Awarding excellence in corporate identity

Jury

After last year's LogoLounge jury, this year I have the honor to participate in Identity's Best of the Best international jury along with design legends I've been looking up to for many years. Here are the jurors:

• Ruth Klotzel — Vice-president of ICOGRADA, founder of Estudio Infinito (Brazil);

• Minato Ishikawa — Founder of Minato Ishikawa Associates Inc. (Japan);

• Ivan Chermayeff — Co-founder of Chermayeff & Geismar (USA);

• Emma Booty — Creative director of London office (Landor Associates, UK);

• Ken Cato — Co-founder and chairman of Cato Purnell Partners (Australia);

• Prof. Erik Spiekermann — Founder of MetaDesign and Fontshop, member of German Design Council, president of the ISTD, International Society of Typographic Designers (Germany);

• Cristian "Kit" Paul — Co-founder and creative director of Brandient (Romania);

• David Carson — Founder and principle of David Carson Design (USA);

• Alexander Faldin — Founder and art director of fallindesign (Russia);

• Tony Spaeth — Independent brand consultant, founder of identityworks.com (USA).

Contest

From Identity's press release:

The international award scheme, now in its second year, is designed to recognise excellence in logos, trademarks and corporate identity.

In 2006, 970 submissions from 26 countries resulted in 10 prizes. View the results.

This year two new categories have been added and the award scheme has been endorsed by Icograda. Entries will compete within 12 categories (6 categories for logos and trademarks, and 6 categories for corporate identity and packaging).

Act!

I invite all Romanian designers to submit their work to Best of the Best 2007. We all have things to prove and misconceptions to turn around. We all need to get rid of the provincial status quo that plagues our industry and open up to the world.

In 2006 Brandient demonstrated the potential of Romanian design by winning the most awards and nominations in this international contest — now it's your turn.

Major events, past and future

Questions

Catalin asks a bunch of bloggers, myself included, three questions: which was the biggest story of the Romanian Internet in 2006; what will be 2007 known as — if 2006 was the year of the blog; and what personal plans or projects I have related to Internet.

Because I am certainly not an Internet industry insider — nor even an acknowledged outsider — I don’t think I can give a competent answer. However, I'll tackle the first question from a subjective angle that may be of interest.

Metropotam

For me, 2006 was the year the first entrepreneur envisioned and developed an Internet product not as a web site/Internet service, but as a brand. I am talking about Metropotam¹, an innovative city-guide weblog about Bucharest, whose identity and tone of voice were specifically designed for a certain audience.

Common knowledge says that Internet is an elusive beast whose quirky nature makes communities hard to build in any other way but from a grassroots level, with spectacularly limited control over the process, relying only on the code, the looks and a couple of coarse-grained marketing tools.

Metropotam (coined from “metropolis/metropola” and “hippopotamus/hipopotam” — the witty, self-ironic urban creature) employed some pretty sophisticated tools (brand rhetoric and an avatar, to mention a couple) to achieve differentiation and emotional bond.

And it worked. Meeting one of Metropotam’s founders at a cup of tea a couple of days ago I was happy to learn that the stats are good and climbing while the community grows.

¹ Full disclosure: Metropotam — the brand — was developed by Brandient.

Is 'graceful aging' an oxymoron?

I have friends telling stories about their grannies running around in sport shoes and watching MTV, young at heart like when they were 20. Except they're 70. What about the Stones? They committed every kind of excess imaginable (and — I'm sure — a few that could take my imagination by surprise) and yet they're still able to bounce around the stage for two hours straight, while the messages I got from the elders is straightforward but scary as hell: aging is God damn awful.

Is there any decent explanation for this?

This seems either a big sales promotion or a Russian roulette, depending on the side you're looking from. Although we're young and prefer not to be looking at all.

"You throw balls at me? I throw balls at you!"

People throw tags at me and — I know! — I'm too slow to play game. There's a book I would like writing about (that's another, old, old tag), but for now I'll try and put together a list of five things.

3 glorious things you might have not known about me

1. At 18 I was a programmer, writing (among other things) communication protocols for Z80/8080 processors. Telepat, my first application written in C, was an inter-platform (8080 CP/M machines to Z80 ZX Spectrum home computers) communication software. A man needed to program his I/O ports at the lowest level, using assembly, in those times. In spite of the fact that I was drawing on every flat surface in my ecosystem, I had absolutely no plans to pursue a career in design: I could only picture myself as a programmer. In America.

2. I am more and more of a vegetarian. I gave up red meat and I eat a lot of fish instead. I still eat chicken, but slowly-slowly I'll get rid of that, too. And — God! — I was a mean, mean carnivore only a couple of years ago. People change. This things happen as a couple of friends dear to me are de-vegetarianizing in order to pursue the decadent delights of mici and sarmale (heavy, meat-rich Romanian food specialties).

3. I never smoked. My parents were smoking so I regarded it as something terribly uncool as a kid. Funny dynamics these things have — how the intergenerational conflict can sometimes work for the better. Rather rarely, but still...

Continue reading "Five" »

I don't enjoy writing about politics, but as 2006 was drawing to an end, developments were building up.

A few remarkable specimens crawled out of the sewers lately but they're marginal compared to the one who has the power to rule them all. And it's not even his merit. It is media's.

Some journalists have little reason for sleeping well at night — during 2006 they proved crassly irresponsible in a self-distructive kind of way by promoting the extreme-right "militant of light," Mr. Becali, a growing force that once created by reckless media people is rapidly becoming a serious menace.

Consequently, he clocks in second now in the polls and experts predict his figures will continue to climb in 2007. Consider the following dystopian scenario: a heart attack or an accident disables President Basescu in near future. What then?

Is hell about to freeze over (again) this year? You can bet your ass it is! [via Universul Apple]

The homepage announcement seems like a Macworld San Francisco keynote teaser, actually. What can be expected? Here's a rumors line-up:

• The Apple-branded Phone Mac-heads are talking about since 2002,
• The 8-Core Mac Pro,
• iTV, the device that interfaces your media content to your television,
• Leopard details regarding the "secret features" Apple has held back from the public preview,
• Hi-rez displays (via resolution-independent GUI rumors),
• iLife '07, as the suite is regularly updated at the MSF,
• Video iPod, although this rumor grew tired lately.

The keynote takes place at 9am Pacific time on January 9th, 2007.