A B-Side BY Armin

Groen

Founded in 1982, Groen (“Green” in English) is the Flemish green political party in Belgium. After eight years with a bright green logo with an exclamation point at the end, Groen is aiming for a more modest logo. Press release here (in Dutch).

Thanks to Geert De Deckere for the tip.

Opinion BY Armin

Meet Mr. PIP

Established in 1983, Belkin designs and produces a broad range of consumer electronic products, from routers, to mobile accessories, to a perplexing but always life-saving range of USB and cables — or, as they so eloquently and on-brand put it, “Belkin products connect the dots between people and technology.” To coincide with, CES, the biggest electronic show — and with the return of Belkin founder, Chet Pipkin (pay attention to the name) — Belkin has introduced a new identity designed by Wolff Olins.

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A B-Side BY Armin

Golden Boy Foods

Established in 1979, Golden Boy Foods is a manufacturer of private label foods like peanut butter, trail mixes, snacking nuts, and more. The new identity was designed by TAXI Vancouver. Some applications below (or after the jump).

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A B-Side BY Armin

Home Forward

Established in 1941, Home Forward (formerly known as Housing Authority of Portland) is the largest provider of affordable housing in the state of Oregon. On the new logo: “Vivid blue, green and featuring a ‘flourishing home’ symbol that combines the two colors, the new identity tells current and future residents, business partners, and community members that Home Forward is a progressive, positive enterprise committed to a better tomorrow, for the organization and especially for its residents”. Full press release here [PDF]. The new identity has been designed by Bend, OR-based Brand Navigation. A detail of the logo below (or after the jump) and a full case study here. This is one of my favorite icons of the year: simple, smart, and hopeful.

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A B-Side BY Armin

TreeHouse

Opened last week in Austin, TX, TreeHouse is a 25,000-square-foot store dedicated to sustainable and healthy-living products for home improvement. Home Depot with an environmental conscience if you will. The new logo was designed by Austin-based McGarrah Jessee. Press release of the opening here and a video with an inside look at the store here.

Thanks to Cole Baldwin for the tip.

A B-Side BY Armin

Educating Tomorrow

Educating Tomorrow is a “teacher-based coalition that believes our schools must take the lead in moving toward a greener future by providing our children and future leaders with an environmental education and exemplary environmental programs, such as school-wide recycling.” Their new identity, designed by New York-based Language Dept., is one of the 2011 projects of the fabulous desigNYC, a “group of designers and design advocates with the mission of helping nonprofit and community groups in need of design services connect with professional, pro bono design resources.” A few application images below (or after the jump).

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A B-Side BY Armin

Zaatar w Zeit

Established in 1999, Zaatar w Zeit — or “Thyme and Olive Oil Mix” — is a fast food chain in Lebanon, Kuwait and the Emirates. New logo has been designed by Pearlfisher, with this to say about it: “The new logo is a distinctive, modern marque that provides a more literal and graphic expression by creating a simple link between the thyme and the oil, the leaf and the droplet, and forms a distinctive ‘Z’ within the negative space.”

Opinion BY Armin

The Internet Called, it wants its Hexagons Back

Based on the amount of tips I received about this, it seems we have a very healthy amount of harder-core developers reading Brand New than I thought. So for those of us whose knowledge of the web stops at “Add to Cart” here is the basic premise: First released in 2010 Node.js is a platform based on JavaScript to build websites or online applications that make the best use of connection times, only pinging the system when it needs rather than constantly. Or something to that effect. Node.js has a vibrant and passionate community around it of developers using the platform. Last week they introduced a new logo designed by Chris Glass.

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Opinion BY Armin

Bitmaps are so 2011

Launched in 2005, TechCrunch is a blog dedicated to covering all things web: software, gadgets, start-up, geek, venture capital, and more as long as it’s techie and it generates pageviews. Originally independent, TechCrunch was acquired by AOL in 2010. Its numbers are impressive: it attracts 12-plus million unique visitors a month that generate 53-plus million pageviews on top of the 2.2-plus million RSS subscribers. Along with sister (yet rival) AOL site, Engadget, they pretty much rule tech journalism. On Monday, TechCrunch unveiled a redesigned website and identity by New York-based Code and Theory.

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Guest Editorial by Joshua Levi Posted BY Brand New

United Colors. Now with more Benetton.

The year is 1985. In America, Reagan is in the White House, Michaal Jackson and Lionel Richie are writing “We Are The World”, and Cliff Huxtable is dazzling us with his wardrobe of knit sweaters. In Italy, the country’s largest clothing maker, The Benetton Group, coins the phrase “United Colors of Benetton”. The phrase is blasted into pop culture, not only referencing the company’s colorful clothing but also the idea that cultural diversity is good. Today, Benetton colorfully dresses customers in 120 countries and is in the process of rolling out an evolved graphic identity system designed by Pentagram partners Daniel Weil and Michael Bierut with the internal Benetton team.

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Opinion BY Armin

Bioplastics is the New Recycling

Bioplastics are an environmentally friendly alternative to regular ol’ plastics. Made from renewable resources like vegetable oil, corn starch, or pea starch, or corn, tapioca, potatoes, sugar and algae. Some bioplastics are even designed to biodegrade, which basically means you can toss the thing into your backyard (or better yet, your compost) and it will eventually become not the thing it currently is. Bioplastics got a bit of a public boost when Pepsi announced that it would launch a pilot bottle in 2012 made out of “bio-based raw materials, including switch grass, pine bark and corn husks”. Looking to capitalize on the popularity of this growing trend is Cereplast, a California-based company that designs and manufactures proprietary starch-based, sustainable plastics. In January of this year, Cereplast launched a contest to design a new symbol to represent bioplastics. Yup, you know where this is headed.

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A B-Side BY Armin

Nebraska Book Company

Established in 1915, the Nebraska Book Company is a national distributor of textbooks for universities and operates over 280 campus bookstores around the U.S. Working with Kansas City, MO-based Nathaniel Cooper Creative the company has rebranded to Neebo (plenty of applications at this link).

Opinion BY Clinton Duncan

Acer

Acer, as you’re probably aware, is a Taiwanese computer and electronics manufacturer, making everything from desktop and laptop PCs, PDAs, storage devices, smartphones and… well you get it. What you may not know, is they are the global number two PC maker, behind HP and in front of Dell. They recently updated their rather odd looking pine green logo to a less odd, more “consumer friendly yet technological” lime green logotype in their push to be ‘more like Apple’. Financial Times has the story. Below (or after the jump) you can see the progression over the years, with the latest iteration definitely the best yet.

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Opinion BY Armin

eHow Answers How to Make a Logo. Sort of.

Launched in 1999, eHow, a “leading online destination for practical, trusted advice and know-how,” has grown into one of the most commonly stumbled upon websites as it hosts over 2 million articles that provide basic answers on how to do almost everything: from How to Bake Chicken (ranked “Easy”) to How to Introduce a New Logo to a Customer Base (“Moderately Challenging”). Like the subject of our last post, typeF, eHow is owned by Demand Media and has an interesting, if slightly scary business model (reported thoroughly in a 2009 article on Wired magazine) where freelance writers and/or videographers produce dozens of good-but-not-too-good articles and/or videos under very low pay but as long as the articles do well over time, the freelancers get paid residuals. In January alone, eHow attracted over 80 million unique users worldwide and this month it introduced a new logo.

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Opinion BY Rietje Gieskes

Retuled

The TUL, Transport Urbain Lavallois, is a network of buses based in the Laval community in France. The network consists of 54 buses that travel 21,000,000 kilometers, (that’s 13,048,795 miles for you metric-phobes) every year, and in the process transports an average of 7 million passengers. Their new colorful identity designed by Royalties Agency launched earlier this year.

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Opinion BY Armin

Coinstar, More Coin less Star

When we were in New York we would amass mountains of coins since most bodegas, mom-and-pops, and pharmacies would not accept credit card payments for any purchases under $5 or $10 so there was a lot of cash involved. At one point we had two 32-ounce yogurt containers filled with coins. We carried them from Brooklyn to a Coinstar in Manhattan and went back home with more than $200. Boom. Coinstar — a coin-counting kiosk set up inside a retailer lets you exchange coins for either cash or gift cards to places like Amazon and iTunes, keeping an average of 10% if you choose cash — first appeared in San Francisco in 1992 and today counts with more than 19,000 kiosks in the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico, Ireland and the UK, processing around 50 billion coins a year. This week a new logo for Coinstar was introduced by its parent company, Coinstar Inc., who also own the DVD-renting Red Box kiosks, to separate the corporate mark from the consumer mark.

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Opinion BY Armin

All right Mr. Schultz, I’m Ready for my Close-up

Starbucks needs no introduction but just in case: Founded in 1971 in Seattle, Starbucks is the world’s leading coffee retailer with more than 16,000 stores in 50 countries (this despite numerous closings in the last year or so). Starbucks also manages Tazo tea, Ethos water, and Seattle’s Best Coffee. And, part of the reason why we are here today, Starbucks sells more than coffee and its stores offer more than coffee (Wiiii-Fiiii says I in an Oprah wail). Yesterday, Starbucks announced that beginning in March, to coincide with their 40th anniversary, their brand would be making a bold visual evolution. Namely (pun intended) dropping its name from the logo. The new identity has been developed in-house — Starbucks has one of the strongest internal teams in a big corporation — in partnership with Lippincott.

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Opinion BY Clinton Duncan

Living Art

SECCA, or the South Eastern Centre Contemporary Art, is a contemporary art centre in North Carolina. Originally founded in 1956, the organization really got going in 1976 thanks to a philanthropic bequest of industrialist James G Hines’s 32-acre estate. In 2010, after an extensive renovation, they turned to Pentagram partner Luke Hayman for a new visual identity to compliment their shiny, newly updated art space.

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Opinion BY Armin

Generic Swap

I first learned about Swaptree through a presentation by one of our clients at TEDxSydney on the subject of Collaborative Consumption — itself the subject of her book, What’s Mine is Yours, for which we designed the web site. Although Swaptree has been around since 2004, it wasn’t until recently that the model has taken off and gotten more attention. Its focus is on users signing up, adding a list of books, games, music, or videos they either want to acquire or want to get rid of. Swapping. The system then matches you with equivalent swaps and through the magic of trusting strangers you put your book, video, game, or CD in an envelope, spend $2, and three days later you have a new item you want, not one that sits on a shelf. Last week I did my first swap, changing Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, which my 3-year-old deemed scary, for Toy Story, which we have yet to watch. Last week, Swaptree announced it would change its name and domain to the all encompassing Swap.com.

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