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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘modernism’
13.02.2020

Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons
On Andrew Yang’s run for the Democratic nomination in the US:
If Mastodon ever stops supporting that Javascript, I wrote: ‘Pretty stoked at what Andrew Yang has managed to achieve. Certain forces tried to minimize his coverage, to give him as little legitimacy as possible (sounds familiar). Yet he also normalized the idea of an Asian American presidential candidate, paving the way either for himself in 2024 or for someone else. #YangGang’. Those forces include some of the Democratic activist media.
It’s a damned shame. Yang didn’t vilify Republicans, listened to both sides, and was a pragmatist with solutions. Granted, there were areas his policies fell short, but at least he presented the optimistic side of American politics, something so rarely seen in what we outsiders perceive to be such a negative, murky world. Now Americans (and those of us watching from without) will likely face a shouting-match campaign.
And found on the web: a cellphone with a rotary dial that its creator, Justine Haupt, claims is more practical for her, and where calling is faster than with her modern phone. No apps, no SMS, but if you’re after something to call people, it does the job admirably. Her frequently dialled numbers are stored, so it’s only new numbers where she has to dial. The dial also serves as a volume control. Since I’m getting sick of apps, and I can’t be alone, Haupt may be on to something.
In her words: ‘A truly usable rotary-dial cellphone to replace my flip phone (I don’t use a smart phone). This is a statement against a world of touchscreens, hyperconnectivity, and complacency with big brother watchdogs.’
Tags: 2020, Andrew Yang, cellphone, design, innovation, invention, mainstream media, media, modernism, politics, privacy, racism, simplicity, technology, USA, YangGang Posted in design, politics, technology, USA | No Comments »
29.05.2014
The below ran in Lucire today, though it is equally suited to the readers of this blog.

RIT
Massimo Vignelli, who passed away on May 27, was a hero of mine. When receiving the news shortly before it hit the media in a big way, from our mutual friend Stanley Moss, this titleâs travel editor and CEO of the Medinge Group, I posted immediately on Facebook: âIt is a sad duty to note the passing of Massimo Vignelli, one of my heroes in graphic design. When I was starting out in the business, Massimo was one of the greats: a proponent of modernism and simple, sharp typography. His influence is apparent in a lot of the work done by our brand consultancy and in our magazines, even in my 2013 mayoral campaign graphics. A lot of his work from half a century ago has stood the test of time. There was only one degree of separation between us, and I regret that we never connected during his lifetime. The passing of a legend.â
This Facebook status only scratches the surface of my admiration for Vignelli. There have been more comprehensive obits already (Fast Company Design rightly called him ‘one of the greatest 20th century designers’), detailing his work notably for the New York subway map, andâcuriously to meâglossing over the effect he had on corporate design, especially in the US.
Vignelli, and his wife Lella, a designer in her own right and a qualified architect, set up the Vignelli Office of Design and Architecture in Milano in 1960, which had clients including Pirelli and Olivetti. In 1965, they moved to New York and Vignelli co-founded Unimark International (with Ralph Eckerstrom, James Fogelman, Wally Gutches, Larry Klein, and Bob Noorda), where he was design director. It was the worldâs largest design and marketing firm till its closure in 1977.
The 1960s were a great time for Vignelli and his corporate identities. He worked on American Airlines, Ford, Knoll, and J. C. Penney, and the work was strictly modernist, often employing Helvetica as the typeface family. Vignelli was known to have stuck with six families for most his workâBodoni was another, a type family based around geometry that, on the surface, tied in to his modernist, logical approach. However, there were underlying reasons, including his belief that Helvetica had an ideal ratio between upper- and lowercase letters, with short ascenders and descenders, lending itself to what he considered classic proportions. The 1989 WTC Our Bodoni, created under Vignelliâs direction by Tom Carnase and commissioned by Bert di Pamphilis, adheres to the same proportions.
Although my own typeface design background means that I could not adhere to six, there is something to be said for employing a logical approach to design. American corporate design went through a âcleaning upâ in the 1960s, with a brighter, bolder sensibility. Detractors might accuse it of being stark, the Helveticization of American design making things too standard. Yet through the 1970s the influence remained, and to my young eyes that decade, this was how professional design should look, contrary to the low-budget work plaguing newspapers and books that I saw as I arrived in the occident.
When the Vignellis left Unimark to set up Vignelli Associates in 1971 (and later Vignelli Designs in 1978), their stamp remained. The MTA launched Vignelliâs subway map the following year, and like the London Underground map by Harry Beck in 1931, it ignored what was above ground in favour of a logical diagram with the stops. Beck was a technical draftsman and the approach must have found favour with Vignelli, just as it did with those creating maps for the Paris MĂ©tropolitain and the Berlin U-bahn.
New Yorkers didnât take to the Vignelli map as well as Londoners and Parisians, and it was replaced in 1979 with one that was more geographically accurate to what was above ground.
In 1973, Vignelli worked on the identity for Bloomingdaleâs, and his work endures: the Big Brown Bag is his work, and it continues to be used by the chain today. Cinzano, Lancia and others continue with Vignelliâs designs.
Ironically, despite a rejection of fashion in favour of timelessness, some of the work is identified with the 1960s and 1970s, notably thanks to the original cut of Helvetica, which has only recently been revived (a more modern cut is commonplace), and which is slightly less popular today. Others, benefiting from more modern layout programs and photography, look current to 2010s eyes, such as Vignelli Associatesâ work for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
The approach taken by Lucire in its print editions has a sense of modernism that has a direct Vignelli influence, including the use of related typeface families since we went to retail print editions in 2004. Our logotype itself, dating from 1997, has the sort of simplicity that I believe Vignelli would have approved of.
Vignelli was, fortunately, fĂȘted during his lifetime. He received the Compasso dâOro from ADI twice (1964 and 1998), the AIGA Gold Medal (1983), the Presidential Design Award (1985), the Honorary Royal Designer for Industry Award from the Royal Society of Arts (1996), the National Lifetime Achievement Award from the CooperâHewitt National Museum of Design (2003), among many. He holds honorary doctorates from seven institutions, including the Rochester Institute of Technology (2002). Rochester has a Vignelli Center for Design Studies, whose website adheres to his design principles and where educational programmes espouse his modernist approach. It also houses the Vignellisâ professional archive.
He is survived by his wife, Lella, who continues to work as CEO of Vignelli Associates and president of Vignelli Designs; their son, Luca, their daughter, Valentina Vignelli Zimmer, and three grandchildren.
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, American Airlines, Bloomingdaleâs, Bodoni, branding, Cinzano, corporate identity, education, fashion, Ford, graphic design, Helvetica, history, Italy, J. C. Penney, Knoll, Lancia, legend, Lucire, Massimo Vignelli, Medinge Group, Metropolitan Transit Authority, Milano, modernism, New York, NY, retail, RIT, Rochester, Stanley Moss, Tom Carnase, typeface, typeface design, typography, USA, Vignelli Associates, WTC Posted in branding, business, design, marketing, typography, USA | No Comments »
07.11.2013
The below was written on the 4th inst., the morning of the release of Absolutely Positively Wellington’s “plus sign” logo, and ran on Scoop, where I am told it is one of the most liked for the Wellington section. As it is to do with branding, I have republished it in full here. (The parody image was done separately.)
As I learned of the story first through a story by Katie Chapman in The Dominion Post, out of courtesy, I sent the below to her initially, some hours before Scoop, where it was picked up as an opâed. As the only mayoral candidate with a master’s degree in the area, and as an author, and as an editorial board member on the Journal of Brand Management, I might be one of the better qualified people to discuss the topic. I might also have been the first to write about destination branding as a discipline in this country. A city rebrand was also among the topics I discussed regularly during the debating season during the 2013 campaign, and I first raised it at The Dominion PostâMassey University debate in September. (It turns out I also blogged about it in 2010.)
Let’s just say it was a topic that concerned meâas well as many other Wellingtonians, including councillors who began digging and found out the plus sign cost us NZ$25,000. So on Monday morning, I put pen to paper (figuratively). Other than Scoopâs publication, I was interviewed on Newstalk ZB about my thoughts.
Incidentally, Edinburgh has a particularly good destination brand for a capital city.
Iâm fairly certain that when Wellingtonians identified that our city needed a new brand, the one shown today in The Dominion Post isnât what they had in mind.
It doesnât matter whether you are branding for a company or a city, the biggest rule is: get your internal audience on side first.
In the case of a city, that internal audience is the people of Wellington.
And there seems to be less excuse for not engaging citizens in the age of social media.
Of course, if everyone were engaged, then the status quo tends to be preserved. People tend not to like change, even when they say they want change. However, the logic is that at least the cityâs opinion leaders must be involved in a rebranding process.
Maybe they were. Although if they were, it doesnât come through.
First up, as I said in my election campaign, this is a 22-year-old brand.
Today, it remains so.
It may have had touch-ups over the years, mostly typographicallyâmoving from typefaces like Perpetua and Baskerville under Mayors Wilde and Blumsky to an italicized FF Fago under Mayor Prendergast. But it reflects the aspirations of Wellington in 1991. What we saw today was the same brand, but a new logo. It comes across as a cosmetic alteration, applying lipstick to the bulldog.
Arguably, grouping the wording together into a single place is preferable to having it divided into three, with black and white bands. It would not be wrong to call the logo more âmodernâ in the formal sense of the word: it is reflective of modernism.
Ăsthetics will always be subjective, but there is a school of thought that a logo that can be easily replicated is a positive development. A plus sign is easily replicated, but then, thereâs the second rule of branding: differentiate.
The purpose of branding is to symbolize, differentiate and communicate.
The logo is original: while there are many with pluses (Google Plus, or our Plus One channels on Freeview), I canât think of any that are executed in this exact way with this colour scheme. But you get an underwhelming feeling since weâre the creative capital. A few more pluses would convey dynamism (although that has been done before, too)âas long as we stick with getting Wellingtonians on side first.
The brand itselfâAbsolutely Positively Wellingtonâdoesnât take into consideration those sectors that did not exist in Wellington in a major way, notably ICT. Maintaining it tells me that itâs more of the same. That message is backed up by the abolition of the portfolio within council.
It doesnât take into consideration the thoughts of any of our young people, who will be burdened with this as the cityâs brand in years to come. Those in their 20s might feel a familiarity with the term âAbsolutely Positively Wellingtonâ, but also a disconnect. They werenât consulted on where they see Wellington or what they aspire us to be.
The logo, therefore, reinforces the old brand. Comments on social media this morning highlight that: at the time of writing, I have yet to see a positive one.
They range from not knowing what the logo means to thoughts that it would be better applied to a church [one example shown at right].
That brings us to the third rule: tell the internal audience what it stands for before rolling it out to an external audience.
Yet this is all shrouded in mystery today.
Another point of interest is the logoâs removal from parking tickets. Itâs going to be reeled back from being a city brand to one that is applied in more formal marketing efforts. We go from the enviable position of having a city brand to a mere destination brand.
There is a subtle difference. A city brand is meant to unite the city, giving everyone who lives here a sense of pride. A destination brand is one aimed at marketing, the province of business and tourism agencies.
However, Iâd still like to see us all âownâ it because modern marketing sees citizens participate as much as organizations.
While I accept that thereâs a Resene deal that sees citizens being able to adopt the yellow ourselvesâwhich on paper is a fine ideaâwill the lack of earlier engagement encourage us to take it up?
So in the branding 101 handbook, there have been mistakes.
On the plus side, pun intended, Iâd be happier to see the yellow box in movie credits and on letterheads than its black-and-white predecessor. That was certainly unworkable in destination marketing and lacked appeal for years. One might say it has never had appeal.
Regardless of how negatively the Stuff reader poll puts the new logo, itâs not as bad as the Wellywood sign proposal.
I hope for our cityâs sake this works out and that stage two of the roll-outâwhere itâs sold to the rest of usâis far more convincing.
Tags: Aotearoa, branding, design, destination branding, Jack Yan, logo, media, modernism, New Zealand, rebranding, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in branding, business, design, marketing, New Zealand, Wellington | No Comments »
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