Corporate Identity

Corporate identity is a trademark of a company, the logo defines the personality of a corporation, the influence of its design, the effectiveness of the design, and it is the corporation’s identity.  Well-known brands are immediately identified by millions of individuals,  because of their logo, for example fast food related restaurants; MacDonald’s is instantly recognized because of its logo, even if the individual has never been in that restaurant, Microsoft is instantly known by many electronic users.

Corporate identity originally initiated in the medieval times, craft guild were using them in order to have their own area of jurisdiction, in order to know the placement of each item, whether it is a trustworthy product or not.

The crafting guilds had evolved to corporations or companies, which use the same technique, as mentioned above, one would know the product is trustworthy, or not by recognizing the company by the logo which the product is normally branded with.  The industrial revolution brought plenty of new companies and numerous of new identities were developed.

Eventually in the 1950’s corporations noticed how important having an identity was to interact with the target audience, maintaining a good reputation with the audience having something that would be visually appealing would boost their company’s notoriety.  

Overall corporate identity aids the company providing it with recognisability, it symbolises the company or organization this helps the image of the company, it helps leave the structure of the company, basically it helps keep the company alive.

Peter Behrens was known to be the father of industrial design; he had created the first logo for the organization (AEG) which later influenced many other designers.  I mentioned Peter Behrens in a previous post which describes the designer more into detail. Peter Behrens is also known as the founder of Corporate Identity, he was the first person to create logos, advertising materials, and company publications. Peter Behrens quote “Design is not about decorating functional forms, it is about creating forms that accord with the character of the object and show new technologies to advantage.” He created the design to be perfect in form and function.

Modern brands:

Apple for instance had a dramatic change in there logo design, the initial logo for apple was perceived to be complex and hard to view so the designers worked on the logo, and added a bite to represent the persuasion to the brand in order to represent people buying the product. The rainbow coloured apple is to refer to the story of Adam and Even in which the apple is signified as the fruit of knowledge, the current logo is a metallic silver sheen that is very visual appealing on any of the products.  

MTV’s was originally an experiment to see how flexible they could make the letters ‘MTV’ into a constructive, innovative and flexible design.

Reference:

Tony Chen 2010, The Evolution of Corporate Identity Design [online] available at:http://www.looks.gd/design/the-evolution-of-corporate-identity-design, [accessed 13^th of December 2013]

De Nora 2009, Corporate Identity [online], available at: http://www.denora.com/News/CorporateIdentity.aspx, [accessed 13^th of December 2013]

AEG 2011, The father of industrial design [online] ,available at: http://www.aeg.com/en/About-AEG/History/, [accessed 13^th December 2013]