1. 21st century branding is being held hostage by 20th century modernism.tl;dr: It’s not that we can’t, it’s that we choose not to. In hindsight it was entirely predictable that when faced with the complexities of a fast evolving digital environment that branding would respond through a lens of minimalism and reductionism. After all, if the sheer complexity of channels, screen sizes, resolutions, software limitations, UX considerations, usability and accessibility, data, and 3rd party design and layout rules must be navigated, the most obvious response is to boil everything down to its most basic component parts in order to ensure both consistency and compliance. Unfortunately, this has also served to create two inter-related problems. The first is that brand design has regressed to a place of blandly austere and joyless modernism in pastels that’s become way too comfortable to be useful. The second is that this comfortable approach directly impedes any hunger to push the boundaries of what is possible and create new voices for a new time. The result? A sea of beautifully designed brands paying homage the mid-20th century that are entirely undifferentiated from each other, aren’t particularly distinctive in any way, and that we cannot for the life of us remember from one day to the next. And while we may laud the standard of design craft on display, if the results are consistently commodifying even as the volume of direct competitors explodes, have we created something of value or are we simply talking to ourselves? Put simply, good design is the new bad design. Good design has never been more available to more corporations for less money, which means it’s no longer a differentiator in its own right. Instead, it’s 21st century table-stakes. That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. Like all things table-stakes, you have to have it and it has to meet expectations. The problem is that a judicious application of design craft simply isn’t enough to make any brand stand out today in the same way that it did even five years ago. As a result, craft alone is no longer enough when considering the branding of any company. Instead we require a much greater emphasis on conceptual creativity, cut-through thinking, and a deliberate breaking of the so-called rules across the breadth of the designed experience. And that will be hard, because there are few things as conservative as a design community that is both cutting in its criticism and narrow minded in its idea of what’s acceptable. But our problem today isn’t designing something suitably acceptable, it’s designing something suitably different. Now, designing different is far from a new idea. The London 2012 Olympics logo was designed as a deliberate response to the narrowing of design taste, and while excoriated by the usual suspects at the time, it’s almost certainly the only Olympic logo you can remember amid the stultifying schmaltz that came before and after. Before that, while Apple’s approach to design might today epitomize the acceptable mainstream, in 1998 it was daringly and strikingly different from the norm. And long before either of these, Coca-Cola created its iconic bottle as a direct response to a sea of copycat cola’s that consumers couldn’t tell the difference between. So, it’s not that we can’t design brands to be radically and wonderfully different from each other. Or that we can’t embrace richness in digital. Or that we can’t elevate cohesion over rigid consistency. Or that we can’t embrace code and motion and sound and interactivity. Or that we can’t insist upon vastly bolder ideas. Or that we can’t deliberately test the edges in order to be as unique to our time as what came before was to its. It’s simply that we choose not to.
|
