A B-Side BY Armin

Women at NBCU

Launched in 2008, Women at NBCU is an “ad sales, marketing and research initiative [that] creates custom solutions for advertisers to connect with female consumers via NBCUniversal’s wide portfolio.” Logo designed by Wolff Olins. A few more images at Wolff Olins designer Mike Abbink’s website.

Thanks to Marc Nijborg for the tip.

A B-Side BY Armin

Frankfurt Book Fair

The Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse in German), running since 1949, is the world’s largest book fair in the world, attracting publishers from all countries representing every single book genre and industry imaginable — it is a great launching pad for new titles as well as for wheelings and dealings for securing international rights licenses and partnerships. Their logo has been redesigned for the upcoming fair this October.

Thanks to Sriparna Ghosh for the tip.

A B-Side BY Armin

The Kubert School

Established in 1976 as The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, New Jersey by renown comic book artist Joe Kubert, the institution has changed its name to The Kubert School and introduced a new identity. The website Comic Book Resources has an interview on the new branding with Kuber and his two sons, Adam and Andy, comic book artists themselves.

Thanks to Matt Rower for the tip.

Opinion BY Armin

Virb is the New Virb

In the Mesozoic era of social networking — that distant year of 2007 — a new community was poised to take over the web, replacing the aging and visually painful MySpace species. Virb allowed users, who joined by invitation only, to craft and customize extremely elegant and sophisticated personal profiles with all the accoutrements of online social behavior. Photos, videos, messages, etc. MySpace died a natural death. Virb, however, was crushed by the imminent rise of Facebook with a nail in the coffin courtesy of Twitter. Acknowledging that they couldn’t compete with Facebook, Virb is re-emerging not as a social tool but as a website-building tool, harnessing the effectiveness of its personalization tools so that photographers can put up a decent portfolio or bands a decent promotional site. The new service also benefits from hosting company Media Temple being the parent company of Virb since 2008. While most companies who didn’t succeed at first would be compelled to change names and launch under a different personality, Virb is betting that its name, in good-standing condition with the web world, can handle the complete switch of service and business model.

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