A Corporate Makeover
For Designers it’s no easy task
Cisco Systems, the San Jose, Ca.-based networking giant, kicked off a $100 million marketing campaign in October 2006 to remake its image in hopes of making Cisco a household name.
“We are trying to increase general awareness in the company,” Sue Bostrom, Cisco’s chief marketing officer said in a press release.
Cisco called corporate brand designer, Jerry Kuyper, principal of Jerry Kuyper Partners in Westport, Conn., and New York-based, identity specialist, Joe Finocchiaro to redesign the logo.
No easy task for any designer.
To began a project of this magnitude Kuyper said they sat down with Cisco’s Director of Brand Identity, Gary McCavitt, who requested a full investigation. “He told us he’d rather reel us back than not see what is possible,” Kuyper said.
There were three objectives Cisco wanted them to meet, Kuyper wrote in an email: 1) align the visual identity
of Cisco with a new positioning that was developed internally; 2) improve the
ease of reproducing the logo across all media, and; 3) to maintain some DNA of
the Cisco bridge which was a specific request from Cisco CEO John Chambers.
Cisco’s old logo consisted of a bridge enclosed in a box which symbolized the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, a concept born of the company’s early days.
Projects such as these require time, lots of time.
They began by systematically taking the existing bridge apart, Kuyper said. They also created several other concepts, he said. But since the bridge concept--a metaphor for connection and interaction--has been a part of Cisco’s visual identity since its early days the concept was difficult to beat.
Identity guru, Tony Spaeth, said in a telephone interview, there are four phases to the logo redesign process: analysis & planning; creative development; application design, and documentation/launch/maintenance.
Earlier this year when computer chip maker, Intel Corp., hired the brand consultant
firm, FutureBrand, to design its new corporate logo, they no doubt spent considerable
planning time when they decided to drop the lowercase "e" and "Intel inside" and
replace it with the Intel name inside a swoosh.
Analysis & Planning
That decision to drop the lowercase “e”, an example of planning and analysis, Spaeth said, could take up to 10-12 weeks.
"First you have to decide what you want to do and where you want to go," Spaeth said.
And, if everyone is in agreement and there are no internal battles then you start the exploration part of the planning phase. This part can go “very, very fast,” Spaeth said. A creative direction is decided at this point and you decide what criteria needs to be met, he said.
Creative Development
After spending 2-3 months in the planning phase then actual design work begins. The designer will develop 6-8 ideas to figure out which will work best.
The first part of the design phase is type exploration. The designer will take the name and look at each letter in as many typefaces as possible to see what the letter form will do.
Kuyper said, in his initial observation of Cisco’s logo, “the length of the name forced the logotype to appear small and the bridge symbol to appear heavy.”
Hence, the reason Cisco also dropped the word Systems from its name.
Once a decision is made about the typeface then brainstorming sessions begin. As many creative directions as possible is explored in as many possible ways imaginable, Spaeth said.
“It is not unusual to fill 2-3 walls with sketches,” Spaeth said. Teams of designers are assigned the same challenge and their design ideas are posted like crazy, he said.
If you are a lone designer, however, you have to force your own self to come up with as many directions and ideas as possible, Spaeth said.
Once all ideas are put on the table the favorites are picked and worked on harder and shared with the client for their response.
Spaeth said, “from this process 3-5 directions are selected for further exploration over the next few weeks…before a final design is selected.”
The Reveal
“Nothing offers a quicker glimpse of an organization’s image than its logo,” Spaeth said. When Bailey Doogan, a Professor Emerita of Painting and Drawing at the University of Arizona, explained her work on the Morton Salt Girl design in an Art Journal article she said, “the Salt Girl’s looks were very important.” The design project was named Mortie. “Mortie ended up with the requisite cuteness and spunkiness, strutting her stuff in a downpour,” she said.
When UPS launched its new look in March 2003, they had to consider changing the logo on about 88,000 vehicles, 257 aircraft, 1,700 facilities and more than one million uniforms around the world. John Menna, UPS’s vice president of marketing for Latin American and the Carribean, said in a Miami Herald article, “we actually believe…, this is the largest global rebranding in corporate history.”
When Spaeth wrote about the UPS logo redesign he said, “UPS provides a classic instance of the use of an identity change forcefully to redirect the corporate brand image, inside and out.”
A big job for both, designer and corporation.