brand

From John Battelle: the new Skittles home page is a Twitter search. Interesting move, but something that can only work for a global consumer brand? And right now it's looking very meta, all the tweets are about the Twitter home page itself...

UPDATE: Skittles quickly swapped Twitter for a Facebook group, and a few days later moved to a Wikipedia page. The tagline is "Interweb the Rainbow," and in addition to getting points for the "cool, how'd they do that?" concept, it's also a very strong embrace of the power of social media sites to build the brand.

Speaking of logos, here’s a redesign that just hit it out of the park. In preparation for the 100th anniversary of the Good Housekeeping Seal in 2009, designer Louise Fili did a wonderful job of capturing the brand — the new seal looks like it’s been there for every one of those hundred years. Check out the swooshy “modern” seal it’s replacing on Brand New, where they discuss some of the confusion over which version is actually the new one. (We’re so ready to expect a wrong turn from corporate design that there’s almost a double-take when they get one right...)

Logo Design Love shows us some of the early iterations considered by the Obama creative team. Lead creative Sol Sender: “We developed a lot of logos. Usually we only develop two to four, maybe five. There were 15, 16 options, and we focused on three.” They explored quite a few variations on the 08/OB juxtaposition, and it’s interesting to see the early version of the final logo — the relatively small change to the red stripes makes a huge difference.

The first thing that pops into my mind when Saul Bass’ name is mentioned is the classic title sequence from The Man with the Golden Arm, one of just many amazing title sequences he did for directors like Hitchcock, Scorsese and Kubrick. Here’s a reminder that his logo work resided in the stratosphere as well: 12 iconic brands that have really stood the test of time.