31 posts tagged with “branding

As a child of immigrant parents, I grew up learning English from watching PBS, Sesame Street, specifically. But there were other favorites like 3-2-1 Contact, The Electric Company, and of course, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. The logo, with its head looking like a P was seared into my developing brain.

So I’m incredibly saddened to hear that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-funded entity behind PBS and NPR, will cease operations on September 30, 2025, because of a recent bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Trump.

While PBS and NPR won’t disappear, it will be harder for those networks to stay afloat, now solely dependent on donations.

Lilly Smith, writing for Fast Company:

More than 70% of CPB’s annual federal appropriation goes directly to more than 1,500 local public media stations, according to a web page of its financials. This loss in funding could force local stations, especially in rural areas, to shut down, according to the CPB. Local member stations are independent and locally owned and operated, according to NPR. As a public-private partnership, local PBS stations get about 15% of their revenue from federal funding.

She reached out to Tom Geismar, who redesigned the PBS logo in 1984—the original was by Herb Lubalin and Ernie Smith in 1971. He had this perspective:

There is an ironic tie-in between the government decision to cut off all funding to public television and public radio, and what prompted the redesign of the PBS logo back in the early 1980s.

That was also a difficult time, financially, for the Public Broadcasting Service, and especially the stations in more remote regions of the country. Much of the public equated PBS with the major television networks CBS, NBC and ABC, and presumed that, like those major institutions, PBS was the parent of and significant funder for all the local public television stations throughout the country. But, in fact, the reality is somewhat the opposite. Although PBS local affiliates received a portion of funding from the federal government, it is the individual stations that have the responsibility to do public fund raising, and PBS, in a sense, works for them.

Because of this confusion, the PBS leadership felt that their existing logo (a famous design by by Herb Lubalin) needed to be more than just the classic 3-initials mark, something more evocative of a public-benefit system serving all people. Thus the “everyone” mark was born.

Geismar ends with, “And now, once again, with federal government funding stopped, it is the stations in the less populous regions who will suffer the most.”

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The designer behind the iconic 'everyman' PBS logo sees the irony in its demise

Tom Geismar designed the logo to represent the everyman. Now, he says, it’s those people who will suffer the most from the loss of public broadcast services.

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This is gorgeous work from Collins in their rebrand for Muse Group, developers of music apps like Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, Audacity, and MuseClass. Paul Moore, writing in It’s Nice That:

One of the issues, [chief creative officer] Nick [Ace] argues, in the design industry is a fixation on branding tech as “software from the future”, relying on literal representations from the 1980s that have created dull and homogeneous visuals that shy away from the timelessness of creativity. “Instead of showcasing technical specs or outlandish interfaces, we centered the brand around the raw experience of musical creation, itself,” says Nick. “Rather than depicting the tools, we visualized the outcomes—the resonance, the harmony, the creative breakthrough that happens when technical barriers disappear.”

Collins rebrand for Muse Group channels the invisible phenomena of experiencing music

Geometric abstraction, dynamic compositions and a distillation of musical feeling sets Collins new project apart from other software brands.

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Close-up of bicentennial logo storyboard frames featuring red, white, and blue geometric patterns and star designs in rounded rectangles.

America at 200

When I was younger, I had a sheet of US Bicentennial stamps and I always loved the red, white, and blue star. Little did I know then that I would become a graphic designer.

Sheet of US postage stamps featuring the bicentennial star logo, each stamp showing "AMERICAN REVOLUTION BICENTENNIAL 1776-1976" with 8-cent denomination.

The symbol, designed by Bruce Blackburn at Chermayeff & Geismar is a multilayered stylized five-pointed star. It folds like bunting. Its rounded corners evoke both a flower and a pinwheel at the same time. And finally, the negative space reveals a classic, pointed star.

Official American Revolution Bicentennial logo - red and blue interlocking star design with "AMERICAN REVOLUTION BICENTENNIAL 1776-1976" text in circular border.
Are Logos Becoming Irrelevant in Modern Branding?

Are Logos Becoming Irrelevant in Modern Branding?

Logos are no longer the sole defining element of a brand, as dynamic branding, AI personalization, and social media dominance challenge their relevance. While still valuable as anchors of identity, logos must evolve into adaptable, integrated tools to thrive in today’s fluid and experience-driven branding landscape.

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Vibrant artistic composition featuring diverse models in striking, colorful fashion. The central figure is dressed in an elaborate orange-red gown, surrounded by models in bold outfits of pink, red, yellow, and orange tones. The background transitions between shades of orange and pink, with the word ‘JAGUAR’ displayed prominently in the center.

A Jaguar Meow

The British automaker Jaguar unveiled its rebrand last week, its first step at relaunching the brand as an all-EV carmaker. Much ink has been spilled about the effort already, primarily negative, regarding the toy-like logotype in design circles and the bizarre film in the general town square.

Jaguar’s new brand film

Interestingly, Brand New, the preeminent brand design website, hasn’t weighed in yet. It has decided to wait until after December 2, when Jaguar will unveil the first “physical manifestation of its Exuberant Modernism creative philosophy, in a Design Vision Concept” at Miami Art Week. (Update: Brand New has weighed in with a review of the rebrand. My commentary on it is below.)

There have been some contrarian views, too, decrying the outrage by brand experts. In Print Magazine, Saul Colt writes:

Griffin AI logo

How I Built and Launched an AI-Powered App

I’ve always been a maker at heart—someone who loves to bring ideas to life. When AI exploded, I saw a chance to create something new and meaningful for solo designers. But making Griffin AI was only half the battle…

Birth of an Idea

About a year ago, a few months after GPT-4 was released and took the world by storm, I worked on several AI features at Convex. One was a straightforward email drafting feature but with a twist. We incorporated details we knew about the sender—such as their role and offering—and the email recipient, as well as their role plus info about their company’s industry. To accomplish this, I combined some prompt engineering and data from our data providers, shaping the responses we got from GPT-4.

Playing with this new technology was incredibly fun and eye-opening. And that gave me an idea. Foundational large language models (LLMs) aren’t great yet for factual data retrieval and analysis. But they’re pretty decent at creativity. No, GPT, Claude, or Gemini couldn’t write an Oscar-winning screenplay or win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, but it’s not bad for starter ideas that are good enough for specific use cases. Hold that thought.

What is brand strategy and why is it so powerful

What Is Brand Strategy and Why Is It So Powerful

Let me tell you a story…

Imagine a smoky wood-paneled conference room. Five men in smart suits sit around a table with a slide projector in the middle. Atop the machine is a finned plastic container that looks like a donut or a bundt cake. A sixth man is standing and begins a pitch.

Technology is a glittering lure, but there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on the level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.
My first job, I was in-house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter—Greek named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is “new.” Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.
But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product. Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.

Courtesy of Lions Gate Entertainment, Inc.

Why is brand strategy important

Why Is Brand Strategy Important

Designing since 1985

I’ve been a designer for as long as I can remember. I usually like to say that I started in the seventh grade, after being tenacious enough to badger my father into buying my first Macintosh computer and then spending hours noodling in MacPaint and MacDraw. Pixel by pixel, I painstakingly drew Christopher Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria, for a book report cover. I observed the lines of the parabolic exterior of Saint Mary’s Cathedral, known colloquially in San Francisco as “the washing machine,” and replicated them in MacDraw. Of course, that’s not design, but that was the start of my use of the computer to make visuals that communicate. Needless to say, I didn’t know what brand strategy even was, or why it’s important, but we’ll get there.

Pixel art of a woman in traditional attire drawn on an early computer program called MacPaint.

Screenshot of MacPaint (1984)

Marvel’s Comic Book Logos Break All the Design Rules, But That’s Part of Their Charm

Marvel’s Comic Book Logos Break All the Design Rules, But That’s Part of Their Charm

My attraction to graphic design started with comic books covers. Like a lot of artistic comic nerds, my pre-teen friends and I would painstakingly redraw our favorite panels from Iron Man; while they drew characters and scenes, I was the guy drawing Iron Man’s shiny, machined logo—rivets and all. I

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IBM Perfected the Art of the Anti-corporate Corporate Poster

IBM Perfected the Art of the Anti-corporate Corporate Poster

During the mid-twentieth century, perhaps no other American company exemplified technological achievement, business acumen, and good design better than IBM. Major advancements in data processing and mainframe computing brought forth an unprecedented investment in R&D within the company that prov

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Celebrating the legacy of Kamekura Yusaku’s iconic Tokyo 1964 Olympics identity

Celebrating the legacy of Kamekura Yusaku’s iconic Tokyo 1964 Olympics identity

The 1964 Summer Games were seminal in cementing Japan’s post-war identity and the design of everything from pictograms to posters to uniforms – a modernist vision championed by Kamekura – played a massive role in making such a remarkable event.

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Neville Brody on Navigating the Shifting Identity of Graphic Design

Neville Brody on Navigating the Shifting Identity of Graphic Design

Neville Brody is a journalist’s dream. He has a well-honed knack for wryly provocative, headline-ready  takes on the design industry that others would take hours to delineate.  As one of the best-known graphic designer since the 1980s, he's adept at this sort of thing. Even those who haven’t heard h

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Joe Biden’s Branding Was Both Traditional and Trippy, and It Looks Like the Future of Politics

Joe Biden’s Branding Was Both Traditional and Trippy, and It Looks Like the Future of Politics

When Democrat Jon Ossoff’s U.S. Senate race in Georgia was forced into a runoff, his campaign changed up its social media strategy. Throughout the campaign, Ossoff’s Instagram account posted screenshots of his tweets set against a dark navy background, but a few weeks after Election Day, the screens

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Photo of the Hall H stage at Comic-Con

What Comic-Con Teaches Us about Design and Branding

We communicate in stories. Storytelling has been around as long as our species has existed. From paintings on cave walls in Lascaux, to hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt, to radio dramas like “War of the Worlds” that cause city-wide panic, to the fantastical Game of Thrones television series on HBO, stories impart culture, history, information, and ideas. Stories are primal so we are receptive to them, and we remember them.

Today when we think of storytelling, we think of our modern day’s Golden Age of Television or the Marvel Cinematic Universe (“MCU”) movies. Comic-Con in San Diego is the Mecca of pop culture storytelling, and this year brought an estimated 135,000 fans from over 80 countries. Attendees packed over 2,000 panels and screenings and lined up for more than 250 autograph events from their favorite actors, writers, and artists. Fans lined up for hours, often overnight, for a chance to get into the infamous 6,500-seat Hall H where they were able to get a glimpse of their favorite star talking about their latest film or TV project. Many came to the con dressed as their favorite characters, often constructing their own elaborate costumes. That is fandom, otherwise known as brand loyalty.

What lessons for design and branding can we learn from Comic-Con and its pilgrimage of rabid fans? Storytelling has power, and design is storytelling.

In this article we’ll take the primary elements of storytelling and apply them to design, namely branding, marketing, and product design: