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.
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:
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.
Screenshot of MacPaint (1984)
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
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.
Yesterday the design and advertising community was abuzz over the leaked presentation deck (PDF) for the new Pepsi logo by the Arnell Group. Yes it is absolutely a work of pure horseshit. But, I was reminded of the decks that my colleagues and I create every day and how somebody’s horseshit may be someone else’s chocolate cake.
We all have to sell our work. Ideally the concepts and ideas come from a well-formed strategy, but that doesn’t always happen. Many times the strategy must back into the creative. In other words sometimes you might have a great idea that you’ll need to justify after the fact.
