Brand identity is too often treated as a police manual: approved logo, approved colors, approved layouts, end of story.
In an excerpt from Taschen’s The Elements of Brand Design in It’s Nice That, the book’s authors Katharina Sussek and Jens Müller trace the longer history of modern brand design, from color and trademarks to systems that coordinate products, buildings, typography, and media:
An important impetus in design history thus emerged with the approach of the Italian typewriter manufacturer Olivetti. In the early 1930s, Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960), the son of the company founder, established the principle of working with not just the best engineers but also the most innovative architects and product and graphic designers in Europe.
Out of the totality of its designs a unique corporate identity developed over several decades, one that did not come about through following norms but through an expansive understanding of design. In the mid 1950s, IBM would follow a similar approach. The American company found itself smack in the middle of transforming from a typewriter manufacturer into a world-leading computer supplier. The architect and industrial designer Eliot Noyes (1910-1977) was appointed as the consulting director of design. In developing a holistic corporate image for IBM, he gave contracts for projects to the leading figures of mid-century design, including Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen. As the graphic designer, he hired Paul Rand (1914–1996), who started by overhauling the logo and moved on to developing a comprehensive identity based on a set of guidelines for use across all media applications of the company – from the printed matter to the labels on the machines.
That’s the part of brand strategy that gets flattened when identity systems become enforcement instead of expression. Consistency matters, but Sussek and Müller are pointing at something bigger: a company making its values visible across everything it touches.
They cite a 1967 corporate-identity text:
An idea that bubbled up in many places simultaneously at the end of the 1950s was the concept of a coordinated design, or a house style, as it was initially often still called in the literature of the time, before terms like corporate design or brand identity caught on. In the book Design Coordination and Corporate Image, which in 1967 was one of the first reference texts on the subject, a new understanding of the systematic approach to the standardisation of design was described using examples from the United States, Japan and many European countries. In their introductory text, the two authors, FHK Henrion and Alan Parkin, developed a remarkably prescient vision of modern brand design: “There is a tendency to regard a house style as a static, once-and-for-all set of rules. But market situations and corporations themselves change continually; and these changes should be expressed visually,” [it says in the book.]
In reality, though, most of the corporate design systems of the 1960s were extremely rigid due to analogue production processes. Standardised layouts were at the time seen as an important guiding element for a brand. Usually once the position and size of the logo was fixed in each medium this did not change. This indeed created a high level of visual congruity, but it did not necessarily lead to a dynamic perception of the company. Furthermore, the designers who had the task of implementing the designs across various media found that these too stringent rules often got in the way of good graphic solutions. By the 1970s, establishments from outside the commercial world also discovered the merits of a consistent visual appearance. Cultural institutions like museums, libraries and music festivals were especially fertile ground for highly creative solutions which had the advantages of a high recognition factor combined with a distinctive graphic signature. What initially developed in the Netherlands was known as ‘public design’, which placed a focus on functional solutions accessible to the general public.
That tension still feels familiar. A good system gives teams a shared language without confusing the manual for the work.
The trap is that the guide becomes a substitute for judgment. You can follow the rules and still make something that feels dead, because the rules only preserve decisions someone else already made. The next application still asks for taste.
Later, the authors make the AI connection directly:
In recent years, with the wide availability of artificial intelligence, another phase of the digital age has begun. For visual identities this has opened up a multitude of new playing fields. Examples shown here give an impression of how brands use these fresh possibilities – whether to achieve a new dimension of modularity or as a highly effective tool for creating solutions in line with the brand. At the same time, design as a profession has been challenged yet again, along the lines of ‘Can’t we just use AI instead?’. A look at the work collected in this book proves, however, that the development and redesign of brands, regardless of size, demands conceptual individuality and artistic originality. In the age of AI, these are two capabilities of designers that will become even more important, not less.
