Hans Kleefeld (1929-2016)

German-born Canadian designer Hans Kleefeld died earlier this year. He was a prolific designer in the 60s and 70s, designing many memorable trademarks for Canadian companies. Most of his professional work was performed at the Toronto-based firm Stewart & Morrison. After leaving S&M he would go into teaching his craft at the Ontario College of Art.

Here follows a compilation of trademarks designed by Kleefeld while at Stewart & Morrison. A few of these, like the Toronto Zoo and Bank of Montreal marks, are still used today in some form. Others are long forgotten.

Interview: Adrian Bailey talks TV One rebrand and Eyeball/ModOp merger

When American cable channel TV One relaunched in early February, it did not just mark a shift in the channel's programming and position. It was also a sort of culmination in the merger between the two companies responsible for creating that new look. Those companies were branding agencies Eyeball and Modus Operandi, and the TV One rebrand was their first common project to be made public.

I caught up with Adrian Bailey, creative director from Modus Operandi, to talk about the TV One project and the ongoing merger.

The two agencies have somewhat different backgrounds. Eyeball is best known as a New York-based agency with a great track record in broadcast and motion design. A couple of years ago they also expanded across the country by opening new offices in Miami and Los Angeles. Modus Operandi (or ModOp) has a strong background in digital design. Adrian describes their skills and capabilities as highly complementary:

“The things we were individually pushing, such as doing more 360 integrated campaigns, were really made a reality after joining together. Our work and experience is a lot more robust and well-rounded now that we're working together.”

Raymond Loewy 120

Raymond Loewy was born in France on November 5, 1893 and immigrated to the United States in 1919. Here he would employ himself as a fashion illustrator and window decorator, gradually gaining prominence before becoming one of the leading industrial designers in America. A highpoint of sorts was October 1949 when he was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

Being an industrial designer, Loewy designed just about everything. Locomotives, cars, interiors, gas stations, packaging and, of interest to this blog, trademarks. The Loewy brand of design would eventually travel the world when he set up a subsidiary in his native France and worked with clients in Japan.

To mark the 120th anniversary of Loewy's birth, here's a compilation of some trademarks made by his companies, Raymond Loewy Asscoiates, Loewy/Snaith and Compagnie de l'esthethique industrielle (CEI). Some of them are design classics, still used today - Shell, Formica, Spar, LU, New Man. Others are obscure and forgotten. The trademarks were often only one of many designs that Loewy created for his clients, he would often also design products or interiors to work with an overall design programme.

Milton Glaser and Grand Union

Grand Union was once a national supermarket chain in the United States with stores all over the country. Several decades later if had gone through a steady decline until it was just a handful of stores in north-eastern United States. That came to an end at the beginning of this July this year when the remaining stores were rebranded and Grand Union was confined to history.

Why is this particular supermarket chain of interest to this blog? Because for a long time its identity was shaped by prominent New York graphic designer Milton Glaser. His cooperation with Grand Union started in the 1970s when then-owner James Goldsmith decided that his chain needed a new look. Rather than hiring one of many firms specialized in retail design, he contacted Glaser who was famous for designing the I Love New York logo, psychedelic posters, and magazines like New York and Esquire, but didn't have any professional experience in retail.

Walter Landor 100

Today is the 100th birthday of Walter Landor, founder of Landor Associates, one of the world's leading branding firms. He was born as Walter Landauer in Munich, Germany, on July 9, 1913. The son of a prominent architect he was strongly influenced by the modernist movement and realized that ha wanted to design for a living. After studies and practice in London, he eventually came to the United States where settled down in San Francisco and founded Walter Landor & Associates in 1941 with his wife Josephine.

For its first twenty years in existence, Walter Landor did a lot of work in packaging. Much of his success was built on designing beer labels. It wasn't until the 1960s that he would fully venture into the nascent corporate identity field. Since then, Landor Associates has produced thousands of brand marks for prominent clients around the world.

A full biography can be found Landor's website. This post will celebrate Walter Landor's legacy by featuring some of his firm's earlier brand marks from the 50s up until 1974, when Walter Landor retired from day-to-day operations.

Landor was known for pioneering some research-based methods for brand strategy, but that didn't stop his firm from also producing beautiful design. Some are classic design cases, others all but forgotten.

Alta Vista brand history

Yahoo announced a couple of weeks ago that AltaVista would close down today. A good excuse to go through AltaVista's history in logo form.

For those of you who don't remember it, AltaVista was an early search engine, one of the first to use crawlers and indexing to give you results on whatever topic you wanted. It was developed in 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation, partly to showcase its processors, and would soon become the leading search engine as the Internet was welcomed into people's homes.

Alcoa (1963)

The American aluminum giant Alcoa is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year. In addition, it is the 50th anniversary of its corporate mark, introduced in 1963 when the company celebrated its 75th anniversary (are you with me?). The Alcoa mark is also notable as being one of Bass' early big clients after seriously moving into corporate identity design. Not only was "the Aluminum Company of America" a big company that sold just about anything that could be made from aluminum, it was also a very public brand that advertised nationally.

New trademarks introduced at this time were often simple and abstract, replacing cluttered old shields and seals. Not so this time, as Alcoa had already gone through this process in the mid-50s. At the time a firm known as Harley Earl Associates had designed a striking new mark consisting of two triangles. Unfortunately, the application wasn't as pure. The two triangles were typically enclosed by a rectangle with rounded corners with the brand mark, some additional text and, oh, a miniature version of the old shield symbol. In addition, it was potentially not unique enough to be trademarked.

2012 in review

To end a great year, here's a summary of the noteworthy and the memorable in brand design during 2012.

Mr Kipling brand history

Earlier this year, you could read about a new design for Mr. Kipling, a classic British brand for ready-made pies and cakes. The history of its conception and subsequent development in the last decade is a somewhat interesting one.

The brand was created in the 1960s by Rank Hovis McDougall who wanted revitalize their cake sales, but also wanted to utilise a new bakery. When the brand launched in 1967, the range included 20 products that were sold in premium boxes with handles.

Mr. Kipling himself never actually existed, he was an invention by marketing men who wanted to give a traditional family feel for something that is actually industrially produced. This was reinforced through ads suggesting Mr Kipling was a small shop baker, specifically in TV ads where James Hayter did the voice of Mr. Kipling. A successful example of the perhaps a bit disingenuous tactic of implying great heritage where none exists.

Spanair brand history

On January 27, the Spanish airline Spanair became one of the first European airlines this year to suspend its operations, followed by Hungary's Malév within a week, and perhaps more to come as debt-burdened governments withdraw support from loss-making airlines. To mark Spanair's demise, here's a summary of how the airline's corporate identity has changed through the years.

Spanair was formed in December 1986, and commenced flights in March 1988. The logo at the top of this page was probably the airline's first logo, a wavy orange-blue symbol and a Berling Bold wordmark. It was initially a charter airline, and the planes had a plain white livery with the symbol on the tailfin.

Malév brand history

The end of a national airline means the end of a brand that has been a source of pride for a nation for well over a half century. The changing structure of the worldwide aviation market has seen the collapse of the likes of Sabena, Swissair, Olympic Airlines and Alitalia. Some brands were confined to history, others were carried over to a slimmer organisation formed to fill the hole left by the flag carrier.

Malév Hungarian Airlines, the Hungarian state-owned airline, is the latest flag carrier to meet this fate, as it abruptly ceased operations last week after two decades of economic struggles. Unless a plan to revive the airline is realised, this will likely mean the end of a brand that has been in operation since 1956. To mark this occasion, here's a short summary of Malév's corporate identity through its existence.

A Lambie-Nairn showreel from 1996

I recently stumbled upon an old showreel and a presentation video from the UK broadcast design agency Lambie-Nairn that had been uploaded to Youtube by a user called "deeman3000". Founded in 1976, Lambie-Nairn established itself as a leading broadcast design agency in the late 1980s/early 1990s. These videos were probably produced in 1996 and mostly feature material created during the five years prior to that.

This was during a time when it seemed like the company strived to rebrand a channel in every European country. Aside from the acclaimed work the BBC, Lambie-Nairn also worked with other UK broadcasters as well as clients in France, Germany, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Benelux and Russia.

Although every project is unique, one can detect some recurring methods in this body of work, like many filmed sequences featuring different props or actors with heavy makeup, rather than three-dimensional computer animation. Many of these could be shown on television today, if properly remastered for high-definition, but they are of their time and would probably be considered too high-brow in today's environment.

But most of all, they are marked by a certain British wit and sober design sensibility, even in some of the fast-paced epilepsy-inducing examples.

This period was not the peak for the agency. The very next year, it would win the prestigious assignment to rebrand the BBC. Not only did the company create the current straightened-up BBC logo. The Beeb was at this point gearing up to launch a string of new digital channels, both regular public service channels and advertising-funded ones as part of the UKTV partnership, and this would provide steady work for Lambie-Nairn over the following years. If you were watching the BBC between 1997-2003, you could expect the channel branding to be created by Lambie-Nairn.

The agency also continued its international activities, delivering new branding to clients like VRT Belgium (1997), Euronews (1998), the Sci Fi Channel (2002) and LCI France (2005) as well as new Middle Eastern networks like Alhurra and Adu Dhabi TV. It would also move into non-TV branding, and was behind the successful launch of O2 in 2002.

Martin Lambie-Nairn himself left in 2008, one of his last projects being a relaunch of BBC News. Most of the creative professionals who worked with him during these years have also moved on to other agencies.

The two videos can be seen below, along with some stills and short descriptions of the work featured in them. Martin Lambie-Nairn published a book in 1997, and it provides extended descriptions of the work included in these videos. Unfortunately, it is out of print and is somewhat hard to get hold on if you aren't close to a UK library.

Swiss Miss brand history

Swiss Miss is an American brand of cocoa mix powders and chocolate puddings. Having been with the American people for half a century, it is one those classic brands that many remember growing up with.

Thanks to the Internet, innovative companies and people willing to share their collections, we can get a good view of how the brand and its packaging has progressed through the years. A special thanks to Jason Liebig who has given me permission to use some images from his collection. If you want even more packaging nostalgia, you should visit his Flickr photostream.

Swiss Miss original logo, used from the 1960s until the mid-1980s.

The "instant cocoa mix" powder, which creates delicious hot cocoa by just adding water, was developed by Sanna Dairies in Wisconsin, who were also manufacturing instant dry milk. It was originally served on airlines. In the early 1960s, Sanna Dairies were packing the product under the name "Swiss Miss Instant Cocoa Mix" and selling it to grocers. The original packaging was developed with "old world" aestethics, with decorative flowers and an old calligraphy typeface for the logo. A newspaper article published in February 1963 explained it thusly:

"The chocolate flavor developed by Sanna Dairies is reminiscent of delicious Swiss milk chocolate... thus the name and the attractive "old world" design package."

The black-and-white image of a Swiss Miss package on the right is from a 1962 ad. It may well have been the very first Swiss Miss packaging design.