Although I don't disagree with Don's characterization of my having an "incomplete knowledge of the facts," I offer a serious defense of my not-very-serious aside from an earlier post. Don quotes me:
On Mar 3, 2012, at 12:33 PM, Don Norman wrote:
>> *The AT&T company went through some fundamental changes and then the identity was essentially sold off (to people who then went on to destroy one of the company's biggest assets--the Saul Bass logo) so the current AT&T has just about nothing to do with this discussion.
> -----
> Saul Bass logo? As if a logo is what makes a company great? Anyone who
> thinks a brand is a logo, well, .... Changing the logo was a small
> side effect of a much larger change. It needed to be changed (see
> below)
[snip]
> Another good friend of mine later on became head of AT&T Labs (and CTO
> of the entire company), but by then, the game was over. I think it was
> this person who got rid of the logo. But he should have. Logos
> represent something, and the something that this logo represented did
> not exist anymore. AT&T at the time was collapsing.
I, of course, don't think that a brand is a logo. I'm hardly the first to argue that, despite what graphic designers tell their clients, brands are more likely to enhance visual trademarks than the other way around. If Apple and Nike were unsuccessful, nibbled fruit and fat checks would not be broadly admired.
AT&T as a brand name for the telephone market--in my part of the world, mobile telephone service--had some amount of equity. If it did not (or, rather, if it had negative equity), pushing into new service areas with that name was foolish. I don't believe for a moment that much of anyone looked at the newer Interbrand mark along with the AT&T (pardon me, at&t) letters and thought "This is a service that I trust because of its heritage as expressed by the retention of its initials but this visual change signals that they are not the corporate dinosaur I thought they were." [Yeah. Of course nobody thinks out of a marketing script. Make that, I don't think they felt anything toward the brand that approximates that statement.]
A change in look along with a change in direction that the audience can understand can be effective. A change in look along with a confusing muddle merely adds to the feeling of confusion. AT&T as a brand has been a giant swirl of confusion.
Some might argue that a change was needed to signal that it was a 21st century company but unless one defines the 21st century as cute but ham handed, the current mark doesn't seem to live up to that claim. I'm not one to think that Saul's legacy (or Paul Rand's in Interbrand's UPS redo) is somehow holy. In the case of UPS, I think they overcame the problems they needed to while losing nothing in equity. In the case of AT&T, I'm not sure what they accomplished. But I do plead guilty to a graphic designerly formalist objection to the particular visual results in both cases.
Gunnar
----------
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
[log in to unmask]
+1 252 258 7006
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
|