8 minute read
Chapter 11. Colonizing Company’s brand identity
Brand communication
The central part of Planet B is the brand identity of a private space travel corporation, which has gotten its digital and analog representation in the installation. In my speculative futuristic scenario this is the only company that provides services for Mars colonization. This monopolistic giant is extremely popular in 2050 – it helped already over one million people to settle on the red planet. And it is also going to change the life of the main character of the project, the owner of the room.
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As Elon Musk inspired me, even provoked me, to do this project, it is clear that he and his businesses are the real-life prototypes of the depicted company. Partly because of the copyright issues, partly in order to create the right impression, I never mentioned his name. Instead, in the project I use the description: “the most famous space-businessman of the first half of the century, who needs no introduction.” It is true that Musk is often depicted as a Messiah of our times. But not mentioning his name openly while listing his accomplishments creates not a Messiah but more of a Voldemort impression – “You-Know-Who” or “He Who Must Not Be Named.”
The name of the corporation is also not random. I noticed that Elon Musk always approaches naming with humor. One of his companies is called The Boring Company. It has a funny ambiguity in the name because the company has obviously nothing to do with boredom. Thus to create a parallel with Elon Musk’s naming style I decided to use this existing construction “present participle + company” because of its variability and a potential to create a consistent brand architecture of the corporation.
The Boring Company logotype
© TBC
The first tweet of Elon Musk with words Occupy Mars where he mistakenly used a photo of the Moon instead of Mars.
Source: @elonmusk
Based on the working title of the project, Moving to Mars, the first idea for the corporation’s name was “Moving Company.” But while discovering ethical issues in space exploration and visual communication I rejected the idea for not expressing the problem strongly enough. Soon after having a tweet of Elon Musk with the picture “Occupy Mars,” I instantly gained inspiration – it was such an insensitive call to action yet it was taken positively. The option “Occupying Company” was reflecting my view more correctly, but still lacked strength as it had some associations with military. In my opinion, the name had to be ridiculous but also usual. That is how I came up with “Colonizing Company.” We all know that colonization was bad but it is still a normal word that is easily applied to our future without any second thought. Colonizing Company is a synonym of “tyranny of normalcy.”
Colonizing Company Inc. is a big corporation including Colonizing Company itself, Selling Company, Streaming Company, Printing Company etc. The appearance of these similar names everywhere in the installation creates the impression of a corporation that owns almost the whole world. It reminds a little of tech giants who nowadays provide multiple services under sub brands’ names but still representing the parent brand.
To make clear the main idea of Planet B, that colonial patterns are no longer adequate in any sphere of life, I needed to depict Colonizing Company in an obviously caricaturing way. Yes, it has to remind us of the capitalist system we live in nowadays, but it also has to make it seem strange in the future. That is why I have created a particular tone of voice (TOV) of the company.
While Colonizing Company Inc. proclaims to be a great corporation providing life-changing experiences, in fact, it is a profit-oriented and brand-centred capitalistic giant which has an arrogant, stupid, loud, selling, ridiculous and stereotypical TOV.
Привет всем, у кого дороже [Hi to everyone whose prices are higher]
© Burger King
Catchy slogans are a great instrument to translate this impression. My inspiration for this step was the aggressive marketing campaigns of Burger King Russia. Their team created provocative and shocking ads, often directed against their competitors on the market. The positive effects of using this narration style are instant hype around the company and better memorability of the brand. I think the more provocative the slogans are, the stronger they are. To create slogans for Colonizing Company, I used slogan generators – neural networks combining existing slogans and changing key-words in them. I could divide the results into three categories: generic, inspiring, and provocative, ridiculous slogans. While generic ones were as expected not strong and distinct enough, I have chosen all the slogans from the ridiculous category and some of the inspiring ones that had a sarcastic subtext like in “Colonize. Old traditions, new opportunities.”
Brand identity
No brand can exist without a brand identity. It is an identification mark and the face of a brand. For Colonizing Company it is extremely important to appear trustworthy and secure while, in fact, the service they are providing is ethically questionable. Therefore, to show this contradiction in branding, I applied the Western graphic design standard. The issue linked to using the universal Western style is that it is not as neutral as it seems, and that it does not leave space for different approaches in design, being the only “norm.” Because Planet B is a design-fictional project of the Defensive Pessimism type, I am showing the opposite of the future we would like to live in. This means the graphic design of Colonizing Company has to be also colonized.
As a reference, I used the famous corporate identity of NASA created in 1975, which first proposed the “Worm” logo. Nowadays, this identity based on the Helvetica typeface became popular again, although not used by NASA anymore. The brand book is actively replicated and sold as a souvenir, a monument to Swiss design as well as capitalism. I decided to use the vibe of NASA ’75 in Colonizing Company’s identity because it provides a feeling of inheritance and, therefore, security coming from a governmental agency with a long successful history.
NASA “worm” logotype by Danne & Blackburn, 1975
© NASA
(See the development of the Colonizing Company's identity in the published PDF on page 86)
In the logo itself, I wanted to incorporate the controversial meaning of Mars colonization. I started with three potential directions of Colonizing Company’s logo. The first one, Worm 2, was a combination of NASA’s and The Boring Company’s logos, where the first letter “C” occupied “O” and made a black hole out of it. In the second draft, Globes, I depicted an idea of Colonizing Company destroying one planet after another. The black planet on the left represents the Earth and the volumetric planet on the right stands for Planet B – Mars, which is still alive. The third direction, Footprint, shows the idea of humans imprinting themselves everywhere they appear. It is not always negative, but inevitable and often thoughtless. All of these ideas have their strengths and weaknesses, thus, I merged them into one to create the strongest essence.
(See the final version of the Colonizing Company logotype in the published PDF on page 88.)
The final logotype of Colonizing Company combines NASA-like typography, the Soya typeface by the Good Type Foundry, a destroyed planet, and imprinting. It consists of the wordmark “Colonizing Company” and an icon – the black circle representing a destroyed planet. The wordmark can be used separately from the icon as well as in the lockup system. In this system, the word mark is partly placed onto the icon, imprinted on it, although the icon can be any size. When not used in the lockup system, the icon may not intersect with the wordmark but should be present in the format anyway.
The color scheme of the brand also reminds of NASA. The main colors are red, black, and white. However, the hue of red is more bright and orange. Depending on the color of the background, the wordmark of the logo is painted white or red, but the icon must remain black with only one exception – when used in the Mars Colonization Guidebook.
The main brand typeface is Soya by GTF, the secondary typeface is Neue Haas Grotesk, the ancestor of Helvetica. Soya is mostly used for Call-to-Action messages and sometimes for titles. All the remaining information is organised in a hierarchy with the help of various sizes and different styles of Neue Haas such as medium, regular and light.
The layout is usually divided into three columns, two of which are given to the large display text and the last one to an important information set in a small type size. This division of the information imitates the documents and texts, that are “designed to be unread” as the terms and conditions of ITunes or legal information on financial services’ ads.57
Example of a typical 3-columns layout in the style of Colonizing Company.
© Vasilisa Aristarkhova
Graphic brand elements of Colonizing Company include the icon – a black circle of all sizes in various positions - but also some other elements that are currently on trend. As the style chosen for the project is 2020 nostalgia, I tried to predict which tendencies will become popular again in 2050 or just continue being in use until that time. I noticed that button-shaped elements (even in printed media), outlines, texts placed on ribbons, and rounded corners are on trend at the moment. I used these simple tendencies in the corporate identity of Colonizing Company because together they make an impression of a trendy and futuristic yet very Western “universal” design.
As for the photo style, the used images are divided into two categories: product pictures and users portraits. Product photos prevail in all sorts of content while people are depicted rarely and with the only purpose to show the excitement of using the service. Among product photos there are photos of actual items for purchase as well as images of space, spaceships and the process of colonization. All the photo materials look minimalistic with plain backgrounds and often very calm colors. Sometimes photos are edited and parts of the picture get pixelated. Usually it is the background or parts of the picture that represent the past in the opinion of Colonizing Company.
Photo style of Colonizing Company
Photo editing style of Colonizing Company
© Vasilisa Aristarkhova
