Best Brands and Brand Names

We live in a world where almost everyone want to start their own businesses and brands because of the fact that people these days just do not see the purpose of working for someone else and coming with ideas which will make money for their employers instead of doing something which will benefit them by making that money for themselves. Well the thing is we all have the freedom and ideas to bring our names forward and even in the highest earning Forbes list if we are lucky enough to have all the odds in our favour,  something that stands in the way between us and achieving that success is that we all want to see ourselves there, what I am trying to say is that there will be people which will be always better at something you think you are good at and what you will envy is that some do it without even trying their best. Therefore one may have the best looking logo but it will always be a company out there which will have consumers lining up for their branded products even though your company offer an alternative and has a more meaningful name than the other. People often take care, personalize and put their names on the belongings which they feel good about, companies also has a way of showing that some products are offered by them and they do so by branding. Back in the 1950's Thomas Watson said "Good design is good business" and even today we can see people wanting to buy products owned by certain companies for the fact that those companies put a lot of money at markerting their brands in the most creative and entertaining way as possible.  The following are some brands which I as a graphic designer find very thought-through, elegant and having the ability to belong to any time period that is to come in the future.

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Adidas has been a brand which has recreations of their logo for long and yet all these logos are known to represent one company. The logo consists of three stripes in all the reproduction of it, what I have realized though is that the typeface used on the logo has never changed and it is also the main thing which causes people to recognize the brand even when it has different logos, so I would like to put the brand to the test by using just the typeface of the brand but in capital letters with the first "D" of the word facing the opposite way vertically in order to put emphasize of the three stripes as lines which go through the two "D"s and "I" to reproduce the three stripes but in a vertical stance.

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Although there are words that the Blackberry company is doing bad at the moment because of Android, Iphone and Windows Phone giving it a tough competition in the smartphone world, I have to say that the above logo and name(figure 2  and figure 3) that RIM(Research In Motion) presented us with is one of a kind and is complemented by it logo for the fact that a blackberry fruit looks the same way and how their phones are produced with a beveled look and qwerty keyboard buttons also shows that the company put a lot of designing to achieve such. Figure 4 and figure 5 below shows how the B's of the name can be manipulated to make the logo. I do not think I would have 

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Okay we now that we have seen about two of some of the best contemporary brands ever made in the history of conceptual corporate identity, now is time to see which is the third, I would like to bring forward that I did not know which one is best between the two so I picked them both to run in third place even though these are not brands are not against each other in any way (meaning there is no number one, two or three)and they are all good in different levels, Figure 6 is Firefox, the thing about this company is how they manipulated their logo to look like a fox which tail is fire seeming to run around the world, this internet launcher company presents how it is reliable in speed with just their logo, with respect I would not get an idea to better this if ever I am asked. Another is a Linux company using the South African philosophy of Ubuntu, which simply means "a person is a person through other people" and it is an open source computer software which means it can be downloaded or used for free without committing any fraud against the licenses as long as you do not sell it to others. Ubuntu uses a circle for their logo with outside smaller circles and if one looks closely they would see that it is actually three people holding hands in a circle, I would offer much change  to this as well but putting the small circular heads in align with something would do well for the logo and also make it easier for those who get fun in drawing or reproducing logos applying mathematics.

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Content and Style of Magazines; A Look Beyond the Words and Pictures

Now one would ask themselves why are hardcopy magazines still being produced and published in these contemporary times because the ideas of saving trees are growing as many people are introduced to technology, having to subscribe to read an article on the internet, on your smart TV and even being able to read the whole magazine on your tablet, e-reader or smartphone.  Technology is growing wildly and being more available to almost everyone everywhere than it ever was before, but well the thing with technology is that there is always something that needs to be improved in a certain device, all the elements taken to account such as the software, the hardware, and even the applications that run on a device will not always be perfect and run smoothly; some drains the battery, some causes glitches which may cause the device to operate more slowly or even jam and shut down uncontrollably. Therefore having to own a technological device then one must have the patience for all the odds which may be against you in t he future, and besides that having to own a device is not cheap, although one can save in order to have the money to buy one, having to maintain one will (in most cases) cost you more than the device's actual cost. It is therefore safer and cheaper to buy a magazine, not only that but in a magazine the people responsible for putting it together are the ones who decide how it should look and feel (we will look at this later), with the content shown on devices one would realize that not all the devices has the same visual feel when it comes to the content shown, for example a website may look clean and crisp on a HD TV(high definition television) and actually look bad on a tablet which does not support HD and have a low amount of ppi( pixels per inch). 

The Magazine we are going to look at is Design Indaba, now this magazine aimed strictly at creativity as designing includes one to have the ability to create something. The meaning of the word Indaba translates as news or concern depending on the content of the actual Xhosa or Zulu sentence in which it is used. Here one can see the word as either for the main aim for the magazine is targeted at not only those who study it and are in the profession but also by those who love art, design and visual concepts. The images below shows three of Design Indaba's cover pages for some of the issues published throughout the years. 

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In the images above we can see that the Design Indaba team takes the design principles very seriously by not adding too much information on the front cover of their magazines, the main ingredient for a good design is that less is more, that way everything is visual and the viewer does not have to struggle to look for some information. The design of their front cover consists of one unified element unlike other magazines which has different headlines on the cover page which are hard to read reason being that some even run on behind the model on the cover. Although for a design magazine, the logo is not heavily illustrated, it is just basic san-serif type with the letter "N" adjusted to have both an ascender and a descender.

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I know I said the Magazine did not give in all they had when it came to designing the name, but inside the magazine that is where all creativity explodes and aesthetic layouts are being experienced on, because unlike other magazines this one is aimed at the people who are about design and these layouts should somehow motivate the people which reads the magazine. This should not only look aesthetic but the feel of the magazine itself should remind a reader that it is a product of top-notch designers by using paper which is harder than the usual magazine and using glossy and matte inks where necessary. In figure 4 we see how the double spread is used to present an image and type that goes with it, in other magazines we would see that the space is full and this is because the more information they put out the better for them as a magazine, on this one it is all about making the design to own a page in the most beautiful way possible, the information is little and yet it is clear, the heading of the information is being played with in order to achieve the breath-taking presentation with text layered over one another to create a creative visual experience. Although in figure 5 we cannot see the whole word that is transformed out of the page, it is clear to make out that the whole heading reads: "Big in Brazil", I do not have a clue how the designer directed me to make that up without having to read the article but then again that is the whole point of design, it is giving the most information as possible by using as little elements as you can. And then "The Other 90%" placed in such elegant composition in figure 7 showing that no matter which words you put before which in a sentence, as long as the design is on point then the words will be read in an order they should be in when written by hand, I say written by hand because after seeing these I do not know about the person reading this blog but I would like to believe that design is a whole different tool.

Contemporary brands that reflect International Typographic Style

The International Typographic Style is an art movement which took place during the 1950's in Switzerland and it is also called the Swiss style. This graphic design movement was developed in order to cleanliness of the typographic material in the design, readability and objectivity of the designs were  the main cause for the development of this style as it was seen that the art movements which came before this style had complicated concepts merged with the ornaments of the type and was therefore hard to read. A representation of this style can be seen in the elements used as in the asymmetric layout of the whole composition, the use of a grid in order to perfect straight lines and the position of the text and objects, the sans-serif typefaces and the flush left, ragged right text used in the composition.

The following are examples of the contemporary logos and brands which represent the principles of this particular graphic design movement:

THE FOLLOWING IMAGES ARE LINKED TO EITHER SITES OF ORIGIN OR SITES OF THE LOGO INFORMATION AND DESCRIPTION. 

figure 1: Google

 figure 2: Adidas

 figure 3: BMW

 figure 4: ebay

figure 5: Facebook

 figure 6: FedEx

figure 7: Microsoft

figure 8: LG

 figure 9: Yahoo

figure 10: Playstation 4

A logo is usually seen as the personality of the company and that is one of the reasons most companies have changed their logos and brands in order for the companies to stand relevant through the changing times, in this case companies will go lengths in order to make sure their logos as simple as possible because of the information age we are in there are smartphone applications for example and in order for third party theme software developers to accommodate applications such as "Facebook" they should have the ability to designs its logo from scratch. This is one reason the logos and brands of the companies should be in their simplest form and have a grid-based layout or formulae.  

THE FOLLOWING EXPLANATIONS OF THE LOGOS DOES NOT CORRESPOND WITH THE ABOVE FIGURES.

Figure 1: Google

Google is an internet web search-engine company which now is well known for all other projects it works on such as the Android software for mobile devices and other applications it offers, at first its logo may have been a simple typeface which it still is now but it had a bit "bevel" effect on it and a shadow which made the logo seem as if it is three-dimensional, they now took off those effects and went with the more clean type with the same colours but took off the effects which belonged in 2005.

Figure 2: Adidas

Adidas is a sport's clothing brand which is well known for its simplistic three lines of the same thickness, during this age when one is wearing a brand that has the same 3 lines and yet it is not manufactured by Adidas then one may be made fun of by his or her peers for supporting a line which "is trying" to mimic the original as the teenagers would say. Adidas may have different logos for one brand but at the end of the day one still recognizes that all the products belong to one company for the way they all complement the brand.

Figure 3: BMW

BMW is a car manufacturer which is well known for its upper-class material and safety measures it takes to account for its customers to be safe in the road with their vehicles. The reason I chose their logo as one of the logos which reflect the Swiss style is because they are one of the companies which use circles on their logos, now as a graphic designer I assume most of us has tried to hand draw a circle and realize that no matter how accurate it seems to be, it is not. One needs two intersecting lines in order to draw a circle but in editing the circle to become something like what BMW has done then a grid will be needed for the design to be asymmetrical.

Here is an example of a logo containing circles:

Figure 4: Yahoo

Yahoo is also an online search engine as Google, but as I know from my peers it was mostly known for its electronic mail services and was less used as a search engine. Yahoo has went places with its logo changing it from time to time in order to match the contemporary simplistic style of following the Swiss design.

Just as the Figure 4: ebay above Yahoo first had a logo which was not aligned well and was more funky, now they changed it to look more professional. Although the first logo was sans-serif, Yahoo changed it on the latest and yet kept the aesthetic of the brand with clean typeface used in the new logo.

Figure 5: Playstation 4

Playstation is a company which manufactures game consoles and their softwares, the consoles come out as a new brand and a different logo with each device they put out, this includes the Playstation 1, Playstation 2, Playstation Portable, Playstation 3, PS Vita, and Playstation 4. With this kind of technology the game developers for the gaming  consoles has to show which console is able to play a specific game as not all of them can read the same disk games, each has its own set of titles and therefore the game developers has to show the logo of the device on the disk/ game title it is for in order  for owners of different consoles to know whether the game is compatible with their devices or not. The PS4 logo above shows symmetry with the left and right balance of the type and PS logo, the PS4 type was designed on a grid though the corners are perfectly round-shaped could be to portray the smoothness of the gameplay as one of the pioneers of the movement of the International Typographic Style Ernest Keller said that what you portray something should influence how you portray it.

Area of Specialisation: Surrealism

Surrealism is a modern art movement which is about the unconscious mind, the dream, the surreal world which the Surrealist saw as being the real behind the real, meaning that it is something which is real but we cannot realize it for we are spending too much of our attention on the real that we unlikely consider the real behind what we see as real, for example in our dreams we can see touch, feel, and hear, yet the things we dream are not really happening at the moment. We have an ability of dreaming of someone we never seen for years yet their voice and body movement is still the same as it was used to, therefore our brains have the power to bringing to life what we thought is no longer there, something which was real and now it moved behind the real that is real yet still it is hard to figure it out. Without this Surrealism movement the world would be boring today because we would be able to predict everything as we already know the function of the human body and nature, it would really be hard to impress people. Therefore the addition of Surrealism to the world has brought curiousity of how the real behind the real works, meaning that I may not have the ability to understand my own dreams but would be interested and may understand someone else's when they tell me about them.

Surrealism (art):

 

Surrealism (gaming):

Without Surrealism we wouldn't have had a special childhood where we enjoy playing as a character of Super Mario, a Italian plumber who looks Mexican and eats mushrooms in order to grow up, can spit fireballs and jumps on tittles for a living, he can break brick with his head but he dies when he touches a turtle, but its okay because "what doesn't kill you only makes you smaller"- Super Mario. All this makes sense when one has the controller and is playing the game.

Surrealism (design):

Surrealism (cinema):

If human being were not as clever to posses surrealist thought we would never ever though of a possibility of a human being flying, and even go to the extreme that the being is so strong that they cannot have scratches, wounds or dirt anywhere near them when they fight villains, we would not have the movie of the strongest hero in the world, but just to balance everything, make him be the weakest person on earth if a crystal is in his radius.

Surrealist (fashion):

Surrealism (literature):

Dada Collage

Dadaism is an art movement of the 20th century and was all about moving away from everything, one would say that this was a type of art which mocks art itself, the Dadaists wanted art to stand alone without representing anything, Dada had to be like nothing else. There the Dadaists were amongst the first to introduce new tools to the art industry such as collages, mass produced objects and their own literature with poem consisting of just sounds and no intended meaning to them, see the Dadaists were all about chance. As graphic design students we ourselves had to enjoy  a moment of the 1916's and create art using their style, the following is a Dada collage titled "Life is Exciting" by Laone K Kwati where he uses all which we value in the modern world although it is stressful, doesn't has to have meaning, remember that.

 

World War II - the atomic bomb

The atomic bomb is a nuclear weapon which was made by the United States during the time of the World War II and was dropped on Japan Hiroshima, three days later another one was dropped on Nagasaki. The bomb had a uranium-235 filling and weighed 4 400 kg and 10 feet in length, this atomic bomb below was named "the Little Boy", way too ironic for how much damage a little boy can do, the Little Boy is the nuclear weapon which was dropped at Hiroshima.

The Little Boy:

An atomic boy is a weapon of mass destruction which causes a cloud of smoke in a mushroom form that it is called a mushroom cloud. 

Mushroom:

 

Mushroom cloud:

 

A nuclear weapon can cause radiation to those exposed to it and even from interaction with those exposed to its chemicals, These are some of the survivors and those who had been too close to the survivors:

With so much damage being done after the dropping of the bombs, the people had to try to limit this threat by creating anti-nuke or anti-nuclear movements so that such does not happen again with masses of people protesting against nuclear power plants.

Utopias and Manifestos

First of all we've already dealt with the term Utopia earlier this year, which we defined as what one would see as a perfect dream world where everything is all purely good and everyone is happy to live during that time period. Now a manifesto is a public declaration of one's (or even belonging to a group) policy of aims, this is usually a written piece of announcement of some goals which had never been thought of before. People had been writing manifestos for years in which they identify their utopian ideals and what they see as to be the recipe for a "perfect world", one of these people which wrote a manifesto was Philippo Marinetti and he wrote a manifesto to accompany an art movement which he was the founder of, the Futurist movement. In the manifesto he introduces the new art as something which consists of speed, movement and simultaneity. Another art movement which was accompanied by a manifesto was the Dada movement and the De Stijl movement in which the authors of these manifestos also describe the art of that specific movement as something which had never been done before that is the primary reason these people were labelled the avante garde (people way ahead of their time). The following is a copy of a manifesto by the two MGI (Midrand Graduate Institute) in Bloemfontein in which they describe and give an idea of how today's youth would describe someone with an utopian ideal:

As things are in the modern day, it is very hard as an artist to come up with a different style of art that has not yet been created. The reason I say that is because everything has been done! Even mixing different styles to try and form your own has been redone many times. Although we have different styles of art, artists today sort of like plagiarize past artists like Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh and many others. Today it is very hard to be a successful artist because your art will be constantly compared to paintings like the three women by Otto, and even crazy works like the fountain by mutt.

The only way for an artist to stay relevant in today’s world is to tell himself that although whatever it is he dreams of doing has been done, he will just do it either way so he gets it out of the way. It is true that many art styles has been accomplished but no two people can experience or present something in the same way although it is one theme or concept.Therefore the artist should stay true to himself, follow his heart and make peace with the fact he won’t come with anything that might be that new to the world but can present something new using the old ways of doing it.

Art in today’s world is being used mainly as a political tool, either for or against certain political values or in short we should say is being used as political satire or metaphors to ridicule stupidity within the political system. Although some artists express themselves in an explicit and controversial way when painting political images they bring in other elements that have the power to influence a country in a negative way. A perfect example of the above mentioned situation would be the picture dubbed “The spear” because it took us a step backward in terms of fighting racism, although the person depicted does act in the manner that the image suggest.

As the Futurists suggested that with technology making everything easier and mass productions causes things to be made faster, today manifesto is simply seen as an article or a facebook post or note judging by people's reaction to it. The current generation is mostly interested in the future and seem to be bored with everything of the past as time changes they do not expect to live as their parents and grandparents lived because of the way technology has an influence on everyone's lives and causing them to desire urbanisation more. We cannot exercise our cultural traditions anymore because of how the Western  lifestyles had an influence on our lifestyles and values, the transition of our lifestyles from the villages to the urban modern world happened too quickly and with the simultaneity of too many things happening at the same time that all we want is a break from everything else including, school, studying, work, relationships, people and everything. It is hard to be recognized in anything these days as there is way too much competition and people who works harder than you with some even doing better than you would ever do without giving yourself any sleep and they doing it without even trying their best.