A B-Side BY Armin

IZIBUILD

IZI is a Portuguese home improvement store owned by PreBuild. In 2011 EuroRSCG rebranded IZI, now known as IZIBUILD. Prebuild’s Margarida Calvinho explains (as translated by Google) “the new graphic identity reinforces the strength, experience and credibility that characterized the group Prebuilt.”

Thanks to Rodolfo Foitinho for the tip.

A B-Side BY Armin

Daphne’s California Greek

Established in 1991 Daphne’s California Greek restaurant is “the fast casual choice of diners who live healthy, active lifestyles and crave something unique” with 60 locations across the West Coast. In 2010, Daphne’s emerged from bankruptcy protection with new owners, who redesigned every aspect of the restaurant in 2011.

Thanks to Abe Vizcarra for the tip.

Opinion BY Armin

StumbleUpon Stumbles on Hidden Shape

Launched in 2001, StumbleUpon is a discovery site where registered users — 20 million of them at last count — can share, rate, explore, and “stumble” upon web pages of their specific interests. StumbleUpon was the de facto site for random-ish web browsing before sites like Digg and Reddit surfaced as competition in the mid aughts and while all these three shared a crappy design aesthetic and functionality they co-existed well but with the relatively more finessed approach of Facebook and Twitter, StumbleUpon now feels like a relic of the original dot-com era. Today, StumbleUpon is relaunching its service with new functionality and services, designed by Huge. Along with this comes a new logo.

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Opinion BY Armin

Ready. Aim. Chat!

Released in 1997, AIM, short for AOL Instant Messenger, was the original IM-ing choice for the first mass generation of internet users, making it the one socially acceptable product from AOL one could use without losing his or her cred. Even with the onslaught of instant message features in Gmail and Facebook and major applications like Skype and Apple’s own Chat, AIM has somehow managed to keep its spot — or at least a spot — in the market. Lacking any serious updates in recent years, AOL is completely rebooting AIM, launching a new version this week with mobile apps for the iPhone and Android, desktop clients for Mac and PC, and a site for chatting directly on your browser. With this a new logo has also been introduced.

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Opinion BY Armin

Redefining Sharp

Founded in 1939, Gerber is a “global supplier of personal outdoor, tactical and industrial gear”. What that means is that they sell the meanest, coolest, machoest knives, axes, parangs, and all other kinds of cutting, prodding, slicing, destroying stuff. In other words it’s the bizarro consumer product of the other Gerber. Also, if you caught the premiere of The Walking Dead — sucks for you if you didn’t — that big bag of machetes and knives they find? Courtesy of Gerber, thank you. Gerber’s new identity, packaging, and advertising have been designed by Portland, OR-based Mutt Industries.

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Opinion BY Rietje Gieskes

NNewly Redesigned

Nationale Nederlanden, one of the Netherlands’ largest insurance and asset management companies, recently replaced its logo, in use since 1970, with a modified version. The new logo signals a strategic repositioning as a friendlier company, more customer-centric and transparent in its policies than before.

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Opinion BY Armin

X Connects the Spot

Although most of us here in the U.S. associate Nextel with the now defunct company that merged with Sprint in 2005, which basically stopped pushing the Nextel brand at the consumer level, there is a whole alternate universe of Nextel-branded mobile services in Latin America. First extended as Nextel de Mexico in 1998, the company changed to NII Holdings in 2002 and now oversees the Nextel brand in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Peru and Chile. Employing more than 14,000 people, NII Holdings counts with 9.84 million subscribers. This week, the company introduced a new identity designed by the San Francisco office of Landor.

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Opinion BY Armin

Warburtons’ Complete Package

Established in 1876, Warburtons is a producer of bakery products, from your everyday sliced bread to hot dog buns to pancakes to crumpets. Now, still a Warburton-family-owned business, Warburtons employs 5,000 people working at 14 bakeries and 15 depots across the UK, producing over two million bakery products every day and, according to Nielson Data, it is the “second biggest grocery brand” in the UK. Warburtons’ new logo was introduced back in late 2010 but the complete brand rollout has taken most of 2011 to implement. The whole project was designed by London-based Smith & Milton.

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Opinion BY Armin

Aricent’s Quiet Swoosh

Established in 2006 with the combination of the former Hughes Software Systems/Flextronics Software Division and frog design (which had been acquired by Flextronics in 2004), Aricent is a “global innovation and technology services company that helps clients to imagine, commercialize, and evolve products and services for the connected world” with more than 10,000 consultants, designers, and engineers at 36 offices around the world. This past May Aricent announced a new brand positioning — “a provider of innovation services for the connected world” — changed its name to Aricent Group to serve as the parent company for Aricent (delivering the “communications technology expertise”) and frog design (delivering the “creative vision and user experience prowess”). The new identity has been designed by New York-based Siegel+Gale.

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Opinion BY Armin

TNT Post Carries On by Itself

With roots as far back as 1752, chronologically, and Australia, geographically, TNT Post is the official mail carrier in The Netherlands, owned by TNT Group, who also operate TNT Express. Employing 77,000 people, TNT Post processes “8.8 billion addressed postal items (including 100 million parcels) each day and delivers to more than 88 million addresses in the Benelux, Germany, the UK and Italy.” Last week, TNT Group announced that TNT Post will begin to work as an independent company, starting on May 31, 2011 and will be renamed PostNL. The identity will be implemented first in The Netherlands, and later in the other countries it operates in.

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Opinion BY Armin

Meet Morph

Part of Discovery Communications’ menagerie of TV properties, launched in 1999 as Discovery Science, renamed Science Channel in 2003, this little corner of cable universe, featuring, as you might have guessed, science-y programming is reinventing itself a third time: simply as SCIENCE. All uppercase, please. Facing stiff competition from the more popular Syfy, SCIENCE certainly needed some kind of boost to make it more relevant and while new programming like Ricky Gervais’ An Idiot Abroad or reruns of cult classics like Firefly are helping, this new identity certainly demands attention — specially its new logo, nicknamed Morph. The new identity will be implemented on air starting June 8.

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Opinion BY Armin

April Fools: Home Depot’s Home Improvement

Update April 4, 2011: This post is an April Fools. All the design was executed by the talented Matt Stevens. Links to the domain www.myhomedepot.us won’t work as I have released the domain back to the registry. This is what www.homedepot.us looked like on Friday.

Established in 1978 with two 60,000-square-feet stores in Atlanta, GA, and stocking up to 25,000 different SKUs at the time, Home Depot is the world’s largest home improvement retailer, the fourth largest retailer in the U.S., it is ranked number 29 in the Fortune 500, and let’s face it, one of the coolest chain stores ever. Seriously. Where else can you walk out with a bag of screws, a door, and a riding mower? These days, Home Depot has 1,972 stores in the U.S., Canada, China, and Mexico. Each store averages a whopping 105,000 square feet plus an average of 23,000 square feet for the outside garden area. Quite amazingly too, for a retailer of that size, every employee on the floor I have ever asked a question to has been friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful — and I’ve been to a Home Depot in Brooklyn on a Sunday, they are unflappable. This week a picture surfaced on Twitter that indicated a new logo was being tested and, today, that change has been confirmed with the unveiling of a new logo and updated identity system.

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Opinion BY Armin

Tyra Rocks some Fierce Lettering

One of the most unexpected figures in modern-day business and content creation is ex-supermodel — supermodel emeritus? or once a supermodel always a supermodel? — Tyra Banks, as evidenced primarily through the success of 16 seasons and 20 international editions of America’s Next Top Model and her own talk show, The Tyra Banks Show, that aired for five years. Both of these shows were produced by her own company, Bankable. To cement her business savvy (and gain some additional attention), Banks has enrolled in the Harvard Business School’s Executive Education Owner/President Management Program (OPM) which has her attending (and sleeping at) Harvard for one three-week period for the next three years. Her latest venture, in partnership with Demand Media, is typeF, “a revolutionary fashion and beauty website that listens to what women want and gives them the answers they are looking for, when and where they want it.” Banks rang the bell of at the New York Stock Exchange this past Tuesday and launched typeF.

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Opinion BY Armin

Global Weave

Established in 1965 in New York as the Foundation for the South Pacific (FSP) by an Australian actress named Elizabeth Silverstein and a Marist Priest named Stanley Hosie, the nonprofit organization focused initially on helping the island nations of the South Pacific rebuild after World War II. Renamed Counterpart International (CI) in 1992 after bringing its mission — “to empower people to implement innovative and enduring solutions to social, economic and environmental challenges” — to aid after the fall of the Soviet Union. Since then, with over 300 people currently on staff and now headquartered in Arlington, VA, it has helped people in 65 countries in three key areas: economic development, food security and nutrition, and building effective governance and institutions. This month CI introduced a new identity designed by Seattle, WA-based Kite.

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Opinion BY Armin

HTML5 Validates with New Logo

Over the last six months or so, some of the hardcorest web developers and designers have started to test the possibilities of the newest markup for building websites, HTML5. I realize that some might not even be aware that there was HTML1, 2, 3, or 4 or what it even means for coding language to be upgraded. In a nutshell: HTML, overseen by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C for short), is the gobbledygook text that gives structure to a website; in its first iteration, the amount of things you could do with it was limited and in each version it has added bits of language that allow for more versatility. This latest version reflects the advancement of the web in general, by natively allowing the use of multimedia or web fonts, for example, as well as having a more robust set of “tags” — i.e., the ‹em› tag makes things ‹em›italic‹/em›, but that’s just the most basic example — that power each website. HTML5 has gotten a lot of support and generated plenty of excitement and the W3C wants to encourage its use so they are introducing an official HTML5 logo that will serve as a badge for those that are adopting the latest and geekiest markup language. In charge of designing the logo, identity, and a set of icons was Honolulu, HI-based Ocupop.

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Opinion BY Armin

Gazelephants in the Wild

Launched earlier this month with a somewhat subdued splash, the RightNetwork is a new media company dedicated to the views of, well, The Right. The Republicans. The GOP. Presenting a “right-minded perspective that includes an entire spectrum of opinion from thoughtful and reserved to bold and brash” through original programming. It features Kelsey Grammer, aka Frasier Crane, as its spokesperson. Its content is available online and theoretically on TV, available on demand at relatively unpopular cable services like Verizon FiOS TV, Sky Angel, and Blue Ridge. And competing against other TV animals like NBC’s peacock, the RightNetwork is introducing the — wait for it — Gazelephant. “We wondered what would happen,” blogged Frasier, “if we combined the power of the largest land mammal on earth [and mascot of the Republican Party] with the agile, fast as all get-out, Gazelle.” Wonder no more readers.

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Opinion BY Clinton Duncan

Orange Tart

QR National is a soon to be listed public company that owns and operates Australia’s largest rail freight network. In a country that is the world’s largest exporter of coal, it’s not surprising that QR National is also the world’s largest transporter of the dirty rocks. In a big brown land, with big brown trains, from the state of the big pineapple, big mango, big bottle of rum and the big boofhead, a big new company is about to be created — with a smart new identity courtesy of Cornwall Design, Melbourne.

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Opinion BY Armin

Walk this Way

Established in 1973 Transportation Alternatives (TA) is a New York non-profit organization whose mission is to “reclaim New York City’s streets from the automobile, and to advocate for bicycling, walking and public transit as the best transportation alternatives.” If you ride your bike in New York and feel a little safer with every passing day, it’s probably thanks to TA, who is also responsible for campaigns to free Central Park and Prospect Part in Brooklyn from cars, as well as championing the controversial congestion pricing initiative that would charge cars for the priviledge of driving around certain parts of the city. This week, TA introduced a new identity created by Doyle Partners — fitting since it’s not rare to spot Mr. Stephen Doyle bicycling around town in a suit.

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In Brief BY Armin

Every[blank] Every[blank]™

What do you get when you combine two of the biggest telecommunications companies in the UK? The answer is fairly straightforward: You get everything, everywhere. And that’s exactly what the new parent company, starting operations on July 1, 2010, will be called. Everything Everywhere™. It will represent the new 50:50 joint venture of France Telecom (owner of Orange) and Deutsche Telekom (owner of T-Mobile) in the UK market to establish itself as the leading mobile service provider with a combined 30 million subscribers. However, to keep things interesting, both Orange and T-Mobile will continue performing as separate brands, each with their already established brand, but behind the scenes it will all be Everything Everywhere™ — a press release has further details. According to this story in The Guardian, the moniker was “developed by the merged company’s internal team with help from T-Mobile’s ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi and Orange’s agency Fallon, both of whom are part of Publicis.” Since there is two months left before the launch of the new company it will be interesting to see if this trendy but, ultimately, uninspired wordmark — typeset in Neutraface Italic — will remain as the corporate identity or if there is something a little more fitting or, heck, at the very least more bombastic, for these two big brands. I guess we should be lucky we didn’t get another Continental/United-style mashup.

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Opinion BY Armin

Spoiler Alert: The P and G are the Same

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me of writing Brand New reviews is learning about all these multi-thousand-employee organizations that I never knew existed, and if I knew they existed I never quite would have pinpointed what they do. Case in point: PGi. Formerly known, since 1991 and until this past January, as Premiere Global Services, a 2,700-employee organization with offices in 24 countries, whose “advanced meeting, conferencing and collaboration solutions energize people and organizations to connect more meaningfully and work together more productively.” PGI’s services are reportedly used by 90% of the Fortune 500 and by 10 million people every month. So, new name, new logo.

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