Arguably the most obvious and prominent manifestation of graphic design is corporate identity, encapsulated by a company logo.
Landor Associates’ Helios identity for BP is a high profile example. It is also a good illustration of how corporate identity work often results from merger and acquisition activity - in this case between British Petroleum and Amoco 1998, as well as the subsequent acquisitions of ARCO and Castrol.
Here are a few other well-known logos.
Tate, designed by Wolff Olins, 2000. FedEx logo designed by Landor Associates.
Victoria & Albert Museum logotype designed by Alan Fletcher, 1988.
In most cases the logo is merely the uppermost tip of a whole hierarchy of visual materials which communicate a corporation’s identity. This is likely to include corporate stationery, marketing collateral and annual reports and perhaps extending to things like vehicle and uniform livery or signage, depending on the nature of the business. BP for instance uses its logo as the first point of call when it is designing annual reports, petrol station forecourts or corporate sponsorship.
While corporate identity and branding specialists are often forced to explain that their role is not simply to draw a bunch of pretty logos, it is nonetheless the skill of the graphic designer to translate a complex process of identity and company positioning work into a set of distinctive visual elements.
As Rita Clifton, chairman of Interbrand, a branding consultancy, explains: ‘Brands don’t exist just as a construct; brands need to be beautifully designed. I mean that in terms of a process to get to the right answer and also a process to implement the solution and make sure it’s executed brilliantly.’
Read our article on the essentials of brand design
A major part of the work of graphic designers specialising in corporate identity lies in that ‘process to get to the right answer’. An organisation’s visual identity is the result of a lot of thinking about what that organisation is, what it stands for, where it is going and so on. So graphic designers may well act as strategic consultants, or may work alongside strategic branding specialists, asking their clients these kinds of questions before ‘drawing’ anything at all.
Michael Johnson, founder of corporate identity consultancy Johnson Banks, explains how upon securing his first job at branding specialists Wolff Olins, he was tasked with strategic research – that is, finding out what a company is, what it wants to be, where it sits in the marketplace and so on – before working on any visual designs at all. ‘I always wanted to be an identity designer and when I got my first job I thought I would sit down and design a logo. When I started we were working on a bank project and I naively started drawing up some logos. Wolff Olins put me straight on that one pretty quickly,’ he says.
This kind of ‘brand strategy’ is increasingly important, says Johnson. A project at Johnson Banks may not involve any visual work for up to six months, sometimes even longer, he says. ‘People from the outside can often be a bit horrified about this, asking ‘What have you been doing for half a year?’. But the front end, strategic side of design has become much more important and now sits at boardroom level. While you might have given someone like [famous logo designer] Paul Rand $10,000 and he’d go away and design you a logo, graphic designers who work like that are few and far between. The profession of identity design and branding has grown up a lot and to do it today one almost has to sit on one’s hands for quite a while before doing any actual design work.’