Easy-listening, but textural music fuels creativity. Down-beat tunes set a relaxed mood. Electronic sounds gives you energy and perks you up. Until recently I enjoyed these different styles of music separately. Then I was introduced to a group called The Whitest Boy Alive. An interesting-looking bunch, this Berlin-based band is now a regular on our office stereo.
Definitely have a listen, and about 2 minutes into track 3 you will head out the door to buy their new album, Rules. It is that damn good. (Also worth a listen is their previous album, Dreams, which is equally as convincing).
What a topic to cover in the first StudioTalk post … corporate branding standards at their best.
Corporations only too often spend gazillions of dollars on their logo and branding styles, and usually you can see where that money went. However, occasionally you see a high-profile company decide not to bother with those big branding bills and instead let the CEO’s 3-year-old son have a go at it. Enter Telecom’s new logo.
The epitome of an already poor design is when you cannot justify your design decisions. I quite like this quote from a Telecom spokeswoman: “[The new Telecom logo] did not allude to anything and that customers could interpret as they liked”. Plain and simple. They might as well have said “so we ran out of ideas, decided to drop the budget and it was the school holidays – my son had nothing better to do anyway!” Solid.
I do quite enjoy the amount of grief that Telecom is receiving from this branding blunder, only because it is a wake up call to designers (not to mention CEOs and head decision-makers) that when you’re doing a branding project, you are in the limelight (which is the whole point really). And lets face it, everyone is a critic, especially when the blunder is on our home turf. Come on New Zealand – we can do better than this!