WGBH Radio; The Callie Crossley Show

Welcome to innovation hub. I'm Karen Miller. So how do companies shape and reshape your perception of them. Sometimes it's through sound a mandate is what it really is. But increasingly as we migrate from TVs to other screens logos have a growing power to shape our view of companies. And as that influence grows. Art becomes key to business and that art though you may not realize it probably affects you every day. Think about all the logos that you can identify even without the name of the company to help you. Apple perhaps or Nike Starbucks Playboy Mercedes but as the economy changes logos are also undergoing a radical shift to talk about that shift. I'm joined now by two experts on the topic Michael McPhearson creative director and Andrea DAF partner. They're both at Corey MacPherson Nash and national branding and design firm Michael

McPhearson Andrea nad DAF Thanks for being here. Thank you thank you. So let's start with a logo that most people see every single day in fact some people visit the stores every single day. Starbucks we all know it. And what has been happening to the Starbucks logo and why. Well the biggest news with the Starbucks logo is it dropped its name. So when they re vivified the logo in the brand the big news was they dropped the name Starbucks. They redesigned the mermaid also called the siren to be much more modern and clean and kind of coming out of the circle. So she's more simple and breaking through boundaries to explain and her Starbucks into more products and services rather than just coffee. OK so first of all why drop the name Starbucks I don't know how many people listening are thinking about whether they have seen the word Starbucks

actually used on their coffee cups on the stores. But why drop the name and just keep the mermaid. Well it's very interesting because if you just step back and look at what's been going on with the design of logos in the past 12 to 18 months Twitter redesigned its logo dropped the name what we call the double typeface drop the T in just redesign the bird to be much more simple. Domino's Pizza redesigned drop the pizza. Oftentimes what this means is it's a call that we are simplifying paring down but also entering new markets and we want you to think of us in the way that you think of us but we also want you to extend that equity into other areas. And where is Starbucks trying to expand its brand beyond coffee. Well for a very very long time and this is just the DNA in the ethos of the brand and the spirit and Howard Schultz its coffee its It was music its ice cream its concept stores for liquor spirits beer. Its

going all green in its environment they clearly want to have their passionate consumer not only drink their coffee but live in experience their brand online on land through a mobile phone in a physical environment. Michael McPhearson This is fascinating that companies are dropping their names and I'm actually going to play you a commercial here this is a bit of a 2012 Nike commercial and Nike was really on the vanguard here this is a commercial about female athletes and importantly in this entire commercial it never mentions or displays the word Nike. The only thing you get is the swoosh. Let's listen. When I was growing up girls just didn't run in public. Now one of my all boys team would pass to me. Dad told me it couldn't be a boxer. He said I was too small. There was a guy who tried to spit on me and then pushed me out of his way. There comes a point where you have to be sure of yourself. People aren't used to women being so passionate scares them.

One day I just said it doesn't matter what other people think I'm a fashion model who can dunk. I'm a girl. That doesn't mean I have to wear a skirt doesn't mean I can't get all fired up. They say that girl is crazy. But then I just kept winning. Michael McPhearson what happened with Nike and what's the trend here. Well I think the trend is only allowed by a company that has been promoting their brand for 15 or 20 years. They've achieved such enormous equity not only in terms of the visual you know the swoosh and the name but also in terms of the just do it. It's what we call our ruggedness brand it's a brand that defines itself around toughness around and Durrance around persistence around tenacity. And what's the advantage for Nike of getting rid of the n i k e is it a coolness factor. What are they doing there and getting rid of that name. I think it is a coolness factor I think it is a. Were so famous

were so iconic. We don't really need our name. There was also sort of a Nike oversaturation with the swoosh and the name for a while they actually withdrew the swoosh from circulation in order to promote themselves and brand themselves in other ways. Interesting. I wonder too how does Nike becoming an international company and you could say the same thing about Starbucks. How does that factor in here. Is there an advantage to not having to translate a word. Nike is originally a Greek word that means victory. But I think the shape of the word is one of the most recognizable features. There was a study actually several years ago when they were doing science for airports they found that instead of using universal symbols for for example men and women they was more recognizable to see the word shape. To even though people didn't know what the meaning was just the abstract form

was more universally recognizable than the particular shape which varies from culture to culture. Interesting Michael McPhearson. Let's talk about a brand that not just is. Maybe setting the standard for how you brand but is also affecting other brands. That's that's Apple. And I got a little bit of her iPhone commercial for the iPhone 5 which never mentions or displays the word apple. The only thing you get is the apple with the bite out of it that so many people know right at the end so let's listen to that commercial. There are laws of physics right. So explain this. How can something get bigger and smaller. There's more of that and less of that. Well I guess the laws of physics are more like general guidelines.

Michael makes you understand when you look at the way that Apple brands their products. What do you think of that. Well Apple it's almost set a standard that is unachievable I can't tell you how many meetings have started out by people saying when they wanted to redesign their website or redesign their logo or redesign their look and feel of their materials that they wanted it to be modeled on Apple. And I think it really comes down to simplicity. Apple has done a masterful job of taking away taking away taking away paring down. Until what's left is just simple elegance. It will be extremely interesting to see how sustainable that is without the fiery vision of Steve Jobs basically being the design director as well as the marketer and visionary behind Apple. It's interesting though because they put out these products many of which don't have the word apple

on them. It's just nowhere to be found. And yet everybody knows that what that person is holding is an iphone is an i-Pad. What's the effect of everybody using iPhones and iPods are many people increasingly using mobile devices to access brands how does that change how you as a designer of a logo design a logo. Well for one thing you know I used to be standard for designing logos that had to be really look good in black and white because you were imagining the worst case scenario or it was coming through a fax machine remember those. Or is it in your paper. Right right. So the fact that you have this enormous color palette you have an enormous subtle palette of gradation that's available to you. You have the ability to overlap colors. You no longer are restricted by the black and white world of print. It has huge huge impact on design. The other thing that has really been enormously important is the

tools that are available to designers. You used to never see shapes that required enormous modeling through 3-D. And nowadays a lot of the new logos that are coming out are you know the you have the shape of a pretzel or you have the shape of a sphere with chunks cut out of it or you have this potato chip shape or more of the strip. That's all very doable with 3D modeling software. And that used to be. And you know create insurmountable problems for somebody working with a bottle of ink and a straight edge. So give me an example of a logo that somebody might see today that probably would not have been what it is were the logo designers still designing for the fax machine and the newspaper. Well I mean I think the Apple logo itself the way you usually see it is with this sort of glossy bulbous glow to it as if it's made out of some kind of combination of water and plastic where it reflects light

the way a grade-A it's from light to dark. That's pretty much impossible 20 years ago or even 10 years ago. I mean the simplest app on your iPhone or on your smartphone is pretty much unattainable five years ago. And I should say it's amazing how popular logos are. There's actually a really popular iPhone app that people use to test how well they know logos. And it's caught on both with kids and adults. And we're going to put a version of that logo quiz at our website WGBH dot org slash innovation hub and you can see how well you can identify and logos without any words or letters attached to them. But Andrea DAF Let's talk about a logo that bombed the gap in 2010 they thought forget this old one thousand nine hundred six logo. We're going to redesign this thing. And what happened.

The crowdsourcing of the logo. So it's very interesting and I would be remiss in our profession if we didn't talk about. A logo is not just a logo it's so much more so brand is both the physical and the mental the physical part is the logo in the color and the mental is the what I think of when I think of. So what Gap did was they pooled their audience of consumers all over and crowdsourced the logo and got the logo that got the highest accolade and got rid of their iconic blue and their old type face and went to black. And I believe it was a Helvetica type face so it lost all its personality and it came out as a disaster. And then the founder had to come out and do a major culpa completely the other way that the new Starbucks logo was reintroduced. So I think the other point about that is that.

A redesign has to be based in strategy. It can't be based in subjective reaction. It has to be based in business strategy and rationale and product development. And you see that with Coca-Cola people fall in love with tradition. There has to be very often some carryover right from the way things used to be. Absolutely. That's the legacy part. People don't like change. You hear that all the time with redesigns even you know a lot of us are privy to the strategy behind a redesign. But people often don't like change they get very custom to what they see in their nostalgia behind it. There's also the issue of changing for the sake of change. I mean I think one of my proudest moments as a designer is talking HBO out of redesigning their logo. They hired us to do a sort of a brand analysis. They had a new marketing person in there that really wanted to make his mark so to speak and wanted to look at redesigning the logo and. They then make a case for it they just seem to

want to do it. So I think one of our jobs is to save our clients from themselves sometimes and and what we did was actually insist that they use it more and more consistently and really brand themselves around their logo more than they had been doing. That's interesting so one of your jobs is a creative firm and sometimes they say no no change is called for here right. That's right. So speaking of television stations I know you have looked at Nickelodeon and how Mikell Odeon changed its logo. Why did they do that. What do you think of it. Well I think they're very smart people there and I'm sure they had a good strategy. I mean when we originally designed the Nickelodeon logo we you know it played off of the idea behind the MTV logo where you really use the logo as one of your marketing characters. You create some personality around it. No one had really heard of Nickelodeon at the time so we picked bright orange because no other television network was using it and it fit the idea of creating a network that was

actually for kids I think is Nickelodeon has grown and become larger and tried to scale into all sorts of different industries using a love that had a flexible shape. The rule around the Nickelodeon logo was that the type always stayed the same the color always stayed the same but the outside shape of it could vary and play. They got I think tired of managing that particular system and they took sort of some elements of the logo and just basically the orange color and decided this is it this is our logo and we'll be creative in other ways. But it also seems like what we were talking about with Starbucks where they didn't want to feel trapped by their logo into being just a kids network like they once were. Right now they're a place where you see reruns of all sorts of classic TV shows. So they became adult in some ways. Yeah that's right they spent a lot of time and we worked with them on a number of initiatives to try to segment their brand into different areas into games and

sports. We create a whole brand around tweens that never went anywhere. We created Nick Jr. which was a very successful and we created nick at nite TV Land was a spin off of Nick at Nite So there was a lot of. How do we take the same content and reshape it for different audiences without investing a lot of money and look forward for us. What do you see increasingly happening with logos as firms become international as social media takes over all the sort of forces that we've been talking about as people increasingly look at things on screens not on paper. What do you see happening. Well I think it's two sides of the same coin on one hand there's diligent focus on being simplified. So it can translate cross meatier cross culture cross platform super attention to color. But on the other hand it requires much more sophisticated thinking and complexity around thinking about how the logo is going to be executed and applied and

what is the part of my visual vocabulary that's going to live on it. Up in a physical environment on a video as a bug. So it's simple but yet it's complicated. You have to make sure that simplicity like Nike and Apple is exactly what you want and delivers on the experience you wanted to deliver. We've been talking about Logos and how they respond to changes in the economy. And I've been speaking with Michael McPhearson creative director and Andrea DAF partner both at Corey MacPherson Nash a national branding and design firm. Thanks very much to both of you for being here. And coming up next lies a Monday investigates America's shifting gender dynamic. I interviewed some young women lawyers in Texas who were going out on the town in San Antonio one summer and after a couple of nights of telling guys they were lawyers and finding that the guys became sort of argumentative and wanted to talk about politics they decided they would just say they were cosmetologists.

We will talk to allies on Monday about a future that looks increasingly female. Remember that you can subscribe to our podcast at WGBH dot org slash innovation hub and you can follow us on Twitter at WGBH innovate. I'm Karen Miller and this is innovation.