Melbourne Rebrand

The Australian city of Melbourne was recently rebranded by Landor, a global design and branding studio with over 700 designers in 23 offices all over the world. The new ‘M’ logo replaces the leaf logo which had been in use for the past fifteen years. the city’s mayor Robert Doyle says ‘the new design will become an icon for melbourne, synonymous with the modern, vibrant, cool city melbourne is today and will continue to be in the future.’

the new design hopes to achieve better identification of services the city of melbourne is delivering, greater brand impact and flexibility, more cost and time-effective in-house design and brand management.
‘it was deemed necessary to rebrand when an extensive audit and review revealed the ‘leaf’ logo to be outdated. after 15 years this was understandable. the creation of one strong masterbrand is an opportunity to build a new identity that resonates with our staff, our community, our customers and for the city of melbourne as an local, national and international destination. looking at other cities such as london or new york you see the strength of their single brand.’

I can understand why Melbourne determined it required a rebrand after 15 years. The “leaf” is very outdated, much like the “W” logo for Wrexham and I can see this logo being used for the considerable future. I like the idea that the colours can be changed to represent different areas of Melbourne, almost creating a “Master” brand of which all subsequent branding in Melbourne follow. The logo is modern, exciting and works well in many different colour schemes. The one thing I dislike about this brand though is the typeface, something about it just doesn’t seem to fit in my opinion. But overall this is a good brand that is easily applied to most if not all required applications.

Nike Supercruise

One of my Negotiated Studies projects was to design a brand of superior quality american football equipment for Nike.
I designed the brand “Supercruise” based on the premise of superior quality equipment allows the wearer/athlete to stay cool and composed while allowing them to push harder and go faster than anyone else of the field.

I believe the brand is a very strong visual brand with the crest and orange strip around the shoe and eyeshield boxes really helps the packaging to stand out on the shelves of the sports shops.

Although I have produced something I believe that could go into my portfolio once printed on a large scale i believe I dwelled far too long on this project and spent large amounts of time not moving forward or doing anything constructive.

I have taken this into account as well as recurring feedback that i need to do more research and as I kick off 2 or 3 ISTD, D&AD or YCN briefs to be completed over christmas and I aim to power through these with large amounts of research and very little where I stand still and dont move through the project.

Jawbone

Jawbone is an innovative bluetooth handsfree headset which puts a lot of design into making the headset look fashionable and aesthetically pleasing.
I love the packaging for this. I think it takes what is an everyday tech product of a bluetooth headset and markets it as a fashionable accessory instead.
I think the packaging is brilliant and totally unlike anything else on the market. The only downside i see with it is that i believe the spot varnish square with negative ELIMINATES NOISE doesn’t fit with the rest of the design and I believe would be better in a similar style to the Jawbone logotype and perhaps just using a pot varnish onto the lettering instead.
I just think that ELIMINATES NOISE shouts out and dominates the packaging and doesn’t quite fit.

Right Gin

I love this branding for Swedish gin brand “Right” it’s hard to forget the traditional coat of arms combined with the simple and contemporary typography. The simple one colour design doesn’t overly complicate the brand while the lack of colour doesn’t detract from the overall look on the bottle.

Barbasol

Found this on thedieline and thought it was a great way to take an established brand and move it into the 21st century. It retains the brands key principle which is the barbers pole but interprets it in a modern and attractive way which would stand out on the shelf.
This is a great solution to bringing an established but “older” brand into the forefront and making it a fashionable brand once again.

ilfracombe

Ilfracombe has launched it’s new brand to aim to attract more visitors to the town on the south coast of devon.
But this logo has been heavily criticised by the press as the “idiosyncratic swirl” designed by Tessa Martin is being likened to a human sperm cell.

This is a very unfortunate aspect to the re-brand as Ilfracombe, already described as a teenage pregnancy hot-spot just seems to publicise the darker side of Ilfracombe. Although the designer probably only intended it to be an accent piece, but the tag-line “curious costal charm” only adds to the innuendo that could be read from this brand.

This place branding appears to be a glossy marketing campaign that has been mis-interpreted by the audience and has instead brought to light aspect of Ilfracombe that the council would have certainly rather kept out of the national spotlight.

1412 Update

Got an update from BrewDog regarding the beer apprentice that I took part in during Entrepreneur Week and this video was really helpful from a creative standpoint, James Watt, one of the founders of BrewDog critiqued every entry as if it was a professional pitch and highlighted what he liked and what he didnt like about the design.
He very much liked our design and thought it was very original and would stand out from other beers on the market.
The best bit of all was at the end when he announced that our team was the winning team and was “head and shoulders” above the rest.
Shall get our prizes and a photo session next week which shall be interesting.

N.B just discovered that money allowing that our team could travel up to the scottish brewers BrewDog and help brew our beer which would be launched at the student ball in May. I think this is an amazing piece of professional practise and would be amazing to see what it takes to fully launch a beer brand.

Yo-yo Charger

Peter Thuvander was so excited over his new iPhone that he designed an induction powered yo-yo charger for it. It charges its lithium ion battery using an OLPC crank. 30 “yo-yo” cranks is all you need to juice up your iPhone which sounds almost too good to be true.

Information Display

I think the way that the information about how long a driver has been on the road is displayed is very innovative and eliminates the need for any type.
It’s amazing how just a few coloured lights could display so much information clearly and efficiently without the need for text of image.

Eco Stop-Light

This is an innovative new evolution to the traditional red stop light with a countdown displayed around the outside, the designer is marketing this an effective way to reduce carbon emissions “if you’ve got the amount of time you’ve got to stop in front of you, you can shut your engine off, wait, be calm, and turn it back on again when the time is almost up. This not only lessens the amount of gas you use sitting still, but it lessens the amount of crazy madness you have wondering if the stoplight is stuck, or just really, really long.”