Google’s book brand Combines the perfect Of Print And Digital manufacturers
How do you brand the digital ebook of the future? 50% oldschool, 50% new faculty.
July 6, 2015
From a design standpoint, Kindle books don’t seem to be radically different than their print counterparts. Letters are rendered in pixels moderately than ink, and are quite adjustable. however otherwise, a digital a e book is the same as an ebook. So whether it’s a platform like Kindle or a extra traditional publisher like Penguin, these manufacturers are inclined to stick with conventional, typography-primarily based wordmarks.
visible versions has teamed up Google inventive Lab Sydney to reimagine what the e-book may also be from the ground up in a mission known as variants at Play. whereas they still don’t know what a good way to actually seem like (confidently not the Newsstand magazines of yesteryear), they did approach common everything—multimedia designers identified for everything from Coldplay concert events to projection mapping the Sydney Opera home—to model the undertaking.
What results is an emblem that can best exist on a reveal, however provides a nod to the lineage of print. As universal the whole lot’s founder Matt Pyke explains, the glyphs within “variations at Play” had been paired down to simply their vertical parts. These stay static, and take a seat on the web page kind of like binary code, or a line of books on a shelf. however then, the emblem is rebuilt with “human expression”—a collection of 22 animations commissioned by the studio that turn the vertical strains back into full letters.
the place things get extra attention-grabbing, however, is that the prospective animations are endless. Pyke means that into the longer term, animations could be created that were author or work-specific. (I imagine how Warner Bros will once in a while play with the seem to be of their shield sooner than the first frames of a film, but scaled to authors who write mysteries, romance, or horror.) At that point, the logo of the writer would marry the logo of the writer.
whether that is inherently excellent or dangerous is controversial, nevertheless it’s extra proof that branding in the digital age is morphing into a less static thought in a position to transferring itself around the particular context of a single sub-model or undertaking. From trademarks built from code, to Oreo cookies assisting marriage equality, brands of the next day to come will likely be in consistent motion, reacting to the changing world around them.
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