eBay rebrand critique

eBay rebrand / Lippincott, 2012

I’m sure most of you who follow my blog will be familiar with Brand New, the US-based critique of all things corporate identity.

I highly recommend you read their take on the new eBay logo that has recently been unveiled. It’s a well-articulated & concise tearing apart of one of the most boring identities seen in recent years.

“This logo is not bad. Let’s establish that. There is nothing wrong with it. The letters haven’t been mangled, the colors don’t induce puking, and the ™ is, amazingly, all lowercase to match the logo. But this logo is not good either. Very far from good actually but unfortunately not so far that it demands the full berating it deserves…”

Enjoy.

World of Logotypes

A selection from World of Logotypes / Published 1978

I don’t think I will ever get bored of looking at logos from the 60s and 70s. Aqua-Velvet has posted up a few really nice ones from the 1978 book World of Logotypes. You can see more over at Eric Carl’s Flickr too.

NASA 1976 Identity Guidelines

NASA 1976 Identity Guidelines

One of my ex-tutors from college is lucky enough to own this incredible document – an original copy of NASA’s identity guidelines from when they re-branded to the ‘worm’ logo, dated January 1976. He very kindly sent me some black & white copies of some of the spreads. One day I will own this book.

Plancast logo development

Plancast Identity / Alex Cornell, 2010

This is a really great blog post about the process of logo & brand development by Alex Cornell. I’ve blogged about Alex’s solo work before and I’m sure mentioned that he contributes to the excellent ISo50 blog, which is fast becoming one of my favourites.

The great thing about ISO50 is the combination of posts about really beautiful graphics/objects and weighter posts like this one that actually talk about visual concepts and the process of design (they had another interesting one a few weeks ago by illustrator Matthew Lyons.) I find it fascinating to read about the process that goes into design – specifically logo/identity design – and I just wish all the clients in the world would read stuff like this to appreciate what designers do.