After writing last month’s post on the Swisscom rebrand film I stumbled across this page at Moving Brands’ site containing the images you see above. I have to admit that it cast the project in a whole new light for me. I still can’t say I’m a fan of the core logomark in all it’s gradient-clad glory, but on a large scale across various formats I think the branding system is very strong. I’m really enjoying how the logomark works in 1 color mode, looks sharp and far more focused. At any rate, I just thought these photos were great and really capture a nice aesthetic that I hadn’t fully appreciated the first time around. And of course the hot air balloon seals the deal. There’s something about well designed hot air balloons and sails; that’s about as good as it gets. Swisscom should all pitch in on a yacht and make a badass sail with the logo on it and they could all wear these.
I noticed some people weren’t too keen on the logo when I last posted on it, do these images change your mind? Let us know in the comments
I can’t say I’m in love with Swisscom’s new logo by itself, but I will say that the overall rebrand feels right as a whole. The type treatment is solid and the logo — although downright ugly standing still — lends itself well to motion and reinterpretation on packaging. The rebrand was headed up by Moving Brands (apparently with help from Dalton Maag).
I’m not trying to diminish what Moving Brands has done — they know way more than I’ll ever know about brands and how people perceive them, and hell, for all I know this is the best logo ever made and it’s singlehandedly going to increase Swisscom’s annual revenue by 1600% — but seeing a room full of designers standing around an idea board like that and thinking about the hours and weeks and months and millions of dollars that go into a project like this… Well, I sometimes wonder why these big corporations don’t just surf Behance for like and hour or something, find the kid with the best logos, throw him like $50K (which will completely blow his mind and make him your slave basically) and give him like 6 months. I bet he comes up with something just about as good and you saved like $20 million or whatever the hell they pay huge agencies these days. Ok, that’s probably all a bit of a stretch, but it does cross my mind, and if I become CEO of a european telecom giant you better believe I’m at least going to look into the idea. Actually, Moving Brands should have just done the same thing and pocketed the difference, all those guys would be doing burnouts in Ferraris wearing whale skin jackets now instead of standing around a chalkboard.
All that aside, what’s amazing to me is that these companies had the presence of mind and resources to film the process. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for the poor designers over at Moving Brands having some guy with a camera always looking over their shoulder, sounds like a nightmare to me. Of course, a lot of this could have been compiled after the fact, but it’s still an interesting look inside the process of high level design shops. I’ve always wanted to do something similar for one of my posters — capture it from start to finish — but I’m convinced that the second I started the camera I would make the worst thing ever and as hard I tried I would never actually catch anything good happening. Maybe that would be more fun, the time-lapse frustrated designer movie. Video Link