Roman letterforms are named such because they came from Rome. And I’m not talking about just the city in Italy; I’m talking about the Roman Empire. You know—when Caesar was the big man on campus about 2,000 years ago. The Romans perfected the thick and thin stroked serif letterforms named after them. (For the uninitiated, serifs are the little “feet” that terminate at the end of a stroke.) They carved these letterforms with perfection into Roman columns and monuments, and even adjusted the letters to compensate for optical aberrations when viewed by sandaled citizens strolling underneath.

Roman typefaces continued to be developed during the Renaissance through the 1700’s with many variations, but they still retain the same thick/thin/serif characteristics that define the category to this day.

About 100 years ago, the first sans serif typefaces made their appearance. As their name implies, they lack serifs. They have a more uniform stroke width. Sans serifs project a more modern look and are of more recent origin. Helvetica, the most popular sans serif—so popular that a movie was made about it— came out in 1957.

When choosing type, as the eminent typographer Robert Bringhurst said, “Choose a face whose historical echoes and associations are in harmony with the text.” Which gets us back to the Old Mill, the corporate business building I mentioned earlier. The building is a postmodern example of contemporary architecture, with interesting curved forms, column details and flying buttress-like features. Salt Lake-based VCBO Architecture designed the office complex for high-tech business use.

I don’t know who designed the logo for the Old Mill, but the thing that bothers me is the incongruity of logotype and the building itself. The logo uses a Roman typeface in caps and small caps, with a dropped initial “O”. The typestyle and layout are very traditional. The design is perfectly acceptable and would not seem out of place in the correct context. But if you’re choosing typefaces and designing a logo for a modern building, you should choose based on harmonious associations. Thus the use of a Roman typestyle, particularly with the idiosyncratic dropped “O”, seems completely out of character with the modern architecture.

Undoubtedly the logotype designer was influenced by the name of the building itself, which references an historic structure not far from the office complex. For myself however, it doesn’t justify the incongruity. I just want to see something more modern on that modern building. Yeah, I know this is obsessive. – Randall Smith

The premise of Gobe’s book is that successful brands connect with people by harnessing the power behind human emotions. Since the book was written, the opportunity for dialogue between brands and their customers has increased dramatically. And yet emotional connections go way beyond the use of social media. Gobe says that in order for brands to become emotionally engaging, the following changes will need to take place:

10 Commandments of Emotional Branding by Marc Gobe

You can evaluate successful brands or designed artifacts and identify Gobe’s commandments one at a time. I remember the first few years after the iPod came out I found myself in New York City frequently. The cultural impact of that device was huge, particularly notable in a crowded urban environment. White ear buds stood out, especially in the subways and marked you as an owner of Apple’s newest product. The iPod provides value not only for its intended purpose—to play music, but with its recognizable ear buds, as a signifier (Commandments 2, 6) and also for its experiential value, as a user feels part of the iPod community (4, 5, 8). The device becomes a means to enhance the perceived value of the user by giving them an identity and a brand experience (2, 3, 7).

Even architecture has moved away from strictly functional and aesthetic purposes and is now being recognized for the renewal of cities, and is seen as a vehicle for transforming economic growth (1, 2, 8). Such is the case with major public works by “staritects”, who convert buildings into items of brand equity. Downtown Los Angeles is not a major tourist destination, and this fact certainly influenced the selection of Frank Gehry as architect of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Located in right in middle of downtown, Gehry’s building takes your breath away (at least it did mine). It’s not unlike the Salt Lake Public Library, designed in 2003 by Moshe Safdie and local VCBO Architecture, although it’s not quite as ostentatious as Gehry’s building. Today, architecture can be evaluated by its economic potential to heighten the perceived value of its owner—whether a city, a corporation or an individual (5, 7).

Clearly the prime branding tools of the day, Web sites, social media, identities and advertising have the obligation to connect emotionally with their intended audience. As Gobe says, “This strategy works because we all respond to our life experiences and we naturally project emotional value on to the objects around us.”

I teach design history. Graphic design, specifically, but we talk about architecture and product design as well. I’ve always been interested in chairs. The best chairs reveal something about their designer. They have a story to tell. For Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair or Le Corbusier’s LC2 chair, both designed in the late 20s, they are elegant and functional, but also a representation of a new architectural style emerging in the first half of the 20^th century, and the experimentation with innovative materials and construction methods. The early modernists had to design their own furniture to match their architecture; there weren’t other options available.

Like any designed object, chairs have been endowed with meaning. For the chairs of architects, the meaning lies somewhere between status/luxury and strictly utilitarian. Chairs designed by architects have multiple definitions of their purpose. They provide seating, but they are also a fashion accessory for the home or office.

Bauhaus designers claimed to want functional furniture, produced in high quantities for the working class masses, but Mies’s Barcelona chair was expensive to make and difficult to mass produce. It was, in fact, custom created and produced for the King and Queen of Spain. Today the chair is produced by Knoll and will run you around $6,300, making it as much a piece of art as a piece of furniture.  Gerrit Rietveld’s 1919 Red and Blue chair, made simply of painted wood and not as well known, (but still very much an artistic statement) fairs better at Cassina for $2,000.

The Italian architect and editor of Domus magazine, Ernesto Rogers made a famous statement in 1952 about the significance of design in the modern world. He said that it is possible to examine a spoon and understand the kind of city that the society that had produced it, would build. The slogan “from the spoon to the town” described the claim that an architect is able to switch effortlessly from tableware to skyscrapers in a heartbeat.

Whether that’s true or not, there’s no doubt the architects name is useful in selling their product. Look at how Design Within Reach includes the name and photo of nearly every product they sell, from contemporary designers back to Mies himself. The idea of branding designers’ products with a name and photo has even made it down to Ikea’s level of furniture.

What were once anonymous, modest, albeit useful objects have turned into designs of high desirability on the basis of the architect or designer’s name. The most obvious example is the remarkable output of the post-modernist architect Michael Graves, who had a 13 year collaboration with Target (ending this year), creating everything from spatulas to toilet plungers, most of them in his trademark blue color, with his photo on the package—certainly a brand in every sense of the word. You sometimes wonder what, if any, impact it has on the reputation of a respected architect to lend his name and image to such a wide output.

Complaints that architects’ chairs focus too much on form and too little on function are easy to find. One comment on blog post said, “Architects often make uncomfortable chairs. They want you to look good but you have to sacrifice comfort. Actually I think most architects who design these chairs prefer if you did not sit in them at all. Messes up the aesthetics.”

Despite the questions of comfort and questionability of personality branding, I am no less a consumer than anyone else, and I own or covet the very same things. At least I can claim to know what I’m getting into.

Siegel calls on companies to use greater simplicity in their language. Visual language, including graphic design and branding, is as much a part of this language as verbal language. In fact, because images are experienced first they are arguably more important.

I’m currently working on a brochure that explains complex algorithms and formulas for a network-marketing compensation plan. We realized most people will not want to know all the nitty-gritty details, however a small minority will. By simplifying everything to visual metaphors and quick statements that are easy to understand, the result is a breathe of fresh air in a complex, over-hyped industry.

Our approach applied two lessons learned from the Internet.

1) A lot can be said in only 140 characters.
Messages about your company and its offerings must be made shorter and shorter or fewer and fewer people will listen.

2) Those who desire can simply click “learn more.”
Make the information accessible to those who really are interested but don’t lead with it. Ever. Make it available on your website somewhere but keep it indexible. No PDFs.

Steve Jobs once said, “It’s a very noisy world and we’re not going to get the chance for people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.”

Strong brands are easy to understand. Toms Shoes, Apple, Google, Nike are built around simple concepts; “One for One”, “Think Different”, “Don’t Be Evil”, “Just Do It”. Each stands out in their crowded industries. If you want people to pay attention to you, you need to be the breathe of fresh air in your industry.

Simplicity, though, is much easier said than done. Sometimes “simple”, when it has nothing of substance to say, is just boring and is easily dismissed. The trick is not to have simple ideas, rather complex ideas presented simply. Oliver Wendell Holmes is attributed to saying, “I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity; I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity”. All industries are complicated and if you can be the one you can present complex ideas at their most basic level, you can be powerful.