It is always so discouraging to watch a beautiful idea, as
pristine as new snow, get ruined by someone that happens upon
it and feels they need to write their name in it and claim it
for their own.(O.K., a little dramatic but nevertheless…)
And so it was at last weeks Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that Intel unveiled a new look for their storied brand, an example of which is below.
Our
response: WHAT DID YOU GO AND DO THT FOR!?!
Gone is the old font. Gone is the old royal blue color. Gone
is the catchy ‘Intel Inside’ tag line. And gone -yes, gone- is
the dropped ‘E’.
…
…
NNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo!
Why? What were you thinking!?! [wipe away tears].
Of
course it doesn’t take a dummy to see that the Intel brand
identity was getting a little ‘muddied’ and needed a tune up.
The ‘Intel Inside’ logo, although a tag that is both clever
and catchy (and should be pushed till the day the company
folds), usually uses a loose looking type that does it no
favors. Here’s a quote from a January 15, 2006
New York Times article
on CES and the use of Intel chips in new Apple products:
“None of these models will bear the “Intel Inside” logo, and
Apple’s advertising won’t include the five-note Intel riff.
Analysts say that Apple has thereby passed on millions of
Intel marketing dollars. On the other hand, it’s hard to
imagine Apple reconciling that logo with its pride and its
fondness for clean design. “(maybe full text is
here)
Ouch. Hear that Intel? Clean design. The Centrino wings
symbol… well there’s not much to say about it other than it
could have been done better. And the recent addition of the
radius-cornered button look is really just a passing graphic
fad. An example of its use in the recent and terribly
unfortunate add campaign (people of the semi-famous variety
sitting on people of the not-famous variety’s laps) is shown
here.
But
why give the baby a face-lift with the bath-water? The old
Intel logo was so strong. The royal blue. The no-nonsense
type. Straight forward and neat. And then there was the genius
move. The dropped ‘E’. Brilliance! So simple. So dumb. So
beautiful. The dropped ‘E’ gave the logo a sublime
transcendence that the word ‘Intel’ spelled out in regular
type, would not have had. And the stroke of the ‘E’ serves to
tie the word together. Really lovely and really strong.
Visually memorable. Even for those that don’t normally muse on
such things.
What the current Intel iteration feels like, though, is that someone new is on the scene and they want to make their mark in a big way. Yes? Thought? But why throw all that wonderfulness out? Why the new -fussier- type (with the ‘I’ and the ‘L’ that don’t align)? Why mess with the color? The swirl- o.k. we get the swirl- but why not line up the ends of it with the lines of the type? Why the bland new tag line? Please don’t loose the ‘Inside’. And the new ‘Viiv’ logo, while feeling slightly odd, is not so easy to read. It looks fairly close to alien glyph symbols or something. Are glyphs on the horizon? Hope not. But why? Oh, why did you PICK UP THE ‘E’? Are you crazy? Please, just stop whatever you’re doing over there in your clean rooms with your white jumpsuits, take a deep breath, collect yourselves, calm down, and… DROP THE ‘E’! Just push it back down there. No one will notice this little indiscretion. Trust me. You won’t regret it.