BP&O Voices
Rich Baird on Design History:
Bandai by PAOS, 1983
The story of PAOS’ 1983 logo for Japanese toys and games company Bandai....
GUT by &Walsh
Guts aren’t exactly glamorous. And the connotations of the word ‘gut’ are multifarious: there’s the gory (‘blood and guts’); the Germanic ‘good’; the straightforwardly corporeal; or for those with an interest in newer psychological findings, it’s a wondrous ‘second brain’. Ad agency folk, however, have long taken the word ‘guts’ far outside of the bodily. For many of them, ‘guts’...
Logo
Sandvik Group by Lynxeye, 2023
Sandvik provides manufacturing, mining and infrastructure industries with high tech engineering solutions. Its new logo, designed by Lynxeye, is said to represent progress and circularity, and further, visually summarise the commitment of Sandvik to advance the world through engineering. A simple use of heavy to fine lines, a diagonal upwards motion left to right and good balance of volume and...
Logo
Hometree by How&How, 2023
Hometree ‘excels’ in transitioning homes towards more greener heating and energy solutions. Wether it be boilers, home cover and ‘green finance’ Hometree has it covered. Transformation and the green agenda are the foundation for a distinctive new logo, an unusual ‘twist’ on the universal motif of a tree. Familiar yet distinctive and ownable, scaling up and down well. Placed within...
Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano by Landor & Fitch
In the words of synesthete Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music’. Unlike 19th-century architecture, contemporary graphic design is afforded no such static reprieve – it faces the challenge of animating the ‘universal language’. Whereas once the plastic arts could content themselves with merely freezing music, any contemporary attempt to visually translate music must now...
Logo
Antora Energy by Buddy Buddy, 2023
The sun has been depicted in many ways and across millennia, and has been a motif mined thoroughly by designers since the dawn of corporate identity design. It’s difficult to imagine where a designer might take it today in order to achieve both similicity and distinctiveness. Drawing on the strategic positioning ‘building blocks for a lower carbon future’ Buddy Buddy...
Miles by Buddy Buddy
Deodorant isn’t traditionally a hotbed of innovation: for the most part, ‘women’s’ products don an unremarkable raft of white packaging (freshness!); blue, pragmatic type; and vague, rarely-kept promises about lasting for 72-hours. For the men, packs are sombre shades of black, dark blue, or grey (manly!) and just as drearily practical as the women’s. Deodorant, for the most part, has...
Logo
Nationwide by New Commercial Arts, 2023
The world’s largest building society gets a new logo and corporate identity designed by New Commercial Arts. It’s the first significant rebrand for the bank in thirty years, and part of a drive to modernise it. Reduced to the absolute bare essentials, the logo favour usability–scaling far better than the previous mark–over the down-to-earth homeliness of what came before. The...
Paws Off! by Seachange
Anyone who’s ever had a dog, or just interacted with one, has likely spotted that over and above pretty much anything, food is the centre of their universe. Unfortunately for us, though, it’s not just dog-safe food that they’ll do whatever it takes to get their paws on: human food, it seems, often has the most appeal. But just as...
Marshmallow by Ragged Edge
A marshmallow is sweet, soft, pliable. Yet they are also resilient and surprisingly strong – who among us hasn’t enjoyed watching them perform surprisingly well under a hydraulic press compared to substances that much more obviously scream ‘structural integrity’? Perhaps this soft-yet-strong dynamic is why the name works for an insurance company. Or perhaps, more simply, the name works because...
Frydate by Skinn
Beyond its eye-wateringly strong beers, decadent chocolates, and waffles; Belgium is famous for serving up one beloved belt-buster that’s easy to eat, and deceptively hard to get right: chips. A new Belgian homemade burger and snacks offer, Frydate, positions itself far beyond a humble chippie and into the realm of ‘Belgian frymanship’-led ‘friterie concept’. To help it achieve its ‘insatiable...
Logo
ERM by Pentagram, 2023
Inspired by energy-generating turbines and creating two circles from displaced radial lines, ERM’s new logo is said to express transformation from both macro and micro planetary perspectives. Circles and contrasting line weights do indeed give these impressions. If you spend much time in the field of historical logo research (not sure there’s many), the work of Wim Crouwel and Ben...