As its original name implied, Union Bank has a big presence in the state of California but as the organization has grown, expanding into neighboring states like Oregon and Washington, and with two international offices and six in other states of the U.S., it was time to drop the "of California."

"With the change in our name, it was necessary to update our logo, and this gave us a wonderful opportunity to develop a look that underscored the values that we hold close."

"The most important among these values is a singular dedication to serving your financial needs, which we have very boldly illustrated by adopting a dominant U in our new look. We hope you will always consider it your personal invitation to let us provide your financial solutions."
— Press Release

How a "dominant U" illustrates "a singular dedication to serving your financial needs" is beyond me, but I will side with Mr. Tanaka to say that the dominant U is quite nice. It has a lovely swooping feeling without looking weak or fleeting, and I absolutely appreciate that the design manages to convey dimension without resorting to shading and bubbly Photoshop effects. The typography is perfectly adequate although I suspect it will get a rise from Gotham haters.

Thanks to Glenn Sakamoto for first tip.

The statement from Richard Maddocks, Chairman of the Australasian Writers and Art Directors Association, AWARD for short, states in part: Let's be clear. AWARD is not a committee, a board or an institution. AWARD is a community. […] AWARD is as strong, dynamic and powerful as the people who participate in it. AWARD evolves as the community that forms it evolves. Based on the latter two principles, Interbrand Australia created a new, living identity that reflects the evolving and dynamic nature of the organization.

The logo is comprised of numerous dots, each dot representing a member of the organization. The logo taps into the AWARD membership database to recreate itself whenever needed, be it online in the web site designed by Deepend or for print purposes. Interbrand Australia's Creative Director, Chris Maclean, further explains:

Controlled by a complex algorithm, the dots converge, diverge, bounce and swarm — behaviour that you would expect of a creative organism. Together, the dots form the shape of an ever-morphing "A" for AWARD.

The dots come in three different sizes to represent membership levels. The smallest dots represent the students of AWARD School; the largest dots represent members who have received accolades from AWARD; and, the medium sized dots represent all other members. An individual career can therefore be tracked all the way from a student to an awarded professional.

As time goes by, the logo will evolve with the population of the membership and as each member’s career progress.
In the printed world, the logo retains its dynamic nature, appearing in a different configuration on every application. This is made possible by an online logo-generator. A unique logo is automatically and instantaneously downloaded every time new artwork goes to print.

I am getting addicted to these living identities — like last month's Namics — and I wonder if there will be a day, much like the day when a cell phone without a GPS map is obsolete, that a logo that doesn't live in real time will be obsolete. But you don't come here for my futuristic predictions, so let's get to the design. Static, it's hard to discern that the "A" is made of dots and not just of rounded debris, which is not entirely bad, but I wonder if allowing a few of the dots to stray on their own would help make it clear that these are a bunch of dots, not just a distressed "A." However, online, the logo is amazingly convincing and engaging, bringing the concept to life, and I guess that will always be the challenge of bridging the ease of portraying real time online with the hardship of translating it to print, but it's nice to see that AWARD is taking advantage of digital printing to move this living identity concept forward.

Without sounding like a lame criticism of the organization, it's kind of advantageous that AWARD does not have thousands of members, because they would probably end up with an unrecognizable blob. In the end, this is a great identity for a creative organization and it's nice to see a client that allows the boundaries of identity to be pushed a little.

A little over five months ago Kraft Foods introduced its new corporate logo with an accompanying press release that stated: "[The new logo] signals to employees, consumers and investors what the new Kraft Foods is all about." This past week Kraft Foods modified its logo already. So, as a consumer, what this logo change signals to me about Kraft Foods is a company that can not make sound decisions to begin with and, once made, can not live with them. Which is a little harsh, but if we are to believe what we read in press releases, then let's keep corporations accounted for their spin.

New and old logos in big.

The biggest problem of course is not what the press release said but what the change says about the logo and its elements: They are inconsequential. It doesn't matter if the icon faces one way or another. It doesn't matter if the shapes are in one order or the other. It doesn't matter if the colors are solid or gradient. It doesn't matter if the type is bold or light. It doesn't matter if the smile is angled one way or another. These are all expendable visual cues that don't require commitment or investment. There is no stake from the company in the logo. Of course, it doesn't help at all that the new logo is no better at all than the old one, it's simply rearranging the deck chairs on this logo Titanic.

Thanks to Make Seriously for the tip.

Last week Creative Review reported on what I think is one of the biggest brand stories of the year: The new look for MTV International headed by Universal Everything. It would be bigger than big had this new look also applied to MTV in the U.S. but, unless I got my 60-plus MTV channels confused, this change only applies to the MTV International Network, which is still a hell of a lot of channels for a hell of a lot of people. What makes this big, and at the core of this identity change, is that the MTV logo will no longer mutate to the whims of every and any designer and animator that gets his or her hands on it. No, the logo will now only appear in its original, black and white wordmark designed back in 1981. What's funny though is that the designers never really intended for the MTV logo to be used as is, from the beginning it was seen as point of departure rather than a destination.

The new look can certainly be seen as more of a philosophical change than an actual redesign, since the design elements remain the same: MTV logo plus of-the-moment-cool imagery and animation around it. But as CR logo reports, the logo is now "sacred" according to MTV International's Vicepresident of Creative. What has been fun about the MTV identity over the years has been the complete opposite, the lack of sacredness of a logo that without its creative skins is really not that great. We assume it's great because of its association with a revolutionary brand — regardless of what you think of MTV's programming at the moment — but if this logo had been introduced for the first time today, it would get butchered. Why does the TV not match the dimensional angle of the M? Why the thin strokes to define the dimension? Why the droopy TV treatment? Etc.

Turning the logo into something sacred just seems unnecessary but when a brand is reaching nearly 30 years of reproduction, drastic measures must be taken to breath new life into it and, despite all of my previous reservations about the change, I do feel this is the punch-in-the-groin change the MTV brand needed, simply to try and take it into a new direction.

Below are a few images of the new design but I highly recommend that for the full details, more images and a few spanky animations you visit Creative Review.

In October of last year Brink's Home Security, the 26-year-old consumer and residential division from security and protection company Brink's, was spun off as its own company and went public. As part of the agreement, Brink's Home Security would have three years to drop "Brink's" from its name. This week the company announced its name change to Broadview Security.

Last year, we hired Landor, a top-tier branding agency, to help us develop our new name and brand. As part of Landor's research and development process, we involved employees and customers to help us determine the key elements of our organization, our brand and our legacy that are essential to who we are. In addition, Landor conducted external market research to ensure the brand resonates with suppliers, partners, customers, and other external audiences. Finally, we tested and narrowed down our choices. Then, Broadview Security was selected.

There is no confirmation or clarification whether Landor also did the identity, but hopefully they will be happier with this project than they were with Syfy. I do like the name change, it sounds comforting and it's probably better to take a few steps away from the Brink's name which is typically more associated with their armored trucks and people with bullet-proof vests and shotguns.

In terms of the identity, the softer and more vibrant blue is definitely an improvement over the gloomy and corporate dark blue of the previous logo, certainly more consumer oriented. I can perfectly imagine the pitch for this logo as the sideway parentheses being like hands protecting and cradling the consumers, and it sort of works. You do get a sense of protection and support. For some reason I keep wanting to see a smile with the lower parenthesis, but the logo does not seem to be smiling at me. For a consumer brand this is remarkably serious, which goes well with the subject at hand, so it's nice to see that they didn't go with lowercase, bubble typography to appear friendlier and warmer. Overall, if I were contracting security for my home, this identity lets me know that Broadview Security means business.

Thanks to Justin Molloy for the tip.

For most identity designers, companies like LogoWorks, LogoBee or whatever other cute name they acquire, are not to be taken seriously and are only seen as damaging to the industry by lowering (rather ridiculously) prices and quality. For offset and other specialty quality printers, companies like Vistaprint hold a similar position: cheap, fast, mediocre quality. If you have ever printed anything with a quality printer and anything with Vistaprint you know the difference but, let's face it, most civilians (non-designers) people don't — which is worth more than $400 million in 2008 revenue for Vistaprint, according to their 10-k. And Graphic Arts Online, lists it as the 40th top printer in North America.

Thanks to John Mindiola III for the tip.

With over 40 stations covering all of Mexico, a handful across north of the border in the U.S., and over a dozen south of the border in Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama and Ecuador, EXA FM is one of the largest radio networks in Latin America. This month EXA presented a new identity that takes advantage of its amazing short name — anything with an "x" in it is awesome — to create a simple and bold ambigram. The final execution is a little wonky, I think the shapes (particularly the counterspaces) could have been better resolved but the design concept is exa-llent. (Sorry, couldn't resist).

Thanks to Ramon M. for the tip.

No matter where you are right now — specially on a Monday — the thought of being in a Caribbean island surely does not sound like the worst alternative to reading about logos on a blog. But if, like the rest of us, you are stuck in front of your monitor the least we can do is show you some design related to Caribbean islands. Earlier this year the Department of Tourism of the U.S. Virgin Islands launched a new identity, designed by J. Walter Thompson, with a Mocko Jumbie, a traditional stilt dancer, as its main icon.

Detail of icon and logo in one-color application.

This is one of the best destination logos I have seen in a while. The exotic, vibrant and varied nature of the U.S. Virgin Islands is very well captured in the colorfully fragmented icon, which has a lovely graphic tension with the small upper body and giant lower body. The three stars representing the main three islands (St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas) add a certain magic flair to the logo without, I think, being too corny.

Detail of typography from PDF.

In terms of the typography, I'm really not sure what's going on, the press release PDF shows a very distorted treatment which is not quite as evident as the logo on the web site, but it may just be the size difference. If it's indeed intended to be so scribbly, I think it could have been a little less of an Adobe Illustrator Distort filter. Nonetheless, I have to admit it looks good when reduced.

So if you can't fly to the U.S. Virgin Islands any time soon maybe just get yourself a pair of stilts to go with your business casual attire.

Update: Thanks to first-commenter John for pointing out that the work is also represented at Iconologic. The image from their web site is shown above. The press release I quoted originally states "Following a series of focus groups and months of rigorous market research by Atlanta-based advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson […]" so I assumed wrong that JWT did the logo as well.

Thanks to Felix Sockwell for the tip.

The background on this will be brief as I lack in German fluency. Namics is a web design and development, and information technology company based in Frankfurt, Germany and from what our generous tipster informs us it is one of the biggest in Europe. They recently launched a new identity, designed by Zurich based firm Heads, that replaces their ambiguous icon for an ever-changing wordmark.

The best part is that the identity is set in… Arial.

Thanks to Adrian Nussbaum for the tip.

Thanks to Chad Kaufman for the tip.

The new logo is nearly identical to the old one, except for a bolder 6, which was surely changed to perform better on all sorts of production techniques. Old logo in blue, new logo overlays in yellow, so anything that's green remains the same.

Thanks to Eric Lohman for first tip.

Mozilla's Firefox seems to hold a place dear in web designers' and developers' hearts as a bastion of open sourceness; to be honest, I'm not the most well versed in these matters so I don't know if there are better open source browser options that have more street cred than Firefox — I'm sure there is some browser in beta called Cucumber (or whatever) that is more hardcore. But I digress. Point is that with Firefox there are no secrets, no here-is-the-latest-thing-and-you-will-like-it, it's all about involving others. And their process to upgrade their huggable, foxy icon to coincide with the release of Firefox 3.5 was no different. Perhaps to an excruciating degree.

As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, this was excruciating, at least for me and putting myself in Iconfactory's shoes. I can't imagine putting up every two (or four or eight) hours worth of work up for feedback before proceeding. Specially when all the iterations are things that you can decide on your own or in feedback with the client with a simple exchange. Making a big deal out of every iteration is, well, just making a big deal of it. But, definitely, major golf claps for exposing the whole process for everyone to see, I think it's a great exercise.

Old Firefox logo in black and white, with new Firefox logo in color overlaid.

Specially when the changes are so minimal. Looking at the before and after images requires Sherlockian powers of deduction, even more so than with yesterday's Victoria's Secret post. The changes are very subtle and, if you ask me, they are as good as the original intentions of the logo. I can't say it's an improvement because I don't think there wasn't anything in the previous one, merely two years old, that needed 14 iterations to improve. This is simply two ways of rendering a fox over a non-descript globe. You can make it more furry, you can make it less furry. You can have more land, you can have less land. You can have more shine, you can have less shine. Etcetera. Both options are perfectly acceptable. You could even see the inverse exercise, with Jon Hicks coming in in 2009 and fixing Iconfactory's logo from 2007. This isn't a shot to either company, as both icons are perfectly well crafted but it's a clear case of tomato and tomahto. Or, well, fox and fohx.

Thanks to Paul Quinn for first tip.