Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Adventures in logo development (2 of 3)

So, though we explored many examples of blending the two logos, we had to be aware of the actual existing colophons, and ensuring that we maintained that resonant identity into the new Below are some early studies of the logo development.

For giggles, here is one of the sheets With some very early sketches, with some of the notes I got from phone conference critiques from the head of Corporate Communciations. Such scattershot approach is essential early on when you;re working on tight deadline and in multiple directions at once. You need to see what they like about A and B and C, when all three choices are radically different, so that you can see which of the three directions you should move forward into. More often than not, it will merely be an elimination of one of the several directions (which still means a ton of work in different directions. But sometimes its about getting to what you want, by crossing out other directions.





















This series was built off the existing colopon, the dolphin. There is a story behind the boy riding the dolphin with the flute, but the fact is that 99% of the public out there does not know it. The dolphin colophon IS recognizable though, and so it was important early on to explore how much it could change, and yet remain. The foal with this series was also to play with bits of the Harcourt logo that could be incorporated into the dolphin colophon. Could talk for hours about the intent of each of the following, but the reality of logo communication is how you react to it in the first few seconds. How you react to it the next day is also important (that is, which logos stayed in your mind) but the truth is that neither instance requires a long monologue accompanyment. I will say, I especially liked the simplicity of the bottom three.

This group tried to bridge the strength of the Harcourt logo with the light elegance of the identity of the existing Houghton Mifflin logo. The direction is decidedly different from either pre-existing logo, and for that reason these were the least likely to be considered. Nevertheless, I do see some strengths in the identity and direction.














In the end, where we ended up was not so very different from where we started, which is often the case with corporate development. Here is the final logo, from the usage document I created:






































This logo, arguably, is merely an extrapolation of the existing Houghton Mifflin logo, with the addition of the Harcourt name. The decision was made at the top corporate level—though I never was part of the discussion, I had the feedback funneled back to me from the head of the company himself. My own choice, had I been able to express an opinion at that level, would have been different. But then, I rooted for the Red Sox for a lot of years that they lost, too.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Adventures in corporate logo development
(1 of 3)

Houghton Mifflin merged with Harcourt in January of 2008. Of course, it was in the works for months before this. In fact, it was in the works, unbeknownst to me, before I was even hired. But that’s a story for another day.

For the months before the merger, Corporate Communications had been doing prep work with several design firms and focus testing groups to determine what the new identity for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt should be. They’d collected a wealth of information, but hadn’t yet seen anything they liked. That wealth of discussion and information was the pile that was dropped on my desk in November, when Steve Tapp, then President of Great Source, tapped me as new Design Director of Great Source, a division of Houghton Mifflin, if I and my group would take a stab at it. Of course, we did.

At Great Source, I managed a staff of Senior Designers, spread over a volume of five disciplines; Math, Science, Social Studies, Reading and Language Arts. Given this workload, and the fact that this logo work was spread on top of it, I didn’t feel comfortable assigning the work of logo research, development and sketching, so I presented it to them as an opportunity that they could participate in, but not a requirement. One Senior Designer stepped up to the idea, and delivered some solid sketches. In addition, I dug into this myself.

As food for this, we studied the results of several focus group reports, as well some competitors logo suites (examples below).



We also did research into corporate branding in general. There are many areas to balance in logo branding; history of the corporation, symbolism inherent in the logo, and what the logo is intended to evoke or communicate. We studied a wealth of great texts, such as Fresh Ideas in Corporate Identity, by Mary Cooper and Lynn Haller. But at the end of the day, we weren’t starting with a blank slate-—we were working on blending two well established and vested corporate identities, into a new form of life.

Part of the issue was that combining the Harcourt logo (below)

with the Houghton Mifflin logo (below).

was too deceptively simple. The Harcourt logo symbolized ripples on water, the ripples reflecting the effect of education, literature, et al. The Houghton logo was a boy on a dolphin, which is a mythological reference that’s a mystery to 8 out of 10 people. But the colophon was nonetheless memorable and easily identifiable to many customers. Therefore it might seem combining a boy on a dolphin with rippling water would be a no-brainer…except for the fact that the resultant logos were reminiscent of Sea World.

Next: Some of the final sketches