New Traditionalist | Ian Thomas

Earlier tonight I posted a com­ment at the Guardian’s PDA Digital Con­tent blog.

I posted it because Wolff Olins’s work on the AOL logo was get­ting a no-nonsense past­ing on the com­ments board beneath a post detail­ing designer reac­tion to the new look. You can see the post plus com­ments here.

I think the tra­di­tional design world needs to get used to AOL’s rationale — and you can see ex-Google-adman-turned-AOL-CEO Tim Armstrong’s inter­view at the Guardian’s Paid Con­tent — because it strikes me that Wolff Olins has pro­duced a piece of work which, assum­ing AOL’s core product and ser­vice stacks up, has a lot more to do with the sig­ni­fic­ance of its brand in the future than its brand­ing.

Anyway, here’s what I posted:

“If I under­stand AOL’s CEO cor­rectly, this isn’t a brand visual iden­tity that’s designed for the linear world of the mass media model that we’ve all grown up with, it’s designed to under­line the proven­ance of con­tent dis­trib­uted by this brand in a messy, frag­men­ted, user-centred world.

Very soon branded con­tent will com­pete with branded con­tent to build equity from con­sumer pass-alongs; we’ll no longer be oper­at­ing in a polite brand sits along­side brand mass-media mod­elled world where adher­ence to visual iden­tity guidelines is sacrosanct.

Wolff Olins clearly under­stand this. And they also under­stand that brand iden­tity, par­tic­u­larly for digital busi­nesses, is sec­ond­ary to the cre­ation of dis­tinct­ive sig­na­ture brand inter­ac­tion design

This is where AOL appears to be focus­ing its atten­tion — inter­ac­tion and ser­vice — and, judging from the com­ments on this board, it seems they’re right to do so.

I think this piece of work has the poten­tial to deliver a really adapt­able hall­mark brand. Its suc­cess will be determ­ined by the qual­ity of its applic­a­tion and in tandem with products and ser­vices that really work well for users. That is where its brand repu­ta­tion will be built and not built on what it looks like.

The idea that brands — even today — have any con­trol over their visual iden­tity once it passes beyond the bound­ar­ies of their own busi­ness envir­on­ment, is naive. So the loose asso­ci­ation between the imagery and the text really works well to mit­ig­ate the risks of damage to the ‘Aol.’ brand name which, in real­ity, doesn’t even need a pre­script­ive typeface.

I think it has the poten­tial to be a power­ful adapt­ive brand but only if the ambi­tion of the idea is matched by the ambi­tion of Wolff Olins’s client.”

Wolff Olins’ approach res­on­ates with my increas­ingly acute sense that — pretty much — everything we’ve under­stood about mar­ket­ing com­mu­nic­a­tions’ con­ven­tions is now being rap­idly and unce­re­mo­ni­ously tipped on its head.

It’s what led me to create this present­a­tion last week. And why we posted this at MRM’s web­site just about two weeks ago.

What’s motiv­at­ing people like Tim Arm­strong is beha­viour else­where in his mar­ket­place like this.