The Top
Branding Stories Of
2013
Margaret Rhodes
FROM SHAPESHIFTING BRAND IDENTITIES TO DEATH METALINSPIRED CORPORATE LOGOS, HERE’S A RETROSPECTIVE OF THE
YEAR IN BRANDING.
Rebranding is tough work. A logo isn’t just a logo--it’s a way of telling the world what your company stands for (it can also incite
serious consumer rage. Remember Gap’s notorious misstep in 2010?). In some cases branding can almost turn into marriage
counseling for companies: how do you want to grow, and who (or what audience) do you want to grow with?
Over the course of 2013 we spoke with mega companies like American Airlines and Starbucks, fashion-focused groups like Kate
Spade and Refinery29, and even individual designers with their own bold, non-commissioned ideas about branding, all to find
out about how they’re repositioning themselves for 2014 and the years to come. Here›s some of the best of what we saw.
American Airlines
This year American Airlines said goodbye to their iconic
logo, designed in 1968 by Massimo Vignelli, and
introduced a new logo from Futurebrand. The Flight Symbol
is both a bird and a wing, without the original logo’s Cold
War-era talons.
Mesosphere
For the cloud storage start up Mesosphere, Ammunition
designer Brett Wickens (who created the logo for The
Sopranos) conceived of an animated, ever-evolving logo.
The letter “M” forms the core of the icon, but it’s also an
abstraction of the cloud.