Opinion BY Armin

Aetna Finds its Groove

Established in 1853, Aetna is one the biggest health insurance companies in the United States offering medical, pharmacy, dental, behavioral health, group life and disability plans to approximately 36.3 million people. In a move to continue “its evolution from an insurance carrier to a health solutions company” and establish themselves as a more consumer-focused brand, Aetna has introduced a new identity, designed by New York-based Siegel+Gale. To get things started, you can watch a launch video here.

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Opinion BY Armin

Attack of the Red Gradients

Established in 1976, EDP (Energias de Portugal) is not just the largest electricity and energy company in Portugal but also a major player globally with presence in Spain, Brazil, and the U.S. with more than 12,000 employees worldwide. It’s also the third largest wind operator in the world. Last week EDP unveiled a new identity designed by Sagmeister Inc.

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Opinion BY Armin

Gannett Loses Globe, Wins Little

Founded in 1923 by Frank Gannett, Virginia-based Gannett is a holding company that has one of the largest volumes of daily newspaper circulation in the U.S. with USA Today and over 80 local newspapers. Its broadcast division owns over 20 local television stations and its digital division owns websites like CareerBuilder.com, MetroMix.com, and MomsLikeMe.com. Earlier this week, Gannett announced a new identity designed by The Farm to replace the 30-year-old logo they had been using. The redesign has attracted some media attention because, besides being a media company itself, people are dumbfounded that the new identity comes with a 100-page guideline document. The horror! Oddly enough the whole document is available publicly on Google Docs. And for some reason, someone started a Gannett logo Twitter account @gannettlogo. Yawn. This page has a couple of brand videos and additional information.

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Opinion BY Armin

Bretagne’s Stripes

Bretagne (Brittany in English) is a region in the nortwhest of France. While I have never been to Bretagne, the region holds a special place in my heart as it is the fictional home to Asterix’s village which resided right on the coast of a peninsula sticking out at the northwest of the northwest of France. But Asterix doesn’t pay the region’s bills and it doesn’t attract tourists or businesses, so the Agence économique de Bretagne has just launched a new identity to represent the region and has launched two separate sites with slightly different moods and information, one for tourism and one for businesses. The identity was designed by Lyon-based Communiquez (who were here last week for their design of La Manche — in case you are wondering, they didn’t submit work to be featured, they just happened to be the design firm of two separate identities that caught my attention).

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A B-Side BY Armin

Charlotte Russe

Established in 1975, Charlotte Russe is a chain of 500-plus stores located in shopping malls across America that sells groovy, trendy clothes and accessories for women in their teens to early twenties.

Thanks to Alex Poleshuk for the tip.

Opinion BY Armin

Rave at La Manche

La Manche is a Department of France located in Normandy, at the northern end of the country, perhaps best known for being home to the preternaturally picturesque Mont Saint-Michel, accessible from the Cotentin peninsula through a natural bridge that is covered and uncovered as the tide raises and lowers. The Conseil général de La Manche is rebranding La Manche — and to a certain degree also the larger region of Normandy — as not just an Old World Charm kind of place but a forward looking destination with a new identity designed by Lyon-based Communiquez. A PDF in French with the explained system can be found here — our French readers might prefer it over my butchered interpretations.

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Opinion BY Armin

THQ gets a New Q

Founded in 1989 and originally named Toy Headquarters, THQ is a developer and publisher of video games with ten offices around the world. THQ produces its own original titles and also holds exclusive licenses to develop titles for World Wrestling Entertainment and Ultimate Fighting Championship, making it popular with the beat-’em-up, shoot-’em-up crowd. Gamers and the industry alike have all taken notice of THQ’s change over the years from what Kotaku calls having “a licensed-schlock publishing reputation” to “one of quality-focused ‘transmedia’ brand builder.” Or CVG who considered THQ as “Unreliable, uninspiring… unexciting” but acknowledges that “in the last 18 months it’s clear something’s very different at the firm.” And that something is now signaled by a new logo, introduced yesterday at the New York Gamers Event.

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A B-Side BY Armin

Alternative Apparel

Headquartered in Norcross, GA, Alternative Apparel is a retailer and wholesaler of t-shirts, hoodies, jackets, leggings, etc., all with their “signature vintage softness.” The new logo was developed in-house.

Thanks to Andrew Thomson for the tip.

Opinion BY Armin

There is a New “W” in Town

Originally home to the Washington Senators, not one (1901 – 1960) but two times (1961 – 1971), Washington’s current Major League Baseball team is the Nationals, who were originally the Montreal Expos before they relocated to the U.S. as an expansion franchise. On November of last year, the Nationals announced new uniforms and new logos.

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A B-Side BY Armin

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

If you watch this show you will appreciate this mention. If you don’t watch it, you are probably going WTF? That’s okay. It’s Sunny in Philadelphia is a sitcom on FX, now in its sixth twisted season.

Thanks to Robert for the tip.

Opinion BY Armin

A Dell-icate Redesign

Established in 1984 by Michael Dell in our hometown of Austin, TX, Dell is one of the largest technology companies in the world with 96,000 employees and it is currently number 38 of the Fortune 500. Well known for its hardware, shipping 110,000 “systems” (laptops, desktops, and netbooks) every day around the world, Dell also provides a number of IT solutions for businesses and other organizations. Around summertime of this year, Dell began implementing an evolution of its very well recognized logo. The brand group at Dell was kind and resilient enough to share with us a bit of the back story. This implementation is merely the visible result of a process that started in 2007 when Dell announced an initiative to consolidate its more than 800 creative agencies around the world — 800! — that worked with its brand resulting in a “highly fractured brand for Dell.” As an example, at one point, “Dell was using more than 15 different typefaces — and that was only for English.” In 2009 Dell decided it was time to revisit its brand positioning “while analyzing why the brand value had been declining (most notably) in the past five years.”

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Guest Opinion by Rietje Gieskes posted BY Brand New

Oval is the New Circle

WTA, the Women’s Tennis Association, is the principal organizer of women’s professional tennis, the WNBA of the tennis world. It consists of 2,225 athletes, representing 91 nations, competing for more than $86 million in prize money. The new identity is meant to symbolize the modernization of the organization, and will be showcased throughout its 53 annual events and four Grand Slams in a wide variety of media. WTA recently unveiled its new identity, created by Chermayeff & Geismar

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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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Guest Opinion by Mark Holtmann Posted BY Brand New

Two Triangles are Better than One

The Dutch public broadcasting organization VPRO (an acronym that translates into “Liberal Protestant Radio Broadcasting Company”) started its life in 1926 as a religious radio broadcaster. Over the years it became more liberal and less religious until, in the sixties, it planted itself firmly in the avant-garde by being the first television broadcaster showing a nude woman on national television. Since then the VPRO never left its nonconformist role, with slight stubbornness purposefully choosing those programs, topics and formats that the other broadcasting companies passed over. Although not well known outside of the Netherlands, the VPRO is the real deal. It continuously airs intelligent, cultural and quirky programs, the stuff that makes TV interesting.

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Opinion BY Armin

Any way you Slice It

Did you know that a ceramic called zirconium oxide is the most durable substance on earth after diamonds? Not only that, but that it kicks metal’s ass in terms how sharp, hard and durable it can be. That’s why Slice makes it slicing and dicing products out of ceramic. Offering a small range of products designed by design celebrities like Karim Rashid, Michael Graves and Yves Behar, the Slice brand is all about simplicity, playfulness and sharpness. A new logo and packaging design by San Francisco-based Manual reinforces that.

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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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Opinion BY Armin

MapQuest comes Alive

Back in September of 2008 we reported on the evolution of the MapQuest logo and the feeling of the majority was that it was too little too late to make up ground against Google Maps — two years later, MapQuest is betting that it’s not too late with a complete overhaul of their identity and their mapping experience. As a subsidiary of AOL, MapQuest will be integrating the local brainpower provided by its sibling service, Patch; you can read the full details of what MapQuest is setting out to do in their blog. The new identity has been designed by Wolff Olins.

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Opinion BY Armin

Esurance gets Dorky Techie Feely

Only slightly older than ten years old, founded in 1998, San Francisco-based Esurance is one of the leading direct-to-consumer auto insurance companies in the U.S. and one of the better known providers of such unappealing service. Until now, Esurance had been represented by a very generic sunset logo and personalized in the form of Erin Esurance, an animated, pink-haired superhero. Earlier this month, Esurance went through a complete transformation with a new identity and national campaign titled “Techie Feely,” both created by San Francisco-based Duncan/Channon.

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Opinion BY Armin

Hebrew National, Now More National

I don’t consume enough sausages to know which one is the leading brand in the market, probably Kraft makes some rendition of the mystery cylinder meat, I really wouldn’t know. But if you asked me to name one sausage brand I would instantly think of Hebrew National. Not because I know what it tastes like, but because it has a cool name, a cool slogan — “We answer to a higher authority” — and it feels like it plays by its own rules, defying mainstream consumption with a kosher product and, again, what would seemingly be a very limiting name. Originally established in 1905 on the Lower East Side in New York City, Hebrew National catered to the city’s growing Jewish immigrant population, going through various changes over the last hundred years, most recently as part of ConAgra Foods. Beyond a good name and story, the product isn’t bad at all, according to some experts: Last year New York magazine asked über restaurateur Danny Meyer (and two other New York power chefs) to rate supermarket hot dogs — described as a “meatier hot dog” Hebrew National took the top spot. But enough hot dog talk…

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Opinion BY Armin

An Inconvenient Drop Shadow

For a company infamous for their optimization obsessiveness where every nano-second and shade of blue is a matter of life and death, a change as radical as the one seen above must not have come easily. E-mails to Brand New spotting the new logo in the wild started coming in as early as March February and while I was hesitant to post based on a few intermittent reports, it seems now the change is official and, like all things Google, a big deal. The change to the logo comes as part of a bigger redesign of the Google search experience that started to be rolled out yesterday for users in 37 languages — although I’m sure English is one of them, my own Google remains stuck in 2009.

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