JKR

As an agency, we spend our time making brands as easy for people to identify as possible. We have a few simple tests to help us determine whether we’ve succeeded or whether we need to work on. Creating an app symbol for a brand could easily form part of that stress test.

The conventional approach is to shrink your logo down so that it fits into the 9mm square. That way the whole logo will be visible and they’ll be no risk of mistaken identity.

But safety can be at the expense of style. Rolling Stone magazine’s app for Spotify is still instantly recognisable, but has a little more élan because of its abstraction. It’s possible that it was a case of needs must, as it would be a squeeze to fit the whole logo into the box. More likely however, that Rolling Stone knows its readers will clock it in an instant.

These other examples from Saks, J&B and Coca-Cola all demonstrate enough confidence in their own identities to know that they’ll be recognised, even if they don’t show the whole picture. Sometimes the simplest tests can be the most revealing.

Crowdsourcing is now a pretty well-established means of getting new ideas and solving problems, so we shouldn’t be surprised to read that Crystal Palace FC have asked their fans to design the new Club crest. These are the four finalists – selected by the Club’s management and now put to the fans’ vote. The winner will feature on merchandise and more importantly, the strip worn by the team.

Changing a football club’s crest is always going to ruffle the fans’ feathers, so involving them in the process is a clever way of minimising the moans of the opinionated supporter. The flip side is of course, that relinquishing responsibility looks like taking the easy and even lazy option.

But football is a business that, in recent times, has lost sight of who pays its bills. English football has been transformed by oligarch’s and foreign owners, so if ever there were a case for a more democratic process for a brand redesign then surely this is it. After all, what’s a football club without its fans?

With the perfect storm of the Olympics and the Jubilee, a slew of brands are painting themselves red,white and blue. An annus mirabilis for tactical marketing. From what I understand, while the rules for adopting Olympic branding are as tight as a gnat’s chuff (and extremely expensive to boot), the Queen’s rules and conditions are rather more laissez-faire. Hence, if one puts a union jack on the pack it says both ‘Happy Anniversary Ma’am’ and ‘Go Team Britain’ in the sport. The only issue is that, if the point of special editions is to stand apart and be a bit, well special, then this is a rather interchangeable and generic approach.

Some are going instead down the vintage route with Kellogg’s putting out designs that date from the coronation.

But my favourite are the Fortnum & Mason’s packs, which manage to be elegant and irreverent in equal measure. A souvenir pack worth treasuring, which is a pretty good benchmark for such endeavours. Would you keep the pack long after the event?

I have a pretty strict self imposed design rule of my own – I don’t share jkr work on this Gazette as it’s not intended to be a forum for us in ‘sell mode’. But as I am commenting on others’ Jubilee packaging, it would be churlish not to share one of ours for McVitie’s. It was a bit of a coup getting the Royal Mail to allow us to use their image of the Queen on a stamp out of context for the first time. For which we can only say they are first class folk.

Happy Easter, we will be back on Tuesday.

With the giant Damien Hirst retrospective at the Tate there is the inevitable avalanche of opinion and minor controversy. Much of it seems to revolve around whether this is ‘real’ art or a commercial operation. People have been calling Hirst’s body of work and persona a brand for years, and having ‘trademark’ tropes (dots, or animals in formaldehyde or butterflies) only adds to this.

I guess it’s in the eye of the beholder. For me, he’s a pretty impressive commercial artist and I don’t think this is a dirty word. Similarly, like great commercial art, the best Hirst work makes a point and sticks in your head.

The artist himself seems a little conflicted: he defended the merchandise at his retrospective, saying: “You get the Mona Lisa and then you get the postcards, the T-shirts, the mouse-pad, the earrings and the mugs. One thing is the artwork and the other is getting it out there and I’ve always been torn between the two.”

He is selling a plastic skull for £36,800, which fuels the fire that he is a bit of a con artist. After all, it looks really knocked off and crappy. But then, as a good commercial artist, Hirst understands the value of creating something to get folk talking. The skull might be less art or commercial venture and more about advertising. Asked whether it would hold its value, he replied: “Maybe on eBay you might be alright for a bit.” Nice.

Similarly, he would advise anyone who had bought one of his pieces to “keep them on for a few more spins of the roulette wheel”.

Perhaps we don’t need to think too hard about this. Let’s relax and judge the brand on its merits. If you like the stuff on sale in the gift shop, or think it’s just tat, it’s entirely up to you. Just like any other product on the shelf.

Why do some designs attain ubiquitous popularity and an aura of enduring cool? I think Dr Martens’ design success is all about the engineering, not the style. Bouncing around at gigs, kicking in foes or doing the Nutty Dance is so much easier on the feet because of those wonderfully springy soles. Tactility is supposedly our least consciously noticed, but most persuasive, sense – it’s the first one we develop as infants. So those forgiving soles are probably a much more important brand equity than the yellow stitching, the ‘Air Wair’ cloth tabs flapping off the back of the ankle, or the amount of lace-eyelets one chooses. Design is much more than a surface thing.

We can praise the brand for being broadly unspoiled by progress – the key designs are classics because they have not been tinkered with. Of course, relevance is all, so the brand can boast a ‘2012 collection’ that is a bit more Agyness Deyn than Pete Townsend. Youth cult brands might come and go, but such endeavours are all grist to Dr Martens’ continuing vitality, between patches where anyone and everyone wears them again.

Certain designs catch on because they are of affordable high quality, whether you are a punk or the prime minister. Of their kind, you can’t get better than Docs, and any fashion frippery cannot improve on the basic template – that is design (not styling) of some genius.

By Silas Amos, Creative Director, jkr