This year we avoided the carnage of Beaconsfield fair and instead paid a visit to Carter’s Steam Fair in West Wycombe. We had been tipped-off by Richard Collins that it was a retro delight. And he wasn’t wrong. There were genuine Victorian steam powered rides through to 50s and 60s classics including the incredible ‘Wall of death’. The sixties sports car merry-go-round caught my eye as well as my two year old’s. He spent ages debating which particular vehicle suited him best and then chickened out altogether. The choices were an E type Jag, Ferrari, Lotus, BRM and a Vespa. I pondered the selection. They must have been the coolest choices of the day. I wondered what the choices would be on today’s version of the same ride. And would any British cars still make the line up?

Recently we were asked to update the badge for local football club, Penn & Tylers Green. Not exactly premier league stuff, but we like supporting our local community and it was a favour for their website designer. In order to tackle the brief properly we decided to do a bit of research into the art of football club branding. Peter Wilkinson looked into the re-brand of Arsenal, from a few years ago, while I dug out my schoolboy Panini sticker books from ’79 and ’80. Wow, that brought back some memories. Once we’d stopped marvelling at the dodgy haircuts we started investigating the club identities in more detail. Many club badges seemed to have changed little over the years - perhaps not wanting to upset their fans as Arsenal did with their slick and polished makeover.

What became apparent to us was the thing that unites all football clubs is heraldry. But, slightly rubbish heraldry in many cases. Although revered by fans, the origins of many club shields looks like clip art compared to the exquisite heraldic art of medieval England. Perhaps it’s because many of these badges were created in a time before TV and foreign investor money came to the game. Maybe they were assembled by committee. Unlike real coats of arms there’s no rules for football badges. So, insignia like the town of origin, it’s animal mascot, main industry and architectural landmarks can all be thrown together in a shield or roundel. Still, I’m drawn to these motifs like a child in a sweet shop. I think it’s one of the main reasons I collected the stickers so passionately when I was a kid.

Of course, the thing about medieval heraldry and coats of arms was that they were originally designed to help distinguish the different sides in a battlefield. People went to fight as a united tribe, led by their coat of arms, carrying their heraldic shields of protection. So it all makes perfect sense. Now our teams go to battle on our behalf, while we sit and cheer from the terraces proudly sporting our uniform shields of tribal loyalty.

Panini Football Sticker Books

Is it a lumberjack convention? A dodgy country and western band? No, sadly this grainy iPhone shot features Milestone’s Ian Sutton and Peter Wilkinson with two chums, who all turned up to the pub one night in matching check shirts. Three were proudly sporting the Superdry brand (Ian had the temerity to go for a Paul Smith). After much laughter and a few funny looks, it did get us talking about the rise and fall of brands and how Superdry, the faux Japanese label from Cheltenham, had caught the zeitgeist so well. Brand founder Julian Dunkerton will apparently pocket £80 million after floating the business on the stock market this year. Not bad going for a brand launched in 2003. The brand has grown rapidly thanks to brilliant mix of design, quality and value plus endorsement from A-listers like David Beckham.

But with brand over-exposure like this picture reveals we think they may be in need of some new brand ambassadors.

Another disappearing car brand…

With General Motors finally getting a huge organisational re-think, how many of it’s brands will survive? Pontiac has been cited as for the chop already. We’ve seen it happen many times before to some of Europe’s best loved marques. Here’s some that spring to mind. Which ones would we still like to drive? Some disappeared through failing sales, others through acquisition. It makes us wonder who else we haven’t got room for in the current automotive market? 

But, here at Milestone we like the idea of choice of brands for cars. Perhaps in the future the brand will stand for little more than trim level on top of a homogenised vehicle. Doh, that’s what happens now.

Remember these now defunct names?

Alvis | Allard | Austin | Austin healey | Armstrong-Sidley | Morris | Jensen | Gordon Keeble | Facel | Vega | Jowett | Riley | Humber | Singer | Sunbeam | AC | Rover | MG
Hispano Suiza | Lagonda | ISO | TVR | Talbot | Triumph | Delahaye | Lea Francis | De Dion

Innocent Smoothies Packaging Design
Image source: Pearlfisher 

As a member of the design community, or even just a fruit-juice consumer here in the UK, you would simply have had to have your head buried in the sand to not be aware of the design and branding for Innocent Smoothies. The simple and innovative brand conceived by Pearlfisher, made it’s first appearance on a juice stand at a music festival in London in the summer of 1998.  Since then the company has gone from strength to strength, and the brand has undergone a refocusing and segmentation, maintaining the simplicity of the brand identity on the product packaging whilst allowing for strong differentiation between the various sub-brands and categories made by the company.

It’s often said that Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and it’s certainly been a running theme following the launch of many iconic brands in the last few years. Innovative design and branding often influences new generations of design and branding, but when do we need to draw the line? When is it an acceptable influence, and when does it owe more than simple inspiration?Here at Milestone Digital, we thought we’d have a look at a specific example. In 2003, the Australian company Nudie arrived on the fruit juice scene, driven by company founder Tim Pethick. Criticism quickly followed, especially when the brand began to gain international attention. Nudie founder Tim Pethick seemed surprised:

“I’ll be the first to admit that I draw inspiration from brands I’ve observed in the different markets I’ve been in the last 25 years.  But I don’t think you can say that nudie is a complete copy of any one or two brands” “I’m biased, but personally, I think we’ve done a better job as a brand than Innocent, or even the Naked brand of juices from the US, whom we’ve been compared to as well,” he continues. “That’s simply because the intention was never to create nudie as just a juice brand, which they are, but I always wanted nudie to be an inspiration brand that would be able to stretch to other categories.” (source: brandchanel.com)

The similarities between Innocent and Nudie seem far too great to be a coincidence. The childlike innocence of the Nudie logo seems a direct reference to Innocent, and the similarity between product ranges is undeniable.

Nudie Crushes
Image source: www.nudie.com.au 

Considering the level of criticism aimed at Nudie, I was surprised when reading a recent article on packaging blog theDieLine to find yet another example of what would seem a very similar brand identity for fruit juice from European fruit juice manufacturer Romantics in Spain:

Romantics Rebranding
Image source: theDieLine

In defense of the product, Smäll the agency responsible for the rebrand, has moved them quite significantly away from what was an uncomfortably similar design and branding. Even so, they seem to have opted for a bottle design almost identical to that of Innocent, and the product range, like Nudie is still seems amazingly similar.

How important are these design parallels? Should we be doing more to protect innovative brand identities, especially within the same consumer markets? After Apple’s experience with the iPhone and iPod, should we perhaps be putting into place more stringent rules, both on a national and international level to restrict such obvious parallels, whether pure coincidence or not?