New logo: Glasgow Airport

When you want to use typical iconography to represent Scotland, you have two options. The saltire from the Scottish flag or the thistle, Scotland's floral emblem. When a new logo was created for Glasgow Airport, they went with the former.

Glasgow Airport is the second busiest airport in Scotland and launched a new logo this week, on July 10. This is part of major rebranding of the country's largest airport corporation which has meant that all airports have been given independent brand identities. The logo, featuring a nice geometric thistle-G, was created by Designline in Paisley.

New logo: Hightail

YouSendIt, the web service we all use to send large files, announced this week, July 10, that it was changing its name to Hightail. No design credit given, but a video that accompanied the launch suggests it was at least partly done in-house.

The company says it wants to be about more than file sharing. The existing highly functional name, just like competing cloud storage services (Dropbox, Skydrive and several combinations of cloud, drop, send and file). It was also seen as limiting, while the new more aspirational name is broader.

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.

New logos: K2 and Frisbee

K2 and Frisbee are two Italian kids channel broadcast for free to most of the country. Their parent company was bought by Discovery Communications earlier this year, and on June 30 they both got new on-air looks-

K2 is heavy on action and adventure cartoons for boys, while Frisbee caters more to girls. Those targets are clearly more apparent with the new logos.

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.

New logo: Norwegian Environment Agency

The Norwegian Environment Agency (Miljødirektoratet in Norwegian) is a new government agency formed on July 1 from the merger of the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management and the Norwegian Climate and Pollution Agency. The visual identity for this "super agency" was developed by BrandLab Oslo.

They wanted to position the agency as the agenda setter in Norwegian environmental politics. This was done through an elegantly tight expression with a stylised M in a mix of blue and green. BrandLab also developed imagery guidelines, website design, icons and typography.

New logo: Wallonia

The government agencies in Wallonia, the southern French-speaking half of Belgium, unveiled a new logo on June 27. This new logo is part of a marketing effort to promote Wallonia abroad and will be launched in full before the end of the year. It was developed by communications agency VO-Event in Brussels.

The logo consists of five dots and can come with four different "auras", coloured pattern representing qualities such as accessibility and technical know-how.