat it’s 3D, and instead of sloping downward from left to right it slopes upward. “New,” indeed.

The Doctors may not know much about hockey, but one of the first rules in branding is that if something needs to change, it needs to change in a significant and noticeable way. The NHL was a company had spent the past year without offering the product that its customers expected, and it had done so because it didn’t want to pay its employees enough to keep them from walking off the job. If there was any question what fans were thinking, let the Doctors settle it now: things sucked for the League and visible change was necessary.

But change visibly they didn’t. By casting a slightly revised version of their old logo as “new,” the NHL cast itself as an organization that was not only unchanged but also somewhat self-deluded. They hadn’t changed, but they seemed to think they had. What had changed was comically insignificant. The change of color scheme, for example, like the change to 3D, was meant to associate the NHL logo with its primary icon of competition, the Stanley Cup. But the two forms look nothing like one another, and the Stanley Cup itself has been “logofied” on many occasions for all kinds of NHL merchandise, including, most recently, the “My Stanley Cup” campaign, launched this April, which features a player’s silhouette hoisting a Stanley Cup high above his head. While the whole thing is encircled by a regrettably unhip swoosh, the “My Stanley Cup” icon is otherwise effective: it shows a player (which the NHL has been accused of neglecting), with a trophy (which the NHL’s unfortunate lost season had failed to produce). With it, the NHL stands for its players and competitions, which is what it should stand for. Not the most groundbreaking logo we’ve ever seen, sure, but a step in the right direction.

In the case of the not-new new NHL logo, though, the visual allusion to the Stanley Cup is unsuccessful. To say that making something silver and 3D will help fans to associate a shield with a cup is not only counterintuitive, but it also sounds a lot like lip-service. If the NHL had chosen gold as its faux logo metal of choice, the Doctors are pretty sure that no one would have objected that it clashed with the Cup. Fans got it: the NHL wanted to show some bling.

This desire to swagger through some rather adverse circumstances was also the key motivator behind the NHL logo’s other—ahem—”significant” change, from downward- to upward-sloping initials. While the Doctors don’t expect sports organizations to be bastions of artistic subtlety, the reason for this clunker is so obvious that it hits you right in the face mask. But the NHL’s press release points it out anyway, noting that the new logo “uses upward-reading letters to project a vibrant, optimistic image.” While the up/good, down/bad equation is simplistic enough for a 4th Grader to understand, it’s regrettable here, both for its one-liner lack of depth and for its probable lack of recognition. Since the new logo is so much like the old, most fans will think nothing has changed, reading up but remembering down, swapping good for bad, or, at least, more of the same. This is not to insult fans: the failure is the NHL’s. In the same way that we stop listening to stories that have no point, we stop seeing new logos that aren’t new logos. Diagnosis? In the words of the hockey blogger Razor with an Edge, “That’s It? Maybe I’m at fault for expecting something a little more radical.” The Doctors agree.

This article was written for BusinessWeek.com but never published. © 2006 Rob Giampietro and Kevin Smith.

We get the word “koan” from Zen Buddhism, where in Japanese it translates literally as “a matter for public thought,” sort of an open-source philosophy for ancient times. Koans often demonstrated the inability of logical reasoning to produce enlightened thought, and, as a trained lawyer and insurance clerk throughout his life, no one knew the deadening effects of logic better than Franz Kafka. Writing was his escape, his meditation, and, fittingly, Meditation was the title of his first published work, released in 1913. While all 18 koans inside are very much worth enjoying, it’s the shortest of them all—the penultimate “Die Bäume,” or “The Trees”—that I’d like to read as a meditation on typography.

The first of its three sentences plays with our expectations, our human predisposition to empathize. Kafka writes from the first-person plural, “we are like tree trunks in the snow,” and we, the readers, picture ourselves as such. No sooner have we done this when Kafka shifts tenses to the third-person: “they lie sleekly.” We are no longer in the trunks’ position. The shift seems illogical. Looking more closely at the first sentence, it now appears to be only a fragment beginning with “for,” like the second half of a thought. And the thought itself is not explicit, but metaphorical. Everything is twice-removed, yet “wedded to the ground,” immobile.

Kafka’s words are not intended to be logical, and they have as many interpretations as they do readers. But several readers have suggested that the “we” in the first sentence is not a human “we” but a set of printed letters. For many, including myself, the voice at the start of “The Trees” belongs to Kafka’s letters themselves, speaking directly to the reader: “we are like tree trunks in the snow.” Picture a field after a recent snowfall. Think of the straight, almost runic lines of the fallen boughs. Approaching them, they seem like characters from an unused alphabet. Just as with the wispy marks on a printed page, it seems as if they could be easily brushed aside: “a little push should be enough to set them rolling.” It is not, however, as Kafka reminds us, “They are firmly wedded to the ground.”

Historically, there is a direct relationship between our letters and the trees. Apart from having “leaves,” our word for “book” comes from the German word for beech trees, on which many runes were originally carved. Wood type, made by cutting letters from trees, is a practice as old as printing itself. As early as 2900 B.C., pictographic signs were influenced by the shape and rigidity of trees when Sumerian scribes began shaping styluses from the woody reeds that grew abundantly in marshy Mesopotamia. The blunted ends of these styluses were carved into a wedge Latin—giving the script Cuneiform its name.

A passage in George Jean’s book Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts on Cuneiform gives a clue to the meaning of the final sentence of “The Trees,” where Kafka seems to remove meaning just as quickly as he’s hatched it. Jean writes that in Cuneiform, “each sign could have several different meanings, depending on context; the sign that represents a human foot could be understood as ‘to walk,’ ‘to stand up,’ ‘to move,’ and so on….” Our signs, so loaded with meanings, may conjure much in a single stroke. As soon as the picturesque image of a field in winter has entered our mind, Kafka is quick to remind us that it does not exist. It is merely an image in our minds, made by letters on a page and the writer who wrote them. The image’s existence is a metaphor for the shape of language, but it is only one of many metaphors. When Kafka’s letters spoke, they described not their true form, but a ghost of that form, an apparition, like a spirit in the trees.

This article first appeared on 20 June 2006 at Design Observer. © 2006 Rob Giampietro.

Above: Seeking comfort in an uncomfortable chair, Bruno Munari (ca. 1950). From Air Made Visible (2000).

“It’ll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing. If one might say: I will see the moon rose, or: we hurt me at the back of my eyes, and especially: you the blond woman was the clouds that race before my your his yours their faces. What the hell. […] I have to write. One of us has to write, if this is going to get told.” —Julio Cortázar, “Blow-up”

The Seated Reader
Designers have always been interested in chairs, but they have not necessarily always been interested in design essays. Like some essays, some chairs are made for specific positions (like lounge chairs), and others are made for specific places, whether they’re general places (like side chairs), or specific places (like office chairs). Some designers might like chairs for partly this reason. The designers of chairs are able to represent to us the different positions their creations put us into. But the critical positions essays put us into are, mysteriously or not, less comfortable for us to think about.

But perhaps the two things are related by more than metaphor. Before I begin reading an essay by someone, I ask myself, “How should I be sitting? Is this a “sit back” bit of reading, or a situation where I should “lean forward”? Was the writer sitting in the same way? What was the writer’s position? Maybe it’s not such a critical question, but I ask it anyway because it gives me a chance to embody the writer for a minute, to sort of position myself as the writer is positioned so we’re starting out from the same spot together. In this case, dear reader, I’m sitting back.

I picked up a favorite book of mine the other day, Gerhard Richter’s The Daily Practice of Painting, a book I bought because I liked the name. Many would agree with Richter when he notes that being a creator is a constant effort that is never perfected. It is something to be practiced daily. I already think about my design work that way, but lately I have started to think about my writing that way, too. In preparing to write this I read a conversation between Michael Rock and Rick Poynor from a few years ago titled “What is this thing called graphic design criticism?” (available in 2x4’s “Reading Room”) and Poynor says emphatically that “The critic can only learn what is possible by constantly writing.” Yes, so it seems. A critic who ceases to write is like an actor who ceases to perform: these are mere civilians.

The Artist, The Critic, The Journalist, The Actor
Much of the effort expended by creative people is no different from a shopkeeper’s. They take inventory. Many objects from visiting merchants and printed catalogs vie for the shopkeeper’s attention, and the shopkeeper must determine what’s to be done with them and whether they should be put up for sale within the limited space of the shop. Taking inventory requires judgment, and this judgment is constant and laborious. One of the first observations Richter makes, in 1962, is that “There is no excuse whatever for uncritically accepting what one takes over from others…. This fact means that there is nothing guaranteed about conventions; it gives us the daily responsibility of distinguishing good from bad.” Here, his tone is a critic’s. He issues an emphatic directive to an audience, and then, assuming they agree, draws an inference from it. Four years later, Richter’s notes are more self-defining: “I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction…. I steer clear of definitions. I don’t know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.” These words are not a critic’s. They are an artist’s.

When artists write as makers, they tend to write in the first person. When critics write as observers, they tend to write in the third person. If critics use the first person, then it is plural and its viewpoint belongs to the audience. Artists may be wildly contradictory in their arguments, as Richter is, in order to obscure or complicate their ability to speak authoritatively for their works since, as artists, their responsibility is to create works that more or less speak for themselves. Critics do not have this luxury. In order to adapt to changing times, the critic must inevitably revisit his positions, but a wildly contradictory critic will quickly render himself pointless.

There are also journalists. Journalists are observers, but they are not critics. Like critics, they must be clear, but, unlike critics, they should not offer the reader judgments: just facts. These facts may arrive in a highly stylized way, as the New Journalists understood, but if they cease to be facts then the writer, in the most classic sense, ceases to be a journalist and must be playing some other role.

Finally, there are people who routinely play other roles, and they are called actors. Like artists, actors use the first person as their primary tense, embodying the writer’s characters (via the director) and performing them for the audience. The actor is commissioned by the producer to play a specific role in the production. The actor has a task, which is to create his character. In creating a character, the actor’s own opinions must be deliberately ambiguous and non-judgmental. The actor’s character is just one element of the story. Actors are often quick to note that when they judge their characters’ actions preemptively, they somehow fail to relay the essential facts of their character to the audience. Actors must withhold judgment. Because of an actor’s commitment to reporting emotional facts directly, they are a bit like journalists.

Here’s a journalist (Larissa MacFarquhar) writing in The New Yorker about the experience of an artist (John Ashbery) responding to criticism:

He would prefer to read poems only for himself. He dislikes writing poetry criticism. The evaluating impulse is totally foreign to him. He has no interest in developing a set of criteria by which he might decide whether a poem is good or bad or great… It’s simply that, for him, poems are pleasurable tools. He wants a poem to do something to him, to spark a thought or, even better, a verse of his own; he has no urge to do something to the poem.

The artist uses art to generate. The critic uses art to evaluate. The journalist uses art to explain. The actor uses art to empathize.

The Hybrid, The Schizophrenic
Michael Rock makes this complex set of relationships clear early in his conversation with Rick Poynor. He observes, “Design work is exchanged intra-professionally, through publishing, lectures, promotional material, other written forms. Publication may lead to speaking engagements, workshops, teaching invitations and competition panels - all of which in turn further promote certain aesthetic positions. At the same time, a historical canon is perpetually generated, a canon that will influence the next generation of designers by indicating what work is of value, what is worth saving, what is excluded.” So future designers will generate work based on other work they’ve seen, design critics will assign value judgments to the work being published, and journalists will publish and cover more of it for everyone to continue talking about.

But how journalists will cover it is another matter. While Poynor acknowledges that one of the pitfalls of practicing “ordinary journalism” in a design context is that this kind of writing “fails to make its critical positions sufficiently explicit,” he also laments the fact that “a more academic form of criticism to compare with those generated by, for instance, art, literature, and cultural studies… will have limited appeal to professional readers,” or readers who function solely as practicing designers. To remedy this, Poynor suggests increasing the contributions in the popular professional press of a hybrid journalist/critic who practices “critical journalism,” meaning “the kind of writing you find on the arts pages of the Sunday papers: informed, thoughtful, skeptical, literate, prepared to take up a position and argue a case, aware of academic discourse and debates… but able to make these issues relevant and accessible to a wider readership” ((There is some evidence that Poynor, as critics do, has recently changed his thinking on this front. He writes in the March 2006 issue of Icon Magazine that “criticism and journalism are different activities. While it’s certainly possible for journalism to have a critical intention, most design journalism simply reports the latest news.” I agree, and think that recognizing this, as I have tried to outline above, is a major step in defining our profession’s expectations of the critic.)). This is a hybrid borne out of necessity: readers wouldn’t read otherwise.

While this kind of Sunday article is certainly known to us all and makes for an admirable literary goal, these sorts of articles also tend to address subjects that have much richer bodies of classically “critical” writing than graphic design. Since most readers have had some experience with this backlog of criticism, they will be more oriented within a discussion of that subject than they would be in a design discussion, a discipline whose basic principles are largely unknown or poorly understood by others and that has yet to truly define the basic working framework of a criticism for itself.

Finally, this Sunday journalism tends to be practiced by some of the finest writers of our time, the closest thing we have to modern-day public intellectuals, and, in the realm of graphic design, we find quickly that writers of that calibre are in short supply. Along with Poynor, Rock notes that “Most design critics start off as practitioners with a penchant for writing,” adding, “But without seven years of graduate study in preparation of a dissertation to hone their abilities, most design critics have to squeeze in writing here and there, and learn on the fly. Unfortunately it shows.”

This second kind of hybrid, the designer/critic, is also borne out of necessity: design writers wouldn’t exist otherwise. But the problem, Rock notes, is also partly systemic. Design schools, adept at training visual originators, may balk at the cases of students who display above-average verbal abilities, and their classmates may regard them with suspicion, too: perhaps they overcompensate verbally for what they lack visually. In a small community, critics must often write about people with whom they have a personal or social relationship. (For example, Rock was my teacher.) There are too few editors willing to tamper with their publication’s standard array of offerings, and there are too few writers willing to break with form at the risk of losing their audience. And it’s not like you can make a living at it.

Not only is it potentially thankless, but the position of the journalist/critic/designer is also schizophrenic. As a writing designer in Dot Dot Dot, I have published two essays. One covered a contemporary art fair (journalism) through the lens of an academic essay about posters (criticism). Another covered a contemporary composer (journalism) by reviewing his music (criticism) and imagining a possible cover for one of his albums (design). One of these essays was highly principled, critically unambiguous, and observed from a third person perspective. The other was distractedly meandering, impressionistically assembled, and explained from a first person perspective. It was the process of re-examining these two very different essays that led me to thinking about one of the most basic building blocks of any language, critical or otherwise: tense.

I’m pleased to find that I’m not alone. One attribute of an organized criticism is a set of sustained discussions on a key term or idea among several thinkers in the discipline. This way, one thinker can cite another’s way of thinking and reinforce it, correct it, or reject it entirely. In doing so, the uses of an idea common to both of them are expanded to include their collective wisdom. Once a dialogue over a common idea is taking place, the idea itself will lead the discussion and will be amplified and refined by it.

Over the new year I traveled to Paris and happened to discover a book called Dutch Resource: Collaborative Exercises in Graphic Design, which was produced by the students of the Werkplaats Typografie as part of their residency at the Chaumont Graphic Arts Festival in France. Inside, ten students collaborate with ten designers to create a unique presentation of some of the designer’s key projects and texts. These chapters range in tone from academic to folksy, and their design vernacular ranges from that of an antiquated engineering textbook to that of a homemade webpage of remaindered links. These collaborations between designer and designer, one in essence “performing” the identity of another, hints at some of the schizophrenia that the back cover copy makes explicit. “Today’s graphic designer, a specialist and jack-of-all-trades in one” - a hybrid of hybrids! - “who is not only meant to be a good designer but often works as a writer, researcher, editor, curator, critic, and photographer as well.”

Beyond this set of highly specialized roles lies another: type design, motion graphics design, information design, printmaking, art direction, etc. While I would like to try my hand at all of these roles, I do not expect myself to excel at all of them. Quite the opposite, I would assume failure in most of them. And while I was delighted and inspired by Dutch Resource and much of the ambitious work in it, as a critic I take some issue with its overall structure, pairing designer with designer. True, this might mirror an educational model and make for some interesting conversation, but it also seems to suggest that the mere act of collaboration is enough. It isn’t. The best collaborations assume a diversity of their participants’ gifts. The model in Dutch Resource is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, less collaboration among equals and more that of the journalist-subject, or student-teacher, or employee-employer, or designer-client.

The First Person, The Third Person
The beginning of Maxine Kopsa’s introduction, “Semi or Fully Automated,” makes her anxiety over tenses clear: “It’s really quite impossible to write about the Werkplaats Typografie normally. What I mean to say - and I promised I wouldn’t bring myself into this, but look, sentence two, I’m already using the ‘I’…” Is Kopsa a commissioned writer or an independent critic? Is she covering the Werkplaats like a journalist or speaking as one of its designer participants? Where is she sitting, and where are we meant to sit in order to get comfortable? Later, the duo Maureen Mooren and Daniël van der Velden collaborate with Jeffrey C. Ramsey to “re-shuffle, in random order, some things they have previously said about their work - in an attempt to create an ‘oracle’ of text, or simply a resource of words on a profession in need of more explanations.” In creating and defining terms, their aim is like the critic’s, but the multiplicity of their authorship and the recycled nature of their language suggests a kind of artistic assemblage instead.

This three-part invention is reminiscent of another, also documented in the book, between Paul Elliman and the duo Armand Mevis and Linda Van Deursen. The essay “Too Much Information” in their book, Recollected Work, is credited to Elliman, but in reading it one quickly becomes aware that it is the result of a collaboration between the three of them. What is so startling about it is the way that it transforms some of the anxieties over tense that I have described into sharp critical tools whose explanations come from the nature of design and technology itself. Instead of journalistically reporting the facts of Mevis and Van Deursen’s projects and practice, Elliman opts to envelop the duo’s chatty observations in his own narration, borrowing metaphorically from the novelistic convention of free indirect discourse.

Free indirect discourse uses a single narrative voice to assemble and recreate bits of direct speech and indirect observation from multiple sources. Here’s a very simple example: He would love to do it. Were the he to express this thought himself, he might say, in quotes, “I would love to do it.” This is his direct statement, thus direct speech. Direct statements are the only way to know emotional facts like whether or not someone would love to do something. We cannot know unless the person feeling that emotion tells us directly. There are things we know indirectly, and these things are based on observations. Once the subject above has made the direct statement in bold, anyone could say indirectly (and not in quotes) that He said he would love to do it. But to state that He would love to do it neither reports an observation nor assigns a fragment of direct speech to an emotional statement made by the person feeling it. Instead, it uses the authority of a third-person narrator to shift us into a locked consciousness. Moreover, the sentence would not seem the least bit odd if it were written like this: He would love to do it, but she thought he was lazy. However, he has not said directly that “I would love to do it,” nor has she stated directly that “I think he is lazy.” Within a single sentence, we have jumped from one person’s consciousness to another. And it would be easy enough to go back out again: He would love to do it, but she thought he was lazy, even though he got up to leave his chair immediately, while she sat still. And while it is our faith in a narrator that enables this bewildering trick, narrators are not obliged to be solely factual, and in fact they are more than welcome to lie to us at any time. As a result, the use of free indirect discourse as a rhetorical device is ambiguous: it’s not clear if the narrator is speaking for the character, or if the character is speaking for himself.

It may also be, as the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has observed, that both instances are true simultaneously. In his essay, “Discourse in the Novel,” which Bakhtin wrote during a six-year period of state-imposed exile in Kazakhstan, he writes,

It frequently happens that even one and the same word will belong simultaneously to two languages, two belief systems that intersect in a hybrid construction – and, consequently, the word has two contradictory meanings….

The idea that a word could belong to two “languages” comes from Bakhtin’s concept of “heteroglossia,” which allows for several subcultural languages (like “business-speak”) to subsist and compete among each other within a national language (like “English”). This means, as Bakhtin observes, “With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, it must move in and occupy a position for itself within it, it chooses, in other words, a ‘language.’” Thus every bit of speech is a positioned bit of speech, and every speaker must decide how he is positioned with regard to others before speaking. Bakhtin identifies the concept of heteroglossia as having come from his experiences in the local marketplace where he heard peasants simultaneously retelling stories, bargaining for vegetables, and deferring to the landed gentry. Heteroglossia, then, is a popular phenomenon, and Bakhtin naturally found it flourishing in the then-emerging popular form of the novel. Following an analysis of some passages from Dickens, Bakhtin writes, “Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel, …is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse.” When Rock and Poynor title their essay “What is this thing called graphic design criticism” – note that they don’t use quotes – they are both reproducing an overheard direct phrase, “graphic design criticism,” feigning naïveté about this phrase as a rhetorical device, and finally appropriating this phrase as their own in order to define it for themselves.

A combination of Bakhtin’s “Double-voiced discourse” and free indirect discourse also runs throughout Elliman’s “Too Much Information” essay in Mevis and Van Deursen’s Recollected Work. For example, the first sentence of the back cover blurb reads, “The COVER, we always do the cover last, at the end of the project, following decisions taken inside the book.” Presumably this is either Mevis or Van Deursen speaking for both of them in the first-person plural. Then someone says (or writes), “Even though the publisher always wants the cover designed right at the beginning, you know, for those sales catalogues.” First, whoever the speaker (or writer) is, they are freely reporting an emotional fact known only to the publisher. The publisher has not “said” directly that he wanted anything. Upon further inspection, although either Mevis or Van Deursen might have been speaking a sentence or two ago, this following statement could be coming from either one of them or from Elliman, the interlocutor, either egging one of them on in conversation or inserting his critical point of view in the transcript afterward. This innocent-seeming back-cover blurb, which would probably be frustrating to any publisher, plays subtly with time as well, describing, through a set of blatant contradictions, a time before it even existed in description: “[The COVER] is always easy though; maybe the easiest part of the book. But even in this case we’re not sure what to do with it yet.” These statements could easily be from one speaker in a moment of hesitation or from two speakers in the midst of a friendly disagreement. The design of the book itself speaks to this mixed-up set of identities, presenting distinct projects as if strewn across a tabletop, unaligned, fragmentary, and occurring all at once. The illusion that designers work on a single project at a time dissolves so that the less-organized, more eclectic, more collaborative truth of the studio environment can emerge. Neither projects nor statements have quotation marks to offset them, and readers, like their narrators, must move freely, almost frenziedly, from one item to the next.

In his discussion of “Too Much Information” in Dutch Resource, Elliman points out that the act of typesetting speech functions similarly to heteroglossia and free indirect discourse in the way it blurs the boundaries between who’s saying what, what language was initially speech and what wasn’t, and in what capacity the reproduced phrase is meant to represent or reflect upon the whole. He notes in Dutch Resource that “Here you have a text in which you can’t really distinguish between the written and the spoken word, even when you think you can.” Like the technique of free indirect discourse, the process of typography erases distinctions between speakers, tones of voice, types of subcultural language, and modes of language production. Typesetting is a standardizing affair, and, as Kafka alluded to in “In the Penal Colony,” sometimes a brutalizing act of loss. Elliman adopts another trope from Kafka later in his commentary, that of spontaneously turning into an insect, suggesting to readers who attempt to guess the identity a given speaker that “if you go back to some original recording, or become a time-traveling fly on the wall or bug in the phone you’ll be a bit disappointed.”

Sharing another trick of Kafka’s, Kopsa’s introduction adopts the use of initials for standard terms. Much of the writing from the Werkplaats does this: as Stuart Bailey (my editor for this article) explains in “A note on initials,” from the book In Alphabetical Order, this convention originated because “Full names feel too clumsy, first names feel too informal, and surnames feel to formal.” Initials allow for the “serious informality or informal seriousness I’m after.” But the uninitiated may also recognize initials as tools of anonymity, their provenance exclusively typographic, culled from the world of forms, transcripts, and legal documents. Kafka knew them from his job as an insurance clerk, and, perhaps unintentionally, WT has taken a page from the book of Joseph K.

The Reading Sitter
At the end of his comments in Dutch Resource, Elliman admits that “I’ve got an abiding interest in the relationship between language and technology. My interest in typography is clearly a part of that. But so are questions about the role of text in history. Both historical texts and contemporary texts and the writing of them. The construction of a text.” Here, his hybrid role serves him well: the method and logic of a critical argument is something to be designed, too. The text is being designed by its author as it is undesigning and examining the object that is its author’s concern. I can certainly relate. As I write this, I have two overwhelming sensations: that I should add some kind of parting thought here, and, at the same time, that I should not. One voice is urging me onward, and another is begging me to resist. Earlier I was sitting back, relaxed, voicing observations without any necessary conclusion in mind, but now I find myself having changed positions in my chair. I’m leaning forward, more focused, almost forcing myself to reveal some kind of point here, though I’m not sure that one exists. I’m nearly up out of my chair now, trying to listen to which of these voices is the loudest, but it’s hard to hear if it’s the critic or the designer talking.

This article first appeared in Dot Dot Dot #12. © 2006 Rob Giampietro.

Note

Last year’s I.D. Forty was a controversial affair. In Julie Lasky’s editorial note preceding this ranking of design’s movers and shakers, she observes that its “most important value is that it offers perspective, to us editors as well as to you.” Backpedaling from a critical stance, she asks rhetorically, “Why do I feel so defensive about the I.D. Forty? Is it that best-of lists, with their peppy exhortations of confident attitudes, look easy, when in fact they’re wrenchingly difficult?” To allay her anxiety, I.D.’s editors went for hard data, polling 800 “experts.” The result was a list of the 40 knee-jerkiest names in the design biz. In closing, Lasky quips, “The I.D. Forty grabs the zeitgeist—I have no doubt about that. As for seizing your attention, I can only hope.” (She needn’t have worried: Rick Poynor and the design community did take notice.)

This year’s I.D. Forty opens with an editorial note titled “The Fickle Finger of Fame.” In it, Lasky explains that during the process of compiling design’s most powerful, the editors uncovered some of design’s most undersung. The cover line asks, “Who deserves more attention?” If last year’s list rankled the masses by perpetuating what everyone in the design community already knew but didn’t want to talk about, this list, with its confident swagger of conferring not just affirmation but merit, seems aimed squarely at stirring the pot. Lasky admits as much: “We expect this issue to raise hackles. We hope it inspires debate about the relationship between talent, eminence, and publicity.”

But while the last list provoked outrage, this new list has scarcely gotten a mention. Why?

For answers, I turned to a book that turned up on a number of best-of lists that came out as I.D.’s editors were compiling theirs: James English’s The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. English devotes his stellar book to a sociological study of a wide range of cultural prizes and awards. In so doing, he surveys the dynamics of our current cultural marketplace and evaluates the behavior of the individuals involved in that system when prizes are given, and—sometimes more interestingly—when they’re not received.

With any cultural prize, whether it’s the Nobel for Literature or the AIGA 365 Design Competition, there is a claim being made by the prizegivers on several levels. They claim, for example, that they are the ones who should be giving such a prize. They also claim that the prize is being given to the “genuine article,” a true example of what the prize stands for. Finally, they claim that a prize itself is possible to give in the arena of cultural endeavors. (All of these claims, of course, are frequently contested.)

English cites a breakdown of the first claim in the case of Beloved, Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel that failed to win both the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In response, 48 black critics and writers drafted a letter to The New York Times Book Review questioning the “oversight and harmful whimsy” on the part of the two award committees who’d failed to recognize Morrison’s book. The result? Beloved went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and, several years later, Morrison herself won the Nobel Prize for Literature. (As an aside, I’ve often wondered what the “Nobel” for design might be. For years, it was the Chrysler Design Awards; today, it’s undoubtedly the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards.)

In the end, were the National Book Awards or the National Book Critics Circle Awards harmed by their oversight? No. Was Toni Morrison a beneficiary, in some way, of this oversight? Absolutely. As English points out, “The threat of scandal is constitutive of the cultural prize.” This means that we can’t have prizes without scandals, and we can’t have others winning awards without complaining that the awards don’t mean anything in the first place. The first claim—”What gives you people the right to give an award?”—is followed by the third—”How can you give awards to art, anyway?”

In recent weeks, we’ve witnessed a similar breakdown with the popular book A Million Little Pieces (whose AIGA award-winning cover, by Rodrigo Corral, I’ve always admired). Should James Frey’s embellished memoir have received Oprah’s coveted stamp of approval? Perhaps not. But Frey will almost certainly sell more copies, and Oprah’s future choices will almost certainly come with greater anticipation and scrutiny; the prize of being a part of Oprah’s Book Club is precisely the instrument used to engineer this in both cases. (Frey’s book shot to #1 on The New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list; Oprah’s new selection, Night by Elie Wiesel, shot to #1 earlier this week on Amazon’s sales rankings.)

Prizes that engender scandal routinely become more significant as prizes. First, who really wants to win a prize that no one really cares about? Further, as the brilliant Louis Menand writes in his New Yorker review of English’s book, “Accusations of inauthenticity shore up our faith that there is such a thing as authenticity.” In the case of the I.D. Forty this year, the reverse of this statement may also be true. Advertisements of scandal shore up our faith that there is no scandal to be found.

In addition to the claims above, each new prizegiver enters the cultural marketplace needing to make an additional claim: the claim that the new prize addresses something that is not being addressed elsewhere. Often this “something” comes out of Claim #1 (who’s giving the prize) or Claim #2 (what the prize awards). In recent years, design, like film and writing, has seen an increase in the number of prizes offered to its practioners.

As English points out, the film industry now issues more new awards than films. Yet, when anyone browses the year’s best-of lists, they can’t help but note the lists’ selfsameness. This is because in the awards economy, the rich get richer. Prizes beget more prizes. Attention begets more attention. This accrual of prizes results, ultimately, in value for their recipients. Once anointed, these high priests of an artform can then confer this value on less-acknowledged practitioners. (Stefan Sagmeister, #9 on I.D.’s power list last year, did precisely this, and graciously, during his presentation at last year’s AIGA conference in Boston.) This also is what this year’s I.D. Forty aspires to—the role of anointer.

What makes design financially valuable, despite all this talk of “innovation,” is the recognition of its value by a wide range of audiences. Prizes are a primary mode of recognition, used widely by designers (including this one) in their own marketing and self-promotion. Am I saying that winning prizes can result in financial gain? You bet.

This makes prizes valuable in and of themselves. So not only do scandalous prizes reinforce their importance, they also help to pay their own bills. The more you want a prize, the more you’ll pay to be considered for it or others will pay to have it continue to exist. But talk like this in the prize world is, of course, very hush-hush: most design magazines would not exist without the revenues from their highly-profitable awards.

As a result, English might accuse me (and perhaps himself) of breaking an implicit taboo for what I’ve written here. He observes, “As we lose our ability or our willingness to see the prize as a fundamentally scandalous institution, there is bound to be a period of painful contraction in the awards industry.” Fewer awards? I certainly hope so. But what I really hope for are awards that get us talking, get us debating, get us passionate about what our profession’s doing, where it’s going, and who’s leading it. There are many who’ve said privately to me that this year’s I.D. Forty was their bravest yet, and, with a few reservations, I agree. But how come no one out there seems to care?

There are good scandals and there are bad scandals. Bad scandals ruin careers and embarass institutions. Good scandals get us talking about our most deeply-held convictions and beliefs. Every scandal surroundng a prize is ultimately a collaboration between its issuers and its audience.

What design needs right now is precisely a really good scandal.

This article first appeared on 26 January 2006 at Design Observer. © 2006 Rob Giampietro.

For some companies, brand recognition is a matter of profit and loss. But for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC or Red Cross for short), brand recognition is a matter of life and death. In order to serve its mission of protecting humanitarian and medical personnel on battlefields around the world, the Red Cross’s symbols must be absolutely recognizable and their meanings must be absolutely clear. Two of these symbols are well known: the Red Cross and the Red Crescent. And, as of 8 December 2005, the organization has elected a third: the Red Crystal.

The adoption of this “third Protocol emblem” (as it is officially known) is the first new symbol recognized by the Red Cross since the adoption of the Red Lion and Sun in 1923, a special symbol for Iran that, while still recognized, has not been used since 1980. In 1957, Sri Lanka tried to establish the Red Swastika, which is a Hindi symbol of good luck, but was rejected. India tried again in 1977 and was also rejected. And, for the last 50 years, Israel has requested the addition of a Red Star of David, known to Israelis as Magen David Adom, but that request has also been rejected.

The reason for these rejections is simple. The Red Cross fears that if emblems become more specific and more numerous, these same emblems will compromise the safety of those the Red Cross has sworn to protect. While we can rely on soldiers in the heat of battle to recognize perhaps two or three symbols of protection, we cannot rely on them to recognize two or three hundred. Moreover, the limited number of marks has a unifying purpose, aligning individuals from different countries under a common goal. To allow symbols for the Red Cross to become veiled symbols for their host countries would be to risk rendering those symbols useless. Rather than conveying neutrality, it’s possible they could invite hostility.

Unlike the cross, crescent, or six-pointed star, which are commonly seen in religious institutions, the place we’re most accustomed to seeing shapes like that of the Red Crystal is on roads and highways, where it is the shape of many of the signs themselves. The symbol’s design, with an empty center, emphasizes its connection to a frame. The symbol is an empty vessel, a neutral shape, a sign of sign-ness. As such, it is hard-wired in our brains as something that means, simply, “take notice,” and that reaction is precisely what the Red Cross wants. As shown on their website, the Red Crystal’s frame can remain empty, as it will for Israel, or it may carry the mark of the Red Cross, Red Crescent, or—in the case of Eritrea—both.

The Red Cross’s name is itself a description of its visual mark, like Target and Apple. The symbol showing a red cross on a white ground (an inversion of the Swiss flag), was devised at the inception of the Red Cross movement by its founder, Henri Dunant, in 1863. White flags were typically used in battle to communicate surrender, so Dunant thought a largely white flag would make troops more respectful of the new, peaceful organization. Once an affluent businessman with interests in North Africa, Dunant’s passion for launching the Red Cross left him broke and homeless on the streets of Geneva. After withdrawing to the secluded Swiss countryside for most of his life, Dunant finally went on to win the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.

The Red Crescent was introduced in 1876 during an armed conflict between Russia and Turkey after many Muslim nations refused to recognize it. For decades, Israel had been seeking similar consideration from the ICRC, but it was not until the American Red Cross, lobbying on behalf of Israel, withheld almost $35 million in its subscription fees to the ICRC that the organization began serious talks about the creation of a neutral symbol. While no country or national society will be required to change their emblems, none will be required to use the Red Crystal either, but all nations will be required to respect it. While the resolution to adopt the Red Crystal did not pass unanimously, only Syria was vocal in opposition to it.

In every piece of communication, visual or verbal, there is a sender and a receiver. The degree to which the communication remains intact and intentional from one to the next relies on an absence of “noise,” or interference. In the case of the Red Cross, noise might come from a lack of visibility (the symbol cannot be made out on the door of a muddy jeep), or it might come from a bias inherent to the sender or receiver (the symbol is not recognized because it is also a symbol from a warring religious group).

While it has done literally everything in its power to minimize noise in the first case with a clear and readable logo, the Red Cross has done little over its history to minimize noise in the second case, leaving both of its major symbols vulnerable to cultural bias. The Red Crystal, then, is a major step in the right direction for this groundbreaking organization. Like all doctors, the Logo Doctors are fans of the Red Cross. Now we have one more reason to celebrate. If one type of successful mark must make a call to action, there is no greater call than, to borrow from the words of Hippocrates, “First, do no harm.”

The version of this article that was published on 12 December 2005 by BusinessWeek.com is available here. © 2005 Rob Giampietro and Kevin Smith.

Sit down. The Logo Doctors have a story to tell—a story about a time-honored logo that has just been changed. And more broadly, a story about when and how to tinker with a powerful brand icon.

Once upon a time, in the Orwellian year of 1984, one of the largest companies in the world unveiled a new logo that depicted—what else?—the world itself. The designer of this new logo was Saul Bass. The company was AT&T.

Bass’s new globe replaced the company’s previous logo, a bell. Although Bass himself had updated the bell in 1969, the icon had been in use for nearly 100 years before it was replaced in 1984. It was, in many ways, the perfect symbol for the AT&T brand: Not only was it a simple mnemonic for the company’s original founder and the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, but bells symbolize sound and many bells (church bells, doorbells) connect people. And AT&T essentially made sound boxes that connected people.

So why change such an appropriate, well-recognized symbol? Because in 1984, the U.S. Government forced AT&T to break up, spinning off its local phone service in seven regional “Baby Bell” companies. If you’re not the only bell in town, you can’t very well keep using the symbol to mark your territory.

Bass’s solution was to signify something more than sound and connectivity: AT&T’s global reach. If the Baby Bells connected friends and family across town, AT&T linked you to a network spanning the world. Despite the ubiquity of the bell, Bass’s globe was instantly accepted because it effectively symbolized how customers had come to see the company and how the company had come to see itself. The globe signaled to AT&T customers, shareholders, and employees that its new vision was international.

And what a globe it was! Emblazoned in a UN-style blue (an element Bass borrowed from the bell), the globe’s racing latitudinal lines thinned to white in what would be North America’s location, subtly positioning our continent as the information flashpoint for an increasingly wired world. The icon presented the globe as a unified, countryless sphere, coursing with information. This vision of the world has remained a potent one: the symbol is still widely recognized, despite the fact that, since Comcast bought AT&T’s broadband cable division and Cingular bought AT&T’s cellular division last year, the services many consumers had come to expect from AT&T no longer belong to it.

How does AT&T’s new mark stack up? Well, like the old mark, it’s round. Like the old mark, it’s blue. Like the old mark, it has stripes of varying widths. And, like the old mark, it suggests that its round shape is three-dimensional. But this time the three-dimensionality is emphasized with the addition of transparency, shading, and some nifty computer effects. Other than looking like Pixar’s version of an old Disney cartoon, it’s pretty much the same.

As Pentagram’s Michael Bierut—who’s written a moving elegy for Bass’s globe on the site Design Observer—points out, “Bass’s AT&T mark has one advantage over anything that will replace it: it already exists…. Anything new will surrender all that equity, return to square one, and compete for attention with all those other telecom marks out there.”

When a company decides to change a mark that is as beloved and recognizable as AT&T’s globe, it better have a good reason for doing it. Like, the government has declared you’re a monopoly and you must split your company. So: change your mark because the rules of business have changed and the old mark no longer applies. Change your mark because your company has shifted its business strategy. Change your mark because it was bad to begin with and no one recognizes it. And when you change your mark, really change your mark.

The only upside in writing over something as long-lasting as Bass’s globe is in the opportunity to present something entirely new, a bright and confident vision of what’s to come. AT&T’s “new” logo, introduced this 21 November, does no such thing. If Bass’s globe was a confident cannonball into the pool, this logo, by an uncredited designer, is a timid toe in the water. It reduces Bass’s mark to a hollow, cartoony shell of itself. It may not be the same, but it’s definitely not new. As a result, it fails to communicate what, if anything, is actually new at AT&T or even—more basically—why the company changed its logo in the first place. True, AT&T’s sale to SBC required the new entity to review its corporate mark. But in recognizing that AT&T had the stronger brand, SBC should have left the globe alone. The reason for the logo’s change reeks of egotism more than anything else: SBC, once a Baby Bell, has redecorated big Ma Bell’s house its own way, like a bad episode of Trading Spaces.

The “un-newness” of this new mark reminds us of the spring rollout of Mountain Dew’s “new” logo, which looks almost identical to the old one, except that it is sharper and shinier. In response to charges that the new logo was anything but, Scott Johnson of the ad agency Tribal observed, “A lot of people aren’t really going to notice it…, [but] guys can find things that no one really knows are there.”

There’s a great story about things that no one really knows are there, and it’s called “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” A king, told his robes are the finest and most beautiful in all the land, confidently strides out in public naked—his perception clouded by the power of his tailor’s story.

In rationalizing its transparent globe, you can witness AT&T falling prey to a similar kind of storytelling. The company says, “The new globe is three-dimensional, representing the expanding breadth and depth of services that the new AT&T family of companies provides to customers, as well as its global presence.” But wasn’t the old globe three-dimensional? It says, “Transparency was added to the globe to represent clarity and vision.” But wasn’t the old globe transparent?

Diagnosis? The third time’s not a charm, AT&T, and your new blue “beach ball” is full of hot air.

The version of this article that was published on 12 December 2005 by BusinessWeek.com is available here. © 2005 Rob Giampietro and Kevin Smith.

If you think branding a 120,000-sqare-foot store is tricky, try branding an entire state. While it may seem similar to institutional and corporate branding, the practice of “destination branding” is a tradition all its own. In many ways, it’s the opposite of a typical branding assignment. Rather than forging an identity that drives a new culture, the existing culture drives the new logo.

While states have branded themselves in many ways and forms throughout history—think flags, seals, and state mottoes—the concerns of a destination-branding assignment are tied more to commerce than they are to Congress.

These days, the state of Georgia may not be as much on your mind as officials at the Georgia Economic Development Department would like, which is why, a few weeks ago, it introduced a new logo—a stylized version of Georgia’s peach—and a new tag line that junks the Ray Charles classic “Georgia on My Mind” and, instead, summons each visitor to “Put your dreams in motion.”

With one of the fastest-growing state economies, Georgia nonetheless ranks 24th out of 50 states in terms of tourism spending, the lowest of all the Southeastern states other than Kentucky. So how does its new identity stack up against the rest? The Logo Doctors decided to take a virtual road trip across the USA—or at least across state websites—and find out.

These seven logos are fairly typical of what we saw during our journey of state tourism websites. South Carolina combines the palmetto tree and crescent moon motif found on its state flag with horribly stale typography. Alaska transforms the peaks of its A’s into the mountains of the Yukon. The ss’s of Mississippi and Missouri suggest the rolling banks of the river on which the states sit. While Vermont adds a brushstroke of green hills, Arizona adopts a Native American motif, and Kentucky plays on the horse, its beloved state symbol.

While these logos do communicate a sense of place to a potential tourist, the facts they relay are probably already known. Put another way, these logos are more about what these states want tourists to know than what the tourists might actually want to know. They fail, in themselves at least, to offer what most tourists are seeking—the chance to experience the unknown. Otherwise, why travel somewhere in the first place?

Rather than flirting with and ultimately seducing these visitors, the states that use this straightforward word-picture tactic wind up delivering bland information and missing a critical opportunity—the first impression. Particularly in the case of an experience or destination, an identity must leave enough room for interpretation. Questions can be a lot more interesting than answers.

Traveling on, we saw a number of other trends as well. Versions of the clichéd “swoosh” were adopted, to particularly unfortunate effect, by Kansas and Nebraska—states whose flat, featureless landscapes are more problem than perk. Moreover, the swoosh suggests acceleration, like that of your car as it hurtles across these states at 80 mph without even stopping for gas.

Only a handful of logos went for simple type and a clean, almost modernist, treatment. Nevada’s logo feels somewhat mystical (note the Native American-inspired diacritical mark above the second vowel), Iowa rather cosmopolitan, and Florida less chintzy than usual.

Then there’s the tried-and-true method of showing the geography of a state, used here by Illinois and Michigan, whose geography is not exactly iconic. However, these states, too, have a refreshing, straightforward, modern approach that gives what some would call “flyover states” a bit more flair.

A logo technique we saw to an overwhelming degree was the use of stylized handwriting. Why? As we mentioned in our column about graffiti a few weeks ago, people think things made with the human hand are more “authentic” than things with perfect angles and machine-made curves.

The handwriting in this case tries to give an understated sincerity to these states’ tourism campaigns. But because of the commonness of the execution and a distinct lack of nuance in the styles of handwriting used, these seven logos fail to deliver.

In the same way that we read graffiti as the voice of its individual scribe, we read handwriting as the expression of an individual, not an institution or a government. As a result, this logo execution suffers from the same problem as schmaltzy music over a Hollywood love scene: when we start to feel our emotions are being controlled, our emotional connection is broken.

(On a side note, the similarities between the logos for North and South Dakota are surprising, given the growing movement among North Dakotans, written about in The New Yorker by Mark Singer, to change their state’s name to simply “Dakota” in order to differentiate themselves from their better-known neighbors. It’s startling that a state that has contemplated something as fundamental as a name change would miss such a simple opportunity to differentiate itself.)

Before states had logos, they had flags. These seven flags belong to the states with handwritten logos shown (in the same positions) on the previous slide. While the flags are visually rather similar—mostly centered seals on blue grounds—the content is very diverse, showing everything from a pelican to a bison.

Very little of it feels contemporary, and none of these symbols are icons generally associated with these states, making the flags as superfluous in terms of branding as their similar handwritten logos.

Other flags are more useful, however. The flags of New Mexico, California, and Texas (shown on the right) are all more graphic and more recognizable than their overly nostalgic logos (on the left). Texas’s weathered belt loop, California’s ’50s postage stamp, and New Mexico’s cave painting all champion the past rather than looking to the future. Their flags, in contrast, are striking and original. These states would be wise to cash in on them.

Images of national monuments can often be leveraged, since they’re already destinations for many tourists. The incredible symbol of St. Louis’s arch seems like the ideal choice to energize a cutesy logo—its shape is futuristic, welcoming, and dynamic.

Milton Glaser’s famous “I [heart] NY” logo, probably one of the earliest U.S. examples of branding a destination, is also one of the best known. As a symbol for New York, it stands shoulder to shoulder with the state’s other great symbols, like the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Niagara Falls. But it’s personal, readable as both a statement and a graphic, and approachable—a key fact for a state whose main tourist city can be somewhat overwhelming. Instead of “authentic” handwriting, the letters are typewritten, and the logo’s unnamed speaker forces each potential tourist, in describing the logo, to utter the phrase for him- or herself: “I love New York.” Say it enough times, and you’ll believe it.

South Dakota’s sidelong reference to “Great Faces” in the tag line hints at the state’s greatest tourist attraction, the iconic Mount Rushmore. But what if, instead, the logo had taken its cue from the stone carving that so many tourists associate with the state? These great landmarks, and the associations we already have with them, offer the opportunity to build on the empathy of would-be travelers.

South Dakota’s tag line suffers further from an unoriginal sentiment, a problem we also find in South Carolina’s “Smiling Faces. Beautiful Places.” While these two tag lines may not have much to say for their home states, neither do most other tag lines. The assortment in the second row could describe almost any state.

The bottom row contains two groups of tag lines. The first combines the name of the state with its tag line, a novel idea. “Virginia is for lovers” is well known because it is offbeat, charming, and specific. “It must be Maine” isn’t well known because it is bland, dreary, and vague. “I love New York” is the only one to use the first-person voice. Other states might consider following its lead, if it had not set the bar so high in every other regard.

Finally, Tennessee’s “The stage is set for you” and Illinois’s “Mile after magnificent mile” both borrow South Dakota’s strategy of making quiet reference to well-known state icons in the tag line. Illinois’s makes reference to Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile,” also known as the “Mag Mile,” the city’s toniest shopping district. Tennessee’s tag line makes reference to the state’s country-music heritage, but also, more obliquely, to Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage.” The word “set,” with its overtones of tables, food, and hospitality, makes this tag line as good a choice as any.

Last but not least, license plates might be some of the best advertisements a state has because they have a captive audience—drivers stuck in interstate traffic—and they’re found on every car crisscrossing America. They also have a built-in base of spectators, as drivers often try to spot cars from other states. Here are three of the most iconic.

Pennsylvania’s “keystone” shape, now used for all its branding statewide, was adapted from its well-known license plates. California’s Art Deco sunset is known as much from highways as from its place at the start of TV’s L.A. Law. And, finally, Georgia’s plate carried a peach design long before the tourism board officially adopted one as its symbol.

Diagnosis? The bland tag line aside, Georgia’s new identity challenges expectations and envisions a state that’s part of a fresher, more contemporary South. The identity reflects quite well both who Georgians want to be and whom they would like to have visiting. Having traveled the 50 states by web, we can say that puts Georgia’s new peach logo near the top of the barrel.

The version of this article that was published on 25 October 2005 by BusinessWeek.com is available here. © 2005 Rob Giampietro and Kevin Smith.

When your customers are designers, you know your new logo will get a full crit. But when publishing software giant Quark, Inc. unveiled its new identity, timed to coincide with the release of a beefed-up, feature-rich Quark 7, it got something else: a lesson in the difficulties of designing an original logo in a world more packed with logos than ever before.

The new logo seems simple enough—a circle-square hybrid that we’ve dubbed the “squircle,” resembling a very mod-looking uppercase Q, writ large in “Quark Green,” a.k.a. PANTONE 368, a color that Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, equates with growth and innovation.

But “innovation” wasn’t the first word that came to designers’ minds when the logo debuted in early September. Shortly after its release, the design community erupted in accusations that the new mark had been ripped off. Admittedly, the logo is far from original. It’s very similar to logos promoting tourism to Toronto and the Bahamas, and easily comparable to those of Moen Faucets and AkaDemiks Jeans, not to mention a bevy of design-related logos for Sterling Brands, Artworkers, PhotoObjects, and the popular design blog The Designers Network. And color aside, it’s identical to the mark designed for the Scottish Arts Council by the notable Scottish firm Graven Images. In our checkup, we counted 15 logos we’d call highly similar.

Why, the Logo Doctors wonder, weren’t their fellow designers as outraged at the similarities between those existing 15 marks? More importantly, why have so many different companies chosen the squircle? And is Quark to blame for choosing such a common logo?

The answer to the first question is simple: Designers love to hate Quark, for both its limited functionality and its unhelpful customer service. (We happen to be Quark fans, for the same reason we type our columns in TextEdit—sometimes less is more.)

The rise of the squircle is harder to pin down. Like any abstract form, it can be rationalized into a solution for just about any brand. That creates a snowball effect: the squircle’s burgeoning ubiquity endows it with the familiarity that designers aiming to connect their clients with consumers will build on. Focusing on who unveiled the squircle first misses the point.

But try telling that to the Scottish Arts Council (SAC), whose reaction comes as close as we’ve seen to a logo street fight. The defensiveness is somewhat understandable: in 2001, the SAC’s new logo outraged Scots with its publicly financed $37,000 price tag, and the SAC must feel more than a little compelled to defend it tooth and nail.

While a Quark spokesman claimed to Macworld that the company conducted “extensive checks to discover similar existing logos,” this defense is a little tough to swallow. Not only did hordes of enterprising bloggers manage to track down so many within hours, but the shape has been used by multiple companies catering to the same market as Quark.

If you can pardon the company for its total ignorance, the squircle seems better suited to represent Quark than to represent many of the others. After all, it looks a lot like the capital letter Q. (And not very much like the lowercase letter “a” for “arts,” as the SAC claims.) By rationalizing the shape into a monogram, Quark may have used it more effectively than others have. Still, if any mark provokes customer outrage, you can do all the rationalizing you want and the logo is still a failure.

But whose failure is it? While Quark has to shoulder some of the blame and most of the embarrassment, we’d like to suggest that its collaborators at SicolaMartin, a division of Young & Rubicam Brands, should’ve stayed up a little later doing their competitive analysis homework. And we’d extend that advice to them in marketing their own firm. The SicolaMartin website uses the phrase “Good design is good business,” which is trademarked by the furniture manufacturer Knoll. Originality’s a bitch.

As Jeremy Hedley of the blog Antipixel observed, designers are paid as much for the quality of their thought as for the actual Illustrator file sent along at the end of a project. We absolutely agree. If you claim to deliver a blend of differentiating thought leadership along with visual acuity, as SicolaMartin does, then you have to walk the walk. Diagnosis? While the new identity may have its merits, its utter lack of originality is certainly not one of them.

The version of this article that was published on 30 September 2005 by BusinessWeek.com is available here. © 2005 Rob Giampietro and Kevin Smith.

On 2 September, more than 1,600 Sprint and Nextel stores opened their doors beneath new signs bearing a common logo. This marked yet another massive telecom merger, following Cingular’s buyout of AT&T last year and anticipating Verizon’s possible takeover of MCI in the weeks to come. Whenever two become one, a new logo is an inevitable offspring, and this merger is no different.

Will the monolithic new company be dubbed “Sextel,” as bloggers once giddily suggested? Hardly. The new branding doesn’t exactly get us all hot and bothered. Like that forgotten soda from the ’90s, it’s basically…O.K.

Then again, post-merger logos are seldom visionary or inspiring because they’re design-by-committee projects mired in politics. So if the committee is actually able to produce a logo that’s on time and un-ugly, they deserve a pat on the back.

And that’s exactly what a team of execs from Sprint and Nextel—along with branding agencies Lippencott Mercer, TBWA/Chiat/Day, Publicis, and Hal Riney—have done. Because a successful logo merger is always a challenge, the Doctors decided to take a closer look at this team’s decision-making process.

The trick to making a successful logo is keeping what works and ditching what doesn’t. In play are three key elements: name, mark, and color. In the case of Citicorp’s merger with Travelers Group in 1999, the name was resolved from the start: the new entity would be called Citigroup. In designing the logo, Pentagram wisely shortened the word to the very recognizable “citi,” keeping Travelers’ red umbrella, a symbol of protection, while playfully using a “t” as its curved handle. The lowercase “i”s are both human forms and points of connection. The colors of both companies are integrated in the new logo. A masterful merger.

JP Morgan Chase’s new logo is more straightforward. Both banks had great brand equity and name recognition, but Chase’s lovely emblem—designed by Chermayeff & Geissmar in the 1960s and still a classic—was preserved as the more recognizable symbol. They compromised on the colors and updated the typography. Well done.

Finally, when FedEx acquired Kinko’s in 2004, they scrapped the copyshop’s forgettable logo but kept the highly memorable name. Since FedEx has no logo aside from its name, Landor Associates (makers of the original FedEx mark) recognized the need for a logo to anchor the new brand and set it apart from FedEx’s. They devised an innovative asterisk made from three arrows coming together. Three of the colors—orange for FedEx Priority, green for FedEx Ground, and purple for FedEx—were already in use. The remaining color, an aqua blue, became the symbol for FedEx Kinko’s.

In the case of Sprint and Nextel, the left side of this slide shows the assets in play. On the top row, the names “Sprint” and “Nextel,” and the typography of those names: Sprint’s in outdated bold italic, Nextel’s in an all-caps, no-nonsense sans serif. In the second row, the marks: Sprint’s ungraceful diamond-pyramid thingy, Nextel’s mundane cursor. Finally, the color schemes: Sprint’s commonplace grey and red on a white ground is similar to Verizon’s, Nextel’s black on a bold yellow ground is totally its own.

The right side of the slide shows this process of combining existing brand elements as used by another telecom company. When WorldCom acquired MCI in 1997, the new company took MCI’s name but kept WorldCom’s branding. Later, post-scandal, the company ditched the “WorldCom,” but kept its more distinctive look.

This approach wasn’t an option for Sprint and Nextel: While Sprint clearly had the more recognizable name and Nextel clearly had the more recognizable color scheme, neither company had a mark worth getting excited about. The designers decided to create a new one.

The new logo is a vast improvement over the previous two. It visualizes one of Sprint’s most memorable marketing claims—its network is so clear that you can hear a pin drop—to remarkable effect. In so doing, it also has overtones of Cingular’s “full bars,” a symbol of the completeness of their network. The new mark also resembles a bird’s wing, a symbol of the freedom of cellular communication.

Here is Sprint’s final logo, with upper- and lowercase sans serif letters that hybridize the companies’ former typography. In virtually every graphic way, the new branding distinguishes itself from its competitors. We hope Sprint will wear it well.

The version of this article that was published on 15 September 2005 by BusinessWeek.com is available here. © 2005 Rob Giampietro and Kevin Smith.

With alumni like Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, and Donna Karan, Parsons School of Design is no stranger to the power of a great brand. And, since we teach there, we’re certainly no strangers to Parsons. So, naturally, our interest was piqued a few months ago when a faculty email announced that the school would now be known as “Parsons The New School for Design” and that New School University would now be “The New School.” Since it preserved the name “Parsons” but clarified our tie to The New School, the new title sat well with us. The email went on to explain that The New School’s other seven colleges would be renamed accordingly, and a new logo would be introduced. Then we saw the new logo.

The new logo, created by brand veterans Siegel & Gale, scraps nearly every convention in the book. There is no heraldry or traditional academic symbolism. Instead of a school color, there’s a school palette. Instead of a single mark, there are several visually similar marks. And instead of well-mannered, serif capital letters, there is stenciled, spray-painted, graffiti-inspired text that Alan Siegel, speaking to AdCritic.com, describes as “hipster typography and blurry lettering designed to capture the irreverent, urban flavor of the university.” The net effect of all this misbehavior is something that feels less like a school and more like a soft drink.

In a New York Times article spurred by The New School’s new name, our outstanding president, Bob Kerrey, was asked about the recent trend in higher education toward rebranding and renaming. His answer was honest and direct. “My view is that you never argue with the customer about your name,” he said.

What some might argue with, however, is the idea of the student as a customer and the school as a lifestyle brand. Schools didn’t use to advertise themselves much, because advertising’s guileless buying and selling was once considered déclassé and unsuitable for the more refined realm of the academy. If schools did any selling at all, it was based not on differentiation but on a commonly agreed-upon standard of excellence. As a result, school logos have traditionally drawn on shields and flags and other heraldic imagery that suggested legacy, exclusivity, and academic discipline.

The New School’s previous logo took its cue from this tradition. Six turning squares, one for each college, create a modern-looking shield. Designed in the early 1990s by Chermayeff & Geissmar—who’ve created identities for PBS, NBC, and Chase Manhattan Bank—the shield was paired with Matrix, one of the first computer-created typefaces. The logo was celebrated as a modern take on a traditional symbol, uniting the past and future with elegance and simplicity.

As colleges refashion themselves as brands, however, their icons must shift from symbols of defense to symbols that attempt to identify and empathize with a target audience. The replacement of the traditional shield by the new logo, with its visual cues intended to link the school with a young urban culture, reflects The New School’s embrace of lifestyle marketing as its method for facing the public and attracting new students.

But the method is not without its pitfalls. In fact, the new logo exemplifies the dangers of exploiting pop culture forms such as graffiti. Like Alan Siegel, many a marketing exec has been enticed by the vibrant street art, but the problem with an institution’s use of graffiti, as The New School case shows, is authenticity. Though Siegel & Gale Chief Creative Officer Howard Belk has emphasized that the graffiti “was painted, not Photoshopped,” that is not enough. Dissertations could be written on what makes an artform “authentic,” but most everyone would agree that corporate graffiti is not. Graffiti is almost always the critique of an establishment rather than the symbol of one. It is telling that one of the only unifying marks for graffiti artists is anarchy’s circled capital A.

While it may be true, as Belk went on to note, that “graffiti has been a medium for voices with alternative views,” any institutional attempt to harness that subversive quality is doomed. British advertisers Saatchi & Saatchi learned this lesson back in May, when they attempted to introduce a campaign via graffiti in London’s East End. Within days, The London Times reported, street artists hostile to the ad campaign had begun defacing it.

Elsewhere in London, however, is a different sort of lesson. While designing the Tate’s identity in 2000, the British firm Wolff Olins created an indentity that’s remarkably similar to The New School’s, with more successful results. Like Siegel & Gale, Wolff Olins was asked to create an identity that would unify several locations with different missions. They were also asked to create an identity that would empower museumgoers rather than the institution of the museum itself. The resulting identity is all about shifts of focus, as the logo’s design suggests. The name, “Tate,” is blurred and the specific locations are sharp, just as with The New School and its member colleges.

Interestingly, one of Parsons’s most direct competitors for students, the School of Visual Arts, also has a logo with a handmade feel. Created by SVA faculty member George Tscherny, it depicts a sun—a classic symbol of education—painted in fluid, Matisse-like brushstrokes by Tscherny himself. In so doing, the mark references both the hand of the creative artist and the tradition of the academic emblem.

Both the Tate and SVA succeed by avoiding the thorny language of graffiti, which is impossible for any institution to control. And both succeed in branding to their “customers” with big ideas rather than stylistic rationalizations. While it’s true that higher education is a business of youth, exuberance, and constant change, it’s hardly as fluid as fashion, which is seldom the same from one season to the next. Yet the Chanel logo, designed in 1925 by Coco Chanel herself, is only six years older than The New School, and it’s remained unchanged and in fashion ever since.

Diagnosis? In choosing their new logo, perhaps The New School should have asked for a little advice from its more fashionable alumni.

The version of this article that was published on 31 August 2005 by BusinessWeek.com is available here. © 2005 Rob Giampietro and Kevin Smith.