What's your favorite company and design?

This is quite a nice one:

Logo for the Morgan Aero8.

*cough cough*

Talking about the origins of branding helps to clarify how the brand is supposed to interact with the buyer. Theres more to it than ‘this looks cool’. Back in teh olden days (when the internet was in black and white) goods were sold loose in shops. With some goods thats fine, flour is pretty much flour, sugar is sugar. Looks the same, tastes the same. No problem. With something like washing powder though, the power could be really good or really rubbish and theres not really a way to tell by looking at it. By the same measure you could pay a price for good powder one week and be sold rubbish powder by the same shop, out of the same barrel for the same price.

To tackle that manufactures had to start selling their goods in sealed packets with their name on so that their goods couldn’t be mis-sold or cut with inferior product. So a ‘brand’ in the first instance is a guarantee of quality, anything sold with the brand on should meet the expectations you have of it.

But once you’ve sealed it the customer can’t touch/taste/ sample the product so the other job of branding is to confer / infer the qualities of the product so that you can gauge whether the product is for you or not. So in many instances a brand has a duel purpose – to attract the people who would want to buy a product and who would enjoy it and also to sort of repel the people who wouldn’t want to buy it.

Also, in the days before (nearly) universal literacy, logos and shapes would allow the illiterate to identify their brand by shape and colour, hence nice simple shapes such as the Bass red triangle.

Haven’t we learnt the lesson yet that quality of product/service comes before a flashy logo?

I always thought this was quite a good one.

I don’t mind this on the washing machine

But the kettle would look a lot better without this.

No idea why. I just don’t think it looks as good as the other two. Trying too hard almost?

Brilliant you guys are ace. Loads to use and talk about, but I have to say after today’s lesson; I feel I am talking on deaf ears the students just didn’t get anything I was talking about. Perhaps level 2 is too simple to be going into detail about design.

I am looking at setting up my own business so this will all help me, if I can’t help others I’ll help myself.

Maybe off on a bit of a tangent, but I love Valve’s approach to running a business (and have done pretty well so far), check out their employee handbook

its taken me ages to find this video!

Love this – Vertigo records.

And this:

Yamaha.

And this:

And this one too:

Which is very clever if you know they make turntables.

The Mercedes and Audi logos are favourites too.