Over the holiday weekend, word leaked that video game industry rock star Cliff Bleszinski (lead designer of the Gears of War franchise) is launching a new studio, Boss Key Productions. The brand new identity we created for Boss Key also found its way into the daylight as well.

But now it’s officially live, and we’re excited to show the world – just a prelude to the amazing things Boss Key has in store for gamers.

We always mention how much we love the LogoLounge wesbite and book series. So, it’s always a great honor for us to have our work included in another volume of the excellent and popular series. Some of our conceptual work for Mesí and final identity for Ignite are included in this volume.

Like a plot twist gone astray, the streaming film company, Netflix, has once again befuddled customers by reversing course with a recent brand announcement. Weeks ago, Netflix announced its intention to divide its streaming and physical mail business units into two separate entities, while simultaneously apologizing for recent price hikes. This effort was intended to kick off the renamed DVD mail service, christening it Qwikster. Apparently, public outcry and common sense won the day, as Netflix backtracked and rejiggered its plans.

This on-again, off-again game of brand Twister has damaged the Netflix name and its brand cache. While we can only guess at the business reasons that motivated these decisions, it’s plain to see how Netflix shot itself in the foot from a brand perspective.

In some ways, the rationale behind Netflix’s merry-go-round of christening, defending, and retreating from its plans doesn’t matter. Brand identities are tightly bound up in what people think and feel about a particular brand, and most everyday customers won’t ever get to know a company’s reasoning for an initiative. They shouldn’t have to — brand decisions are made in the present, where they affect, challenge, and reflect on an organization — for better or for worse.

We think it’s a useful and instructive exercise to rewind the film, so to speak, and walk through some of the reasons why Netflix’s actions are the equivalent of a disaster movie, or maybe just brand mistakes, seen in high definition.

Brand Equity Squandered
Netflix painstakingly built and earned its reputation as a forward-thinking, powerful content provider, employing a Long Tail strategy to re-envision the movie rental industry. The future-forward vision of delivering films and television to users initially focused on using direct mail as the vehicle for providing films quickly. Fast delivery, responsive customer service, and a super-optimized supply system were all strong brand attributes, and crucial to its growth. Coupled with the company’s commitment to developing better and better recommendation algorithms, all of these factors drove Netflix’s popularity and to a place as the leader in its sector. Cute little red envelopes became synonymous with fast service and the delight and surprise of receiving your next film in the mail. The website experience of Netflix was helpful, friendly, and user focused.

But changes have taken hold in the industry, with corporations moving towards streaming models of delivery, and while Netflix did it first (and arguably, best), it mis-managed the evolution of its brand. This Qwikster debacle grew out of this shift away from Netflix’s original model, and that, coupled with an earlier price hike, started pushing away many of the company’s loyal customers and fans. In surprisingly short order, Netflix began squandering many of the good feelings and past positive experiences previously associated with its brand, as users began to feel excluded and alienated from the formerly warm embrace of Netflix.

Business-friendly, User Hostile
The move to focus more on streaming users makes sense, and that change is a wise one for the company. But the initial concept of the Qwikster rollout was primarily built around the needs of the business, and not users. From a user experience perspective, it seems foolish and nonsensical for a single company to force current users to navigate two distinct websites, handle user accounts separately, and degrade the user experience by providing no integration between the related sites. These are not the actions of a company focused on its customer base, and it made many of the Netflix DVD/Blu-Ray subscribers feel like second-class citizens.

Better to Retreat Than Stand Your Ground
But we have to cut Netflix a little slack. Every brand has missteps. Remember the Apple Newton? No one is immune from screw ups, and the best and most popular brands get to make their mistakes right in the spotlight. So, a brand has to make a decision — to retrench, and fix the problems, or stand their ground and defend the decision. But we know what happened to other brands who’ve gone down this path. New Coke? Tropicana rebranding? The Gap logo? You can circle the wagons, but eventually consumer-facing brands need to kneel before their customers and offer the mea culpa. The above brands survived after all the hoopla, and the name of the game is moving forward after a mistake.

But Who Drives This Train?
Of course, this seems to suggest a dangerous precedent. How willing are companies and organizations to hold the line when a seemingly unpopular decision promises to lead to better places tomorrow? Good PR can’t always serve as the indicator for whether a decision is correct or not. Often, the issue is not the actual decision itself, but how it is communicated to the target audiences and public at large. But even if communication is pitch-perfect and completely on-brand, bad things still happen to good brands. Sometimes a temporary black eye is the cost of visionary leadership.

Still Wondering
All that being said, Netflix’s handling of the scenario was odd — with strange communications, then an out-of-the-blue reversal. The company’s delivery was odd, which caused many to speculate that this rebranding was setting up its mail delivery component to be spun off completely, in anticipating of selling it off to another entity. Perhaps Netflix wanted to distance itself from soon-to-be-obsolete technology, maintaining its technology-forward brand image. Or possibly, the company wanted to jettison the extra baggage of hard costs and labor of mail service, as it seeks to become the premier content partner for streaming devices and online.

In the end, we don’t know. But we do know that Netflix could have done a few things to avoid these pitfalls. Here are a few brief thoughts that might serve as a good reminder:

Keep users first. There is always a fine line between decisions that make good business sense, and those that are good for users. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made. But when in doubt, the more profitable decisions (in the long term) will always be for the good of customers.

It’s all about tone. How an organization communicates hard truths (like a price hike) is almost as important as the content of the actual message. Honesty, sincerity, and a clear message about why a decision will eventually benefit an audience will go much further than a strange, pseudo-apology. Directness, transparency, and consistency are the keys.

Don’t underestimate the value of a good name. Netflix almost threw away millions of dollars of brand equity by renaming part of their service. Forget the fact that the name was poorly-conceived (I still can’t spell it correctly!). Any change was a poor one, if it wasn’t going to utilize the goodwill, recognition, and singular awareness of a little red DVD envelope. When your organization spends years, millions of dollars in advertising, and the hard work of building a brand people can trust, renaming must be done with the most sober of mind, if it needs to be done at all.

So, as part of Tim’s Brand Standards and Identity class at Chicago Portfolio School, here are identity redesign projects from two students, Diane Johns and Megan King.

Megan has redesigned the logo for the DVD/Blu-Ray publishers, Criterion. She’s done a great job customizing and streamlining an existing typeface for wordmark use, and subtly works in the traditional “widescreen” proportions as part of her mark.

And Diane has reimagined Barnes & Noble with her own redesign. This clever mark is cobbled together from typographic punctuation, with an approachable, offbeat style for 21st century reading.

Great work all the way around, ladies!

Logos and brand identity are an oft-misunderstood part of design. A logo is not a brand. A logo is not a brand identity. A logo is a crucial part of an overall brand identity, but it’s just one part of a larger toolbox that contains things like color palettes, brand platforms, photo styles, graphic patterns, positioning statements, and much, much more. This is well-traveled territory. But one thing that’s rarely discussed in logo and identity circles is timing. For clients, when is it a good time to rebrand your organization?

It depends on who you ask, but there are a lot of avenues where it makes sense to initiate a logo redesign. Many prospects and clients see identity design only as a first-stage project — to be initiated early in an organization’s life cycle — for startups and newly-minted organizations. But truly, a new identity is valuable for all seasons. If executed thoughtfully and properly, a redesign is a powerful weapon that can have maximum impact across a variety of moments during the life of your brand.

Sidestepping the issue of how to rebrand your company (conversation for another time), we’ve laid out some of the critical moments when an identity redesign can make a major difference:

In The Beginning

It’s crucial to inaugurate your company correctly at launch, and have a cohesive and strategically-designed logo in place from the beginning, so you have a consistent and appropriate story to tell. Some startups believe that well-reasoned brand strategy and design are for “later,” after rounds of funding or IPOs. But the reality is that audiences don’t care about those things — they need a consistent look and message that ties into their experience with your brand. It’s far simpler (and less expensive) to get your brand personality in order at the outset than have to retool or make course corrections soon after launch.

When Things Go South

The economy continues provide a challenging environment for many organizations, so slowing sales might be your chief concern. When faced with a loss of revenue, smart organizations see the opportunity embedded within the situation. Rather than seeing marketing and design budgets as a place to cut costs in tough times, it might be better to hit pause and reconsider — by reworking your brand’s visibility with updated design and positioning.

While your competitors are hunkering down, it’s even easier (and often cheaper) to gain the mindshare of your markets, with a lot less competitive noise. While that’s happening, it’s important to ask some honest questions: Are you still communicating to the right audiences? Have your audience’s perceptions and needs evolved? Has their awareness of your organization changed? A research-based redesign of your logo and identity can help slow the decline and reposition you for a quick rebound.

All In The Family

Sometimes brands and organizations grow in an organic way, and you find yourself introducing products or services in response to market demands and internal changes. An identity redesign can help reorganize product lines, whether it’s for an overarching organization, or for specific product suites and services. In an age where many companies have diverse interests and audiences, sometimes radically different approaches are needed under one roof. Redesigning a brand’s identity and its presence in the world can often help clarify the goals for departments or groups within your company, or on the opposite end, provide much-needed consistency that prunes back wild applications of your previous identity.

The Times They Are A-Changing

The products, services, and initiatives of your organization don’t exist in a vacuum, so it’s crucial to ensure that your messages, overall look, and an identity application can flex over time when necessary. It’s important for your brand to adapt to new competitive forces, shifting markets, or other parts of a changing landscape. With the speed of business and commerce increasing, it’s crucial that an identity is able to bend, flex, and sometimes morph. If you’re saddled with an intractable, immovable brand identity, then it’s even more important to consider a redesign or “refresh,” to gain the ability of adaptation — whether it’s to new market realities or changing trends. What is fresh today might be stale tomorrow, and yesterday’s relevancy is tomorrow’s history. The best designed identities take this into account, and provide room to grow and change.

Back to the Fusion

Companies get absorbed. Buyouts yield new products and challenges. Mergers and acquisitions are ripe with opportunities for logo and brand redesigns, but it’s important to redevelop new properties in a way that’s appropriate and authentic — true to the story your organization is already telling. Sometimes these absorbed entities are so large that their presence shifts the brand gravity of a whole company, and a redesign is vital to rethink and redistribute the visual universe you now live in.

A Shift in Focus

Whether it’s caused by a new CEO or any of the above changes, sometimes organizations just need to change. A shift in organizational thinking can have a domino effect on all the ways a company sees itself, communicates, and relates to the world. This includes a visual identity, and this very public shift can be an important, outward sign of the positive and tectonic changes within.

We’ve just added some work to our portfolio — the redesigned identity of our client and partners, iam8bit. Take a look at the link for more details.

During the research phase of a recent identity project, we spent some time revisiting numerous examples of what we like to call “fluid identities” — logo systems that use multiple iterations of a mark (or series of marks) to communicate a particular aspect of a brand. These might take the form of a logo that changes with each viewing, or a singular mark that gets impregnated with different imagery, depending on the context. At one point, these types of projects were few and far between, but now these isolated examples have grown into a full-blown trend. The days of the static logo are certainly not extinct, but this persistent way of thinking about malleable identities seems like a portend of things to come.

A logo system comprised of many moving parts and contextual styles is clearly not right for every project, and this approach shouldn’t be used carelessly or without deep consideration for the brand connection. Instead, this way of thinking about a fluid identity is another (powerful) tool in the designer’s “bag of tricks.” Like any other design approach (whether it’s a grid style or a Photoshop filter) this is not a gimmick — it’s a way to solve the client’s identity design issues. The examples we’ve collected probably do the best job in explaining the needs and rationales for such a project, so you’ll find them below. We’ve grouped them into categories based on how their mechanics and fluid natures are utilized. We hope this article will serve as a useful resource, so feel free to leave examples we haven’t unearthed in the comments below.

Identities based on the brand’s DNA

Even though they are different, each of the following examples uses some concrete part of their brand’s DNA to populate the fluid nature of the identity.

Client: MML Mobile Media Lab
Designers: Etienne Bourque-Viens (Pixel Circus), Raphaël Daudelin (FEED), Michael Longford (York University), Anouk Pennel (FEED)
Description: Echoing the client’s multimedia approach, the identity “is constantly changing and will mutate over time.”

Client: AOL
Designers: Wolff Olins
Description: People use AOL ostensibly as a search engine, to find all sorts of things, so this identity leverages that multiplicity with a wide variety of supporting images.

Client: SECCA
Designers: Pentagram
Description:“The final identity conveys a continuing flow; the logo literally moves and fluctuates, echoing the constant change of SECCA’s galleries and community programs.”

Client: Casa da Música
Designers: Sagmeister
Description: This identity is based upon the shape of the Casa da Música in Portugal, the building designed by Rem Koolhaas.

Client: Get Up Hair Identity
Designers: Alexis Rom Estudio
Description: The DIY nature of the stamping process allowed stylists to customize their identity materials in a wide variety of ways.

Client: New Museum
Designers: Wolff Olins, Omnivore, Droga 5
Description: The unique shape serves as a containing window to emphasize or deemphasize different graphic elements to great effect. The logo is fluid, with New and Museum serving as ‘bookends’ to frame whatever message is needed between the words.

Client: MIT Media Lab
Designers: Richard The, E Roon Kang
Description: “The logo is based on an algorithm that produces a unique logo for each person. A custom web interface was developed to allow each person at the Media Lab to choose and claim their own individual logo for his/her business card, as well as a custom animation software which allows people to create unique animations for any video content the lab produces.”

Identities that morph to fit their design applications

Client: PWC
Designers: Wolff Olins
Description: This scalable identity uses shifting panes of color to adapt and fit any space or medium, using size and scale appropriately and powerfully.

Client: ITI
Designers: Heydays
Description: “The logo can be seen as just a flat artwork, but can also be seen as a cube felt with colors. The multicolored supporting graphic illustrates the logo folded out, and comes in a number of different versions. This communicates both the adaptability of the system, and life taking different directions. Appearing different on every surface, the visual expression is a representation of life, freedom and possibilities.”

Client: Nickelodeon
Designers: Tom Corey, Scott Nash, Alan Goodman
Description: This whimsical identity was designed with TV screen use in mind, and helped transform the flagging kids’ network, from 1984-2009.

Client: Knopf
Designers: Various
Description: The famous Knopf Borzoi logo changes with nearly each book jacket design, depending on the needs and whims of the jacket designer.

Logos that change based on external variables

Client: Nordkyn
Designers: Neue Design Studio
Description: “The visual identity is based on two main ingredients; our newly developed payoff, ‘Where nature rules,’ and weather statistics from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. A feed of weather statistics affects the logo to change when the direction of the wind or the temperature changes. On the website, the logo updates every five minutes.”

Logo enclosures that house value-adding content

Client: MTV
Designers: MTV In-House Design Team
Description: “We really wanted to see the logo featured in a new way, and this was really meant being able to house all the great things that are happening at MTV at any given time.”

Client: NYC Inc Company
Designers: Wolff Olins
Description: The city’s identity mutates with a grid-like structure and a variety of “fillings,” using color and photo elements to remix the logo in an endless variety of ways.

Client: Museum of Arts and Design
Designers: Pentagram
Description: “We wanted a way of writing the name that could embody the values of the Museum, something that seemed inventive and surprising, and that could appear in different ways on different occasions. The Museum, after all, is dedicated to artists who take typical forms—say, vessels, or chairs—and transform them over and over again. We hope that the simple forms of the new logo will permit just that kind of transformation.”

Additional factors to consider before undertaking a fluid identity project:

The pieces need to equal the whole.
Many audiences will never see more than one iteration of the logo system. So, if any individual variant is weaker than a singular logo would be, the overall identity will suffer. Showing 100 variations of a mark might look great in a design case study, but the multiplicity probably won’t matter to your audience — most of them will assume the logo they see is the primary graphical face of the organization. So, all the qualities of a great identity must be present in each and every variation of your mark, which is admittedly a tall order.

Does it fit the brand?
As identity designers, we are always of conscious of helping our clients’ brands stand out. The idea of doing something new or different isn’t insignificant, since our media maelstrom forces brands to do increasingly more to gain visibility. Designing a fluid identity can help bring that needed awareness to an organization, but it shouldn’t be a gimmick at heart. This way of thinking about identity design only works when it’s an outgrowth of the brand’s distinctive DNA – some essential characteristic of the company or organization, whether it’s the nature of change, the style of a building, or illustrating the whimsy needed to play in a specific industry. Some brands might need to show diversity of service or product, while others see flexibility as a crucial competitive advantage, and other organizations have evolution written into their foundations.

Is the system/usage built to support a modularity?
A fluid identity works especially well for Nickelodeon and Knopf, because of the structure the logos exist in. Both companies have flexibility to play with the makeup or look of their logo, but this additional freedom only works because the logos live within rigorous support systems — the Knopf Borzoi always appears on the spine of a book it’s tied to, its size is relatively consistent, and it always shows up in that familiar paperback/hardcover environment. The regular use of media and placement adds a consistency that a pocket folder or Times Square billboard could not. Nick’s identity worked because viewers were guaranteed to see many permutations of the logo per hour on their television screen, preventing any confusion or weakness that the single viewing of one version might cause.

What do normal logos do well? (Maybe you don’t need a fluid logo)
It might be enticing to consider a variable or fluid identity for your client, but before you decide that a changing logo is the ticket, consider making your current mark work harder. Maybe it just needs to be more flexible across applications to have the visceral impact that’s needed. A well-designed, thoughtfully-considered mark can be ready to make the jump from the printed page, to a web version, to an animated intro on the latest iGadget. Good designers have those end requirements in mind before putting pencil to paper, and they stay at the forefront throughout the project duration.

Correction: Additional information about the New Museum identity has been added with help from that project’s director, Suzie Ivelich.

Update: The Damn Good call for entries deadline has been extended to Monday, February 28th, 2011. More info here.

We are super excited to announce the official call for entries to our upcoming book, Damn Good: Top Designers Discuss Their All-Time Favorite Projects. Hexanine has partnered with HOW Design Books and Crescent Hill Books to deliver this design inspiration book, our very first!

In thinking about what separates great design from the crowd, we recognized that passion drives the best design work, and this book will provide an opportunity for designers to explain, discuss, and brag about the work that represents their favorite projects. Any work you’ve done, in brand identity, packaging, print, interactive, or another category is fair game. Submissions aren’t limited by their launch date — your projects could have been developed last month, last year, or whenever.

Also, we’re doing something rather unique in this space — one chapter will feature ‘axed projects’ — great work that you loved, but the client rejected. Whether it was recession budgets, conservative clients, or office politics that shelved your project, now is your chance to show it to the world. Axed projects will be featured in our “Cutting Room Floor” chapter so they can live again.

There’s no cost to enter (just a $25 publication fee for chosen entries) and all submissions will be judged by us, the Hexanine partners, Tim Lapetino and Jason Adam. We’ll select more than 100 projects, and 12 will be chosen for case studies, devoting two pages and an interview to your specific design entry. Damn Good will also be distributed internationally and sold in more than 20 countries. You can get more details about the book itself from our PDF info sheet.

So, create an account at Crescent Hill’s online submission site and submit your work! The deadline for entries is February 14, 2011.

We’ll have more information as we move closer to the book’s Winter 2011 launch, including some exclusive sneak peeks. We’ll also give some insight into the design process, and what it takes to judge a book like this. Stay tuned, and stay Damn Good!

Edits: The number of case studies has been changed to 12, and the book’s title is now “Damn Good: Top Designers Discuss Their All-Time Favorite Projects“.