A B-Side BY Armin

Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts

Founded in 1977, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA) is Michigan’s largest contemporary arts center. “We created something that would be long lasting, accessible, graphic, and bold — without being obviously artsy. […] And just as many new experiences challenge us at first glance the cropped typography makes us slightly uncomfortable while giving a nod to all things new that are emerging within our organization.” The new identity was designed by Grand Rapids, MI-based Peopledesign. You can see more applications here and read more about it here. Video of the logo transformation below (or after the jump).

Thanks to Michael Karlesky for the tip.

Opinion BY Armin

Deconstructing CAMH’s Building

Founded in 1948, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) is a “non-collecting institution dedicated to presenting the best and most exciting international, national, and regional art.” Located in Houston’s museum district, CAMH is housed in a very unconventional building — especially for Houston architecture standards — designed by architect Gunnar Birkerts. Viewed from the top, the building’s North and South walls are parallel to the street while the West and East walls are angled at 45 degrees. Viewed at street level, the building has a subtle but noticeable slant. It’s on these physical attributes (as well as an odd triangle shape that sits on top of the entrance) that CAMH has introduced a new logo and identity designed by New York-based AHL&CO.

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Opinion BY Armin

A Penney for your Thoughts

First opened as a dry-goods store named the “Golden Rule” in Kemmerer, Wyoming by James Cash Penney in 1902, JCPenney today is a publicly-traded company with 11,000 department stores across the U.S. and Puerto Rico, mostly in shopping malls. Providing fairly decent middle-of-the-road merchandise, JCPenney is an extremely popular destination for finding affordable items without the top brand names attached — they develop many of their own brands. Yesterday, JCPenney announced that its transformation “to become America’s favorite shopping destination for discovering great styles at compelling prices” would be celebrated with a “bold new logo” that is set to go into effect at the end of this month. The new logo has been designed by Luke Langhus, a third-year graphic design student at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. That’s right, a company with $17.8 billion in revenue in 2010, has a logo designed by a student. Oh, and also, forget all that complicated casing, just call it and write it as “jcpenney.”

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Opinion BY Armin

Spil Games loses its Bounce

Established in 2004 in The Netherlands with a single online game, Spil Games currently offers over 4,000 games aimed at three key demographics: 8-to-12-year-old girls, teens (both boys and girls 10 to 15), and family (mostly moms and their kids). The games are offered through various portals providing them in 19 different languages and they attract over 130 million unique visitors each month. At the end of January they introduced a new identity.

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Opinion BY Armin

Myspace Goes Blank

Launched in 2003, Myspace — capitalized as MySpace at the time — became the de facto social networking platform for youngsters attracting 1 million users in its first year, 5 million a few months later, and over 100 million users amassed to this day. With the ability to customize their profile pages, users unleashed a fury of apocalyptic, senses-attacking, browser-crashing designs laden with unicorns and party pictures that eventually became a user interface punchline. No Myspace story is complete without the mention of Facebook which took on the reigns of the social network kingdom and became the Myspace Killer. More than killed, it wounded. And it has taken Myspace three or four years to recover, or at least attempt a recovery. And it starts this week. Myspace announced a complete redesign of its platform with new features, interactivity, and bells and whistles for its users along with a new identity.

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Opinion BY Armin

Fits like a G(love)

Just when you thought you had heard the last of Gap, we bring you… more Gap! Except that this is a little more uplifting than last week’s meltdown. If we take it from the top, boiling it down to product lines, there is Gap. Then there is Gap Women. In there is GapBody. Now, recently launched, is the GapBody Fit collection, a new range of women’s premium athletic clothing. Battling for consideration against larger branding and design firms the small, San Francisco-based Manual won the job. (You might remember them from the Slice identity.)

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Opinion BY Armin

Don’t Mind the Gap, or the Square

Established in 1969 in San Francisco, Gap is one of the most popular American clothing brands — net sales of $3.8 billion in 2009 can attest to it. With 1,140 stores in the U.S. and almost 300 more abroad, Gap pushes simple and unfuzzy clothing at very reasonable prices and of very reasonable quality. Through their advertising they have established a cool, breezy, and sophisticated brand visual language that ties everything together nicely and, until now, their logo was the perfect little bow to keep it all together. Without any fanfare, Gap rolled out a new logo yesterday. When I first saw it I thought it would just be a seasonal change, but now there is little doubt it’s a new logo: the file on their website is called newlogo.png.

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Opinion BY Armin

Surf’s Down

Founded in 1984 by a small group of surfers in Malibu, California, Surfrider Foundation (SF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to “the protection and enjoyment of the world’s oceans, waves and beaches for all people, through conservation, activism, research and education.” Through more than sixty local chapters, SF counts with over 50,000 members across the United States. Earlier this month, SF introduced a new logo designed by Los Angeles-based 72andSunny.

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Opinion BY Sam Becker

Mergers & Executions

BusinessWeek, a weekly periodical catering to the business community (go figure), was recently acquired by Bloomberg Media from their previous owner, McGraw-Hill. Financial pundits saw this as a quick route for Bloomberg, the successful, finance-oriented media outlet started by the mayor of New York, to a strong presence in print. More to the point, it was viewed as an opportunity to make Bloomberg, the unseen hand behind so many news feeds and stock tickers, more of a household name. And so it came to be. Their name now graces the living rooms and reception areas of millions of homes and businesses across the world, announcing its debut by turning a new page in BusinessWeek’s 80-year history.

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