UBIQUITOUS Issue 4

2016 ISSUE

04

HUMOR IN ADVERTISING A Recent Phenomenon PAGE 2

MARKED IMPROVEMENT Comedy Central Rebranding PAGE 10

FUNNY BUSINESS Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.

— Christopher Morley

We love to laugh. It’s not forced, it’s typically quite light-hearted. And while there can be truth in jest, we’ve honed in on the the fact that joking and humor while working can actually have a positive effect in our Ubiquitous work environment.

As Red Thinking has added a few more thinkers to the team in the last year, we’ve been quick to see how humor builds relationships. It provides some great perspective, often opens the lines of communication and it can really reduce stress. Let’s be honest, we’re not saving lives with the services we provide — but we are doing some kick ass work with no drama. While you don’t need to be a comedian to join our team, we have found that we identify humor as one of the choice characteristics of a preferred Red Thinker. It aligns well with our core values and the benefits of laughing with each other are similar to benefits of laughing in any other situations. It’s just fun.

Possessing a sense of humor has more to do with our ability to see that amusing circumstances are all around. A sense of humor also requires feeling secure enough in yourself to laugh at these situations and settings. It’s not about telling a great joke, a sense of humor is about perspective and we all have the ability to be humor contributors.

As we share with you our fourth edition of Ubiquitous, we hope you enjoy our take on humorous brands, slogans, designs and more. We’ve also given you a glimpse into our virtual office settings. Each Red Thinker showcases their individual work spaces. From a colorful room overlooking the waters in Annapolis, nooks or renovated rooms in our homes — dedicated to creative office spaces, a spot overlooking an epic garden, colorful and funny sayings and signs that show off our personalities, the list goes on. Last but certainly not least - need a good gag gift? Look no further. Who doesn’t need a dancing pickle?

2016

CONTENTS

HUMOR IN ADVERTISING A RECENT PHENOMENON PAGE 2

RETIRED DOS EQUIS: MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD

8 FAVORITE TCHOTCHKES Red Thinkers Share Their Favorite Thingy 10 BRAND PROFILE Marked Improvement, Comedy Central Rebranding 12 LOGO YOU DIDN’T Slapping Our Foreheads 16 PROFILE Ubiquitous Work Space, Red Thinkers at Work

HE LIVES VICARIOUSLY THROUGH HIMSELF

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FEATURE

Throughout history, advertisers have avoided cracking jokes. We know this because history has plenty of advertising in it. And none of it is funny, even going back to pre-history. And its not like the ancients didn’t appreciate a joke. An ancient Roman joke book, named “Philogelos” which translates as “lover of laughter” contains hundreds of jokes, some of which hold up even today: what did the king say when asked how he’d like his hair cut? “In silence.” But there’s no evidence any ancient barber ever used this gem to win clients.

HUMOR IN ADVERTISING A RECENT PHENOMENON

“People do not buy from clowns.”

— David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man

With each new technological advancement, there is evidence that sellers of wares, recruiters of sailors, inn-keepers, clothiers, politicians, kings and everyone else who needed to communicate to the public took advantage to reach more buyers. But almost always their announcements maintain a straightforward, informative fashion. Ancient Egyptian papyrus posters announce goods for sale without irony. The first printed papers published private notices for a fee, giving us examples such as this early ad for coffee:

“In Bartholomew Lane, on the back side of the Old Exchange the drink called coffee, which is a very wholesome and physical drink, have many excellent vertues, closes the orifices of the stomach, fortifies the heat within, helpeth digestion, quickeneth the spirits, maketh the heart lightsum, is good against eye-sores, coughs, or colds, rhumes, consumptions, head ache, dropsie, gout, scurvy, King’s evil, and many others; is to be sold both in the morning and at three of the clock in the afternoon.”

— J.P. Wood, The Story of Advertising

2016

— a step forward in marketing, certainly, but not in entertainment. It turns out that ads have almost always been businesslike, even well into the age of television, billboards and glossy lifestyle magazines.

Even midway through the 20th century, marketers attitudes toward humor could be summed up by legendary ad-man David Ogilvy in his 1963 book, “Confessions of an Advertising Man,” in which he says “People do not buy from clowns.”

But as the number and type of marketed items expanded to every kind of product an industrialized world could produce, the old means of informing the public began to falter. Big business was putting ever-larger sums into national and international marketing campaigns, in an effort to connect with more and more consumers, more and more deeply, in a more and more noisy environment, crowded with growing numbers of ads from competitors. Ogilvy stated that the best copy he ever wrote was an ad he penned for Rolls-Royce which leads with the headline “At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”

The ad itself continues with 719 words of copy, listing facts about the product. But times were changing, and ad men were already appealing to our emotions, creating ads that appealed via sex, fear, love – and our sense of humor.

In a significant shift from thousands of years of pitching features, benefits and value, humor was beginning to find its place on Madison Avenue by the time Ogilvy’s book came out. In the 1970’s ad men began to employ humor as a source of innuendo or a means to catch the eye. Sex and fear had been staples in their toolbox for decades, but as competition for the public’s attention — and for ad budgets — intensified, a new means of drawing attention and cutting through the increasingly ad-cluttered atmosphere was needed.

A print ad for Cricketeer, pronouncing “Anything you can do out of a suit, you can now do in a suit” features an image of a businessman in a 3-piece suit. With his legs behind his head. Funny, but not laugh-out-loud. However, the ad was likely effective at making readers stop and stare as they perused their favorite golf magazine. It certainly stood apart from any traditional ad of the time.

Another example of 1970’s advertising that features a subtle infusion of humor is this ad from Apple.

The wordplay in the title is playful and intriguing, if not exactly funny. Its interplay with the eye-catching image might elicit a chuckle, but compared to the ads of a few years later, from the same brand, the effort implies that the anti-humor past was still very recent.

We laughed a bit more in the 1980’s. By then, advertisers were turning to the experts, bringing in celebrity funny men to help them cut through the clutter. Comedic legends such as John Cleese, Phil Hartman and even Victor Borge, began to lend their talents.

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John Cleese’s ads for Compaq, in which he claims the features are “boring” and that the computer comes in a “very nice box” reveal a new strategy for product advertising, wholly formed and expertly executed. Forget the product and concentrate on the buyer’s perspective instead. Rather than bombarding us with features, Cleese uses humor to grab our attention, jarringly upending the traditional model. The product was getting too complicated for anyone to fully understand, anyway — so let’s use humor to connect with consumers on an emotional level instead. Go get a Compaq — it’s the best, trust us. This new model, in which humor is used to connect a brand to the consumer on a deeper level than product quality and features, or even on specific products at all, can be seen in marketing campaigns today.

An often-praised ad from the same decade is a mesmerizing gem from Fedex, called “fast-paced world” starring fast-talker John Moschitta, Jr. as he speeds through ever-more tongue-twisting snippets of stereotypical business speak. The ad bears multiple viewings, as it would take more than a few just to catch every word he spits out at hyper-speed (all of which are quite funny). But the brand itself only appears in the final few seconds, as a Fedex package is placed on the busy exec’s desk and the voice-over announces “In this fast moving, high pressure, get-it-done-yesterday world, aren’t you glad that there’s one company who can keep up with it all? Federal Express. When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”

By the 90’s humor was becoming a driving force behind many of the most successful branding efforts in the world. In 1993, the California Milk Processor Board hired Michael Bay (Director of Bad Boys, The Rock, Transformers and many more) to direct a new ad. The now-legendary “Got Milk?” campaign used humor not only to get attention, but was often laugh-out-loud funny. When an Aaron Burr enthusiast (a funny concept in itself) is frustrated by a mouthful of pb&j, unable to answer the question “who shot Alexander Hamilton” at a crucial moment, we feel his pain, and wish his empty glass of milk could be filled in time to win the prize. The ad mentions nothing of the qualities of milk, perhaps following Cleese’s lead. But it makes us laugh and, in fact, set off a series of ads that made “Got Milk?” a cultural phenomenon.

Another classic ad from the 90’s is the Budweiser talking frogs ad, directed by Gore Verbinski, who went on to direct the hugely successful Pirates of the Caribbean movies. They live in the swamp by a roadhouse, in full view of a neon Budweiser sign. They say “Bud,” “Weis,” and “Er.” That’s it. No discussion of the product, features, benefits or, in fact any words at all, except the brand name itself.

The ad’s humor, subtle yet powerful, grabbed so much attention during its Super Bowl XXIX launch in 1995 that the campaign was expanded and run internationally through 1998.

2016

IN THE POST-MILLENNIUM ERA, HUMOR IN ADVERTISING HAS BECOME MAINSTREAM. Advertisers today take humor very seriously, testing gags of all kinds, from slapstick to wordplay to observational humor in focus groups before launching across multiple media platforms for a dizzying array of major brands and national — or international — campaigns. According to the 2006 book “Humor in Advertising: A Comprehensive Analysis” by Charles S. Gulas and Marc G. Weinberger, tens of billions of dollars are spent on advertising that is meant to be humorous each year. It also quotes research (Toncar, 20001) finding that 21%–48% of television advertising used a “humor strategy.”

But, do we know how humor works? Or if making people laugh increases sales? Do we understand how humor affects a brand? Surprisingly, we really don’t.

Many studies have been conducted on the subject of humor in advertising, taking a wide variety of approaches to the subject. Despite numerous attempts from academia and the scientific community, no one can prove conclusively that humor really sells more products or services, and no one seems able to fully explain how humor works or even why we enjoy it so much.

There are plenty of insights available, but none are sweeping or conclusive. And no one has produced a formula for being funny yet. That comes down to art, rather than science, and is notoriously tricky to execute consistently, if at all, even with top talent on the team. Just ask a professional comedian.

There is evidence that humor has a positive effect when executed well, however. A recent study by the Association for Consumer Research, titled “The Effect of Humor on Advertising Comprehension” indicates that under certain conditions humor can improve audience comprehension and recall. But among the conclusions is the acknowledgement that more study is needed to understand how this works. It also discusses the need to further understand the effects of “failed humor,” citing “Future research needs to establish if unsuccessful humor attempts produce irritation among large segments of target audiences.”

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There’s a long list of scholarship on the subject.

One often referenced study from 1973, published in the Journal of Marketing and titled “Humor in Advertising,” by Brian Sternthal and C. Samuel Craig “assesses the role of humor in persuasion and suggests an approach to future humor research.”

Twenty years later, in the “Journal of Advertising,” another study, titled “The Impact of Humor in Advertising: A Review” was still concluding that we needed further study — and that humor can be a double-edged sword:

“The use of humor has become common practice in advertising; yet our knowledge about its impact has not been updated since the last major review almost twenty years ago. In the interim, a great deal of humor research has been conducted. The outcome of this research only partially supports earlier conclusions and highlights the need to apply humor with care. Humor is by no means a guarantee of better ads, but its effect can be enhanced with careful consideration of the objectives one seeks to achieve as well as the audience, situation, and type of humor.”

2016

A more recent article by Harlan E. Spotts, Marc G. Weinberger & Amy L. Parsons, titled, “Assessing the Use and Impact of Humor on Advertising Effectiveness: A Contingency Approach” has this to say in its abstract:

“Every year billions of dollars are spent on advertising that uses humor to sell products.

How is that spending decision made?

Despite much research examining humor effects in advertising, many advertisers make the decision on faith. Many past studies lack a clear conceptual focus to guide the investigation of humor effects in advertising.”

In short, when it comes to understanding the use of humor in advertising, “we’re still working on it.”

An article titled “Does humor in advertising help sell more?” in “Psychology for Marketers” blog also tackles the question of whether humor is effective.

It argues that because we “buy from people we like,” brands should use the positive associations of shared humor to associate the brand with positive feelings in the consumer. But it, too, offers little evidence.

Ad executives clearly believe in connecting brands with their consumers via humor — with or without scientific evidence that the practice works. This may be because, from their perspective, they know that what they’re doing gets real results. That “Got Milk?” campaign is credited with an increase of milk consumption in California. But was it humor that caused the increase, or a rise in awareness from the entire ad campaign and subsequent discussions and exposure via spoofs and pop culture references?

Probably both — but impossible to really know.

Regardless, ad executives were certainly pleased with the results and would likely admit they don’t care how it works so long as it does.

HUMOR IS A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD: NOT FULLY UNDERSTOOD AND TO BE HANDLED WITH CARE.

We know that a funny ad can go “viral,” as it is forwarded to friends, repeated in conversations, celebrated in the media and generally adopted into the fabric of society and culture. Say “Where’s the beef?” to anyone who was around in the ‘80s and they’ll immediately get the Wendy’s reference.

Throughout the early 2000s everyone blurted the phrase “whazzzuuuuuuppp?” upon literally every encounter with their friends. It was funny then, for a time. But by 2002 the joke had worn, and the marketing department decided to phase out the Budweiser campaign. As quoted in The New York Times (Feb 16, 2001), Bob Lachky, then-VP, Brand Management at Anheuser Busch, said “You do have to be out of it before it gets tired…It will probably run another six months to a year, then gently float off into sunset.’’

Another experience which ad executives have had with humor is the embarrassment of failure when people either don’t get the joke or take it the wrong way. Burger King, attempting to win back customers after Wendy’s hugely successful “Where’s the beef?” campaign, launched a “Where’s Herb?’ campaign.

The poorly conceived idea was that there was one mysterious guy, named Herb, who hadn’t yet had a Whopper. He became known as the “Whopper virgin.” Ads claimed, “Keep your eye out for him at your local BK and you could win $5,000!” Met with confusion, a lawsuit (when a boy saw Herb but was too young to accept prize money) and apathy, the national campaign quickly flopped. Burger King’s profits for the year (1986) dropped 40%. What was intended as a humorous, fun promotion had become an unmitigated disaster, made worse by the mileage gained by Wendy’s, who happily claimed Herb was eating at their place, and by Saturday Night Live, who featured a mocking portrayal of Herb by Randy Quaid.

We may be living in the first golden age of hilarity in advertising. An entertaining commercial may associate a brand with positive feelings, improve the ad’s retention, spread a brand’s message by going viral, inject itself into the culture in a positive way and win millions of dollars worth of free exposure and word-of-mouth referrals. By now humor has been used effectively in countless campaigns for businesses big and small all over the world over the last 3 or 4 decades.

But we also must understand that humor is a double-edged sword, that it is not fully understood, and that it must be handled with care. Many agencies have adopted the practice of audience-testing their funny stuff before they launch it. They may not have been very entertaining, but at least ancient fruit vendors didn’t have to worry about anyone misunderstanding their latest papyrus campaign and upsetting their apple cart. That’s a very modern problem, and one we’ve only been dealing with for a moment, on the scale of history.

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THE NO BUTTON Tracy: Perfect for moms who are tired of

YODELLING PICKLE Shay: The Germans have a tradition of hiding a pickle on their Christmas tree, and the first child to find it on Christmas morning has a year of luck! Of course, no actual Germans have heard of this tradition, but it is the VERY best gift when headed to an ornament exchange or a holiday gift for the host/hostess.

Everyone else gives something far more bland and I laugh as anyone opens it up, the yodeling is incredibly annoying.

saying no. Just push the button. “Does this make my butt look big?” Hit the button.

“No!” Fantastic!

DAMMIT DOLL

GLASS FROG

Jen: You gotta love it. After one or two

Hannah: The frog’s name is Fernando.

hard whacks against a wall or furniture, you start giggling. It dissipates anger in minutes!

He came with a quote that said “You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.” I like to keep him on my desk as a reminder to be optimistic and open to new opportunities because you never know what chances you take that will lead you to your dreams.

BB-8 Juan: Do I need a tiny droid sidekick in my life? Probably not. But having BB-8 roam the house is a ton of fun for both me and my dogs.

2016

WTF FOLDERS Melanie: They are great because they help keep me organized, but mostly because each time I reach for one and see the titles it adds a bit of humor to my day.

DOORMAT Ashley: It’s funny, useful, and doesn’t take up space. Adding a little humor to the everyday.

ROBIN BENDABLE FIGURE Brandon: Robin sits on my desk waiting for me to pull and stretch him during times of stress. Also if you rip any extremities off, no worries because it’s only Robin.

RUBBER BAND BALL Fiona: 20 years in the making… now it’s the size of a melon and weighs about 5lbs..! Entertaining to watch people try to bounce it and have it fly in the air like a 1960’s Super-Ball!!

EINSTEIN FIGURINE

WHOOPEE CUSHION

Tom: A famous face with a secret space.

Krystal: Flatulence. Need I say more?

This handheld figurine fits in the palm of your hand and has a secret compartment for storing tiny treasures.

Hours of fun with the kids or at dinner parties. At least at my house.

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BRAND PROFILE

Fortune favors the bold, and mimicking the stodgy and ubiquitous copyright mark was a bold endeavor when Comedy Central embarked on a rebranding strategy nearly five years ago. It’s called the Comedymark: a clever play off the enclosed-c Copyright sign.

One lowercase “c” inside an upside-down “c.” If you’ve tuned into the network at any point in the past half decade, you already can picture it.

Comedy Central--remember when they seemed to be the only channel with their logo on the screen?--emerged in the mid-90s. The daily lineup consisted mostly of stand-up comedians performing sets at various clubs around the country. But with the cult success of South Park, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia throughout the early-aughts, the development of original programming became a core focus of the network.

This happens frequently. A new business is formed, a logo is created (typically an area where not a lot of investment is made since money is tight when businesses start) and the company plugs along. Then, for a myriad of reasons, the business model shifts into an area unimagined at the genesis of the company. Nimble companies are aware of this.

MARKED IMPROVEMENT COMEDY CENTRAL EMBARKED ON A REBRANDING UNDERDRESSED “The thing the old logo did brilliantly was to be a television logo, but it was difficult to use in a scalable way,” Alicia Johnson, co-creative director of thelab, the New York firm behind Comedy Central’s rebrand, told FastCoDesign in an interview shortly after the rebranding was unveiled in 2011. “Although Comedy Central is funny it also plays a larger role in culture. … In a lot of ways, it’s like a major news network. So, and I’m quoting a blogger here, ‘the old logo was like showing up in a Hawaiian shirt at a Fortune 500 company.’”

A rebrand was necessary. Not only had the shift in programming occurred, but new methods to consume content were becoming available. Following the logo reveal, thelab earned the coveted PROMAX/BDA awards that followed. They took Gold for Total Package-Branding, Logo Design, Art Direction & Design, and Branding-Long Format.

The emergence of new media platforms is inspiring new directions in rebranding. Tactically, it’s inevitable, because good branding doesn’t just mean a transparent bug in the lower corner of television shows anymore.

It’s splashed across apps that you can download for your iPad and phone, conversations companies have on Twitter and Facebook, and distribution to other distributors, like NetFlix.

AESTHETICS? OR ANALYSIS? While there were certainly reasons to move the Comedy Central brand in a new direction, the antithesis of the idea didn’t come simply from the cartoonish logo that represented the company for two decades.

Dig deeper to find the genesis of the rebrand and the goal itself wasn’t a new logo at all. As Johnson said during an interview with the Motionographer

website, the concept for the creative itself evolved from an invitation to solve some of company’s core business challenges:

“They had a solid reputation with great shows, but the shows were not being attributed to the network and they were not getting as many young viewers as they wanted.”

There are some massive lessons to extract from that sentiment. Obviously branding means everything for corporate visibility, but so little is it discussed when business problems arise. So what comes first — the excellent brand campaign or the business success? Perhaps it’s a little of both.

Any company, regardless of size or reputation, can benefit from rebranding with excellent creativity.

2016

CIRCA: 1997 - 2000

CIRCA: 2000 - 2011

Some companies, seemingly the more established traditional brands, spend millions on rebranding and logo design only to be met with swarms of negative feedback. It happened to New Coke in the 1980s; it happened to Gap a few years ago, and it even happened in sports: The Big Ten was forced to reexamine its logo because of adding additional teams. And, at the time, Comedy Central heard jeers for the “boring” new logo.

CLEVER OR CREATIVE? A good logo can be one of two things: clever or creative. Think about clever logos: FedEx (notice the arrow between the “E” and the “X”? Or Amazon (notice the arrow from “A” to “Z”?) Or even The Bronx Zoo, with the legs of two giraffes forming the skyline of New York City. But there are also simple creative logos, and Comedy Central falls into that category.

While it may not be as clever as others, the creativity behind it, and what it represents compared with the stodgy copyright symbols we all know, serves the purpose beautifully. It’s a Comedymark that will serve the network for years and perhaps decades to come. And it all started with the desire to fix a business problem. Label the logo many things, but boring it is not. And five years later it serves as a perfect mark of a media company that has redefined itself as vastly as the shift from the “Hawaiian shirt” cartoonish logo of old.

LEARNING A LESSON What can we learn, then, from the radical approach to a new logo and, with it, a new identity in the crowded marketplace of media programming? Examine the business, whatever the business is. Are customers understanding that anything produced is associated

with the company? Are there opportunities to redefine the business or new gaps to exploit in the marketplace? Logo design and rebranding aren’t always necessary. But often the focus of a business will shift over time to respond to new demands in the market, as all successful companies do. When that happens, determine if it’s time for a professional examination that could result in better brand awareness … and more business.

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At Red Thinking, we’re a gaggle of design geeks, visual nerds, and creative snobs. We click those listicles about terrible logos, read about disastrous branding campaigns, and delight in the warm embrace of schadenfreude when we see new companies abandon a perfectly fine logo to replace it with rubbish. That means more business for us.

REBRANDS

We went digging through the last few years of logo changes—there is a wealth of options—and picked out seven in particular that left us shaking our red heads. The good news is that all hope isn’t lost for these seven companies who chose poorly when redesigning their identity. We’re filled with talented creatives who would drool at the opportunity to set these abominations straight. And while we’re busy, we may be able to squeeze you in. So check to see if you made the list. And if you did, give us a call.

LOGO YOU DIDN’T SLAPPING OUR FOREHEADS

BEFORE

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AFTER

LIFE IS GOOD The old logo was simple, if not entirely creative. The simple circle within a circle and goofy font that served loyally as the company’s brand identity since its inception represented the laid back, chill emotion associated with the various products the company produced. Then, Life is Good released a new logo. And it’s utterly terrible. Stare at that yellow blob for a minute. Does anything bother you? No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. It’s not even a circle. It’s as if the designer took a brush and colored outside the lines. Add the boring sans-serif font and it’s a reversal in many ways from the old. If you have even the slightest hint of OCD, starting at this logo will make you shake.

2016 BEFORE

2.

TNT Companies absorb a lot of flack after rebranding from a snobby populace who grows suspicious of change.

Sometimes that criticism isn’t merited. Often it is.

If we’re learning anything from this experiment, is that purely changing a logo without provocation or shifts in business typically leads to the opposite of what companies are trying to achieve. Comedy Central undertook a brand makeover, but that was in search of answering business problems that arose from their growth (see page 10).

AFTER

The new TNT logo is reminiscent of a mythical airline corporation formed in the mid 1960s. It would look perfectly normal 50 years ago painted on a tail fin, but it’s a monster step backward for the simplicity-driven design that the company spent decades carving out for itself. The old logo, while lacking cleverness, completely served its purpose for the media channel. If it ain’t broke, break it completely, seems to be the motto of many.

BEFORE

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OHIO While there are plenty of reasons to mock Ohio, we can now add branding into the conversation.

The new Ohio, technically TourismOhio, mark throws away the too-clever-by-half logo in exchange for the representation of good old-fashioned Midwestern penmanship.

The logo itself is hand drawn and contrasts widely with the impressive Pure Michigan campaign from Ohio’s northerly neighbor. While the “hi” inside the circle may not have been the most informative out of context, the new logo appears too remedial to effectively convey its intended purpose. The tagline urges visitors to “Find It Here.” But the only thing we can find is bad rebranding advice.

AFTER

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BEFORE

4.

UBER Noticing a trend? Why take what is perfectly fine — if not creatively brilliant — and start from scratch. The Uber “U” was ubiquitously associated with the transportation company, and drivers had started to brand their vehicles with stickers in the window. There are often rumors about the company’s long-term goals, such as attempting to disrupt the home delivery service.

Nothing about the former logo married the company to a transportation service alone. Many were surprised by the decision and it’s easy to see why: the new logo trades the iconic “U” for an app design that appears almost like a backward “C” but certainly represents the timed element design within the app itself.

While the website maintained the word mark with the slick font, the new app icon could seemingly leave people who have used the service for years scratching their phones wondering why the app disappeared.

Confusion is something to avoid in branding.

BEFORE

AFTER

5.

DIRECTV Did you have any idea AT&T acquired DirecTV? If you didn’t, you will now. Similar to Career Builder, the former DirecTV word mark carved out a fairly stable place among brand identities. Now, however, it’s impossible not to think about the telecommunications giant when even glancing at the new logo.

For whatever reason, AT&T decided to put its stamp on the new acquisition. Which makes sense, since the relationship between customers and television is always seamless, right?

AFTER

2016

6.

CAREER BUILDER It doesn’t always work and it’s difficult to pull off, but sometimes a nice, sleek font and the right color combination can serve as a logo just fine: word marks are present throughout branding design.

Career Builder was one of those logos. The new logo was designed in-house, which is rarely a good idea. The new logo has… a lot going on. All the elements — the spinning wheel, color gradients, mix of fonts — and it’s a recipe for brand disaster. It would be no surprise if this logo were erased within the next year (maybe by Red Thinking). The urge to throw multiple elements into design is rarely prudent for something like a logo. Simple is often better. Perhaps the designer can search for a new career on Monster.

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

7.

CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS No, we didn’t make a mistake. That really is the before picture on the top and the after picture on the bottom.

Confused? There’s actually a story behind the terrible reversal from excellence to awfulness.

AFTER

Chicago Public Schools, with its extremely important mission of educating millions of students, decided in a half-hearted public relations campaign to start a contest and allow the redesign to be a submission from one of those millions of students. This is the winning design.

Unsurprisingly, when you ask students to design a logo instead of leaving a perfectly fine logo alone, you get a logo that looks like it was designed in MS Paint during third-period computer graphics class. While the student may have a rich future in graphic design and creative work, this one shouldn’t make the portfolio.

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WORKSPACE:

SHAY ONORIO

PROFILE

WORKSPACE:

JEN STERLING

UBIQUITOUS WORKSPACE RED THINKERS AT WORK

WORKSPACE:

MELANIE PAYSON WORKSPACE:

TRACY BANK

2016

WORKSPACE:

ASHLEY CRITZER

WORKSPACE:

FIONA HUGHES WORKSPACE:

HANNAH FLATTERY

People sometimes ask, “How does it work with all of you being virtual?”

Our response tends to be another question: “How could it not?” Studies indicate what common sense suggests: Employees who work virtually tend to be more productive. The stress from a traffic-filled commute does not exist. Virtual offices offer flexibility and the comfort of working independently without having to conform to traditional work rules and dress codes. It ignites gratitude towards each other for sharing such a cool culture. Just look at these faces... does this look like work?

WORKSPACE:

KRYSTAL CULPEPPER

WORKSPACE:

TOM CAMERON

WORKSPACE:

BRANDON WEIL

WORKSPACE:

JUAN PLAZA

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