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1963 Lufthansa 0481964 nORthERn natuRaL Gas 0621965 ExpO ‘67 0721969 bRitish stEEL 0901970 atLantic RichfiELd cOmpany (aRcO) 0981970 nEw yORk city tRansit authORity 1061972 bRitish aiRpORts authORity 1521972 ciba–GEiGy 1681972 LOndOn ELEctRicity bOaRd (LEb) 1821972 Randstad 2001972 city Of ROttERdam 2141974 amERican REvOLutiOn bicEntEnniaL 2281975 canadian bROadcastinG cORpORatiOn (cbc) 2461975 u.s. dEpaRtmEnt Of LabOR 2721976 amERican bROadcastinG cOmpany (abc) 2921976 nasa 3061978 QuEbEc GOvERnmEnt 3521979 viii mEditERRanEan GamEs 3681980 cn maRinE 3841981 bRitish tELEcOm 416
dEsiGn manuaLs: an OvERviEw 021adRian shauGhnEssy
OfficiaL symbOL Of thE amERican 231 REvOLutiOn bicEntEnniaLpatRicia bELEn & GREG d’OnOfRiO
u.s. dEpaRtmEnt Of LabOR 275 patRicia bELEn & GREG d’OnOfRiO
spacE OdyssEy 309RichaRd dannE
cOmpany LanGuaGE 019massimO viGnELLi
JOhn LLOyd 035sEan pERkins 041aRmin vit 045
bibLiOGRaphy, thanks, cOLOphOn 428
manuals
Essays
foreword
interviews
End matter
contents contents
manuaLs 1dEsiGn & idEntity GuidELinEs
aRmin vit
interview
armin vit
‘it‘s mORE LikE dRaftinG a Law cOntRact than dEsiGninG a GROOvy annuaL REpORt.’
armin vit is a graphic designer and writer from mexico city. in
the late 1990s he followed his then-girlfriend (now wife) bryony
Gomez-palacio to the united states. he worked at a number of
agencies – most notably for michael bierut at pentagram’s new
York office – before co-founding UnderConsideration, a successful
website and design agency.
www.underconsideration.com
i‘m thinking mainly of web design here,
but what in your view is the role of brand
guidelines in modern communications?
perhaps it‘s a sense of security for the
client that, at least somewhere somehow,
there is a set of rules that explains what
to do and what not to do. these days, brands
evolve so quickly that most guidelines are
outdated within a year. i think they are
mostly an ingrained habit of both designers
and clients to produce them, because that‘s
what we‘ve all been doing for the past 60
years and we‘ll probably keep doing them
for the next 60.
Can you remember the first identity manual
you saw?
it couldn‘t have been anything
transformative at the time, as i honestly
don‘t remember. I could trace back my first
acknowledgment of a manual to my first
job in 1999, when i was working at a large
internet consultancy. we were doing a
website for dupont and were handed this
massive printout of their guidelines. none
of which really helped us with the web
design. but they did help in terms of being
aware of not just the fact that guidelines
are a part of corporate identity work, but
that they could be masterful documents of
information design, establishing the visual
language of a company. it was probably
around 2003 or 2004 that i became more
obsessed with design.
have you ever done one?
Oh yes. Many. From five-page to 100-page
manuals. it‘s a project that manages to
be both mind-numbing and rewardingly
challenging.
the great manuals of the past took ages
to produce, and required a high degree of
commitment to pinpoint accuracy. do you
have to be a certain kind of designer to
work on a manual?
Most definitely. It‘s more like drafting a
law contract than designing a groovy annual
report. a lot of designers just like the
sexy aspect of designing logos and business
cards, but it takes a really thorough
and strategic way of working to draft an
identity manual. you have to foresee not
just how things will look, but what kind
of questions the client or the client‘s
vendor might have, so a designer has to be
able to explain through examples and (even
more importantly) through language what
can or can‘t be done. Some design firms are
rumoured to hand out the guidelines to
junior designers or even interns because
it's deemed as more of a ‘production’ task,
but manuals deserve the full force of a
design firm, with designers at the top of the
ladder and creative directors setting the
tone. what‘s the point of designing a great
identity when, after it leaves the studio,
no one knows how to implement it?
as designers, we can admire the discipline
and craft found in the great manuals of the
past, but were they simply too restrictive
and didactic to be of any real use?
now they seem like they are, because
reproduction technologies have improved
so much, and also because we have a hundred
other applications and mediums on which
to deploy an identity. but at the time,
all you wanted to know was exactly what
size the logo had to be and which corner of
the layout you had to put it in. designers
didn‘t want more, clients didn‘t demand
more, and the audience didn't expect more.
now it‘s the opposite: designers want their
identities to do more, clients demand that
those identities work across multiple
applications, and audiences expect design
to be more engaging.
what did we lose – or gain – when printed
manuals became online guidelines?
perhaps i‘m being nostalgic, but a printed
manual demanded attention and respect.
someone paid to have this thing made and
have the rules set in stone. a pdf seems
so ephemeral, it‘s harder to take it
seriously, especially when it is labelled
on the cover as ‘version 1’ or ‘version 1.5’…
what‘s the point of following this if it
might just change next month? but we‘ve
certainly gained the ability to spread the
rules faster and easier, whereas a printed
manual resided in the desk drawer of one
person and had to be consulted almost by
appointment. an important thing we‘ve lost
in pdf and online guidelines is the ability
for designers to really understand colour
management and asset reproduction: it‘s all
in RGb and it‘s all low resolution. with a
printed manual you are forced to understand
how the identity prints and reproduces.
modern brand guidelines, in contrast to the
manuals of the past, seem more concerned
with ‘look and feel’ rather than the rigid
enforcement of graphic elements. do you
agree with this – and if so, are we really
looking at the difference between identity
and branding?
yes, it seems there is more concern about
establishing the tone of voice and, as you
say, the ‘look and feel’, because there is
now both a broader range of people working
with a brand, and a broader range of
applications. so an identity manual will
go to a printer, a web developer, a mobile
developer, an ad agency, a film or production
company and they all have different
technical needs that can really be met with
a single page manual that says ‘this is the
logo, it‘s an Eps, don‘t mess it up’ – but
they all need to understand what that logo
is meant to represent and what language to
use and what emotions to convey, which are
all really hard to capture in a document. if
you do a feel-good manual about the general
visual statements an identity might make,
then you allow all these different people
to interpret them in their own way and adapt
them to their task. ideally, there is just
enough direction in the guidelines that all
these different outputs will fEEL the same
but not necessarily LOOk the same.
interview armin vit
GRaphic standaRds manuaL
canadian bROadcastinG cORpORatiOn (cbc)
client
title
1975
279×302 mm
kRamER dEsiGn assOciatEs
62 mm
canada
2.10 kG
buRtOn kRamER(www.burtonkramer.ca)
304 paGEs, pLus dividER paGEs
date
size
binding
the designers the client
designers
spine
country
weight
Ex libris
pages
burton kramer was born in new york in 1932. he took graphic design courses at the institute of design in chicago, where he was exposed to the bauhaus movement. in the 1950s he did graduate work on yale’s graphic design programme. after yale, he joined the new york studio of will burtin, the German-born designer and educator. kramer then went to work for Geigy, a swiss pharmaceutical company (p.168), under Gottfried honegger. in 1961 he moved to Zurich to work at the Erwin halpern advertising agency as chief designer. in 1965 he moved to toronto to help develop graphics and signage for Expo ‘67 in montreal (p.072). he also worked as an art director for the clairtone sound corporation. two years later he established his own studio, kramer design associates. the studio earned a reputation for the integrated approach they brought to design and graphic identity programmes for prominent clients such as the Royal Ontario museum, Reed paper and cbc. some prominent designers, such as allan
fleming (around the time that the cbc identity was created), worked at kramer design associates. kramer received the Lifetime achievement award from artstoronto in 1999 and the Order of Ontario for his cultural contributions from the province of Ontario in 2002. from the early 2000s, kramer focused on painting.
The first licences for private commercial radio stations in canada were issued in 1922. by the late 1920s, many radio listeners in canada tuned to american stations. the first Broadcasting Act was passed in 1932, creating the canadian Radio broadcasting commission (cRbc). four years later, a new act established the canadian broadcasting company (cbc) as the successor of the cRbc. Eight publicly owned or leased stations and 14 private affiliates made up CBC at the time. thanks to new transmitters, national coverage increased to 76% of the population. The first television broadcasts began in 1952.
The corporate identification system for cbc was approved on January 28–29, 1974, followed by an implementation phase. The new identity was officially launched on december 9, 1974. this manual was published in 1975.
— dark blue plastic folder— three-ring binder— unpaginated— divided into 13 chapters— tabbed divider pages— Laminated tabs— in excellent condition— text in french and English
from the introduction:‘canada’s national broadcasting service has two official names; Canadian broadcasting corporation and société Radio-canada. the international service is called Radio canada international. The service is also identified by various initials; CBC, SRC and RCI. And just plain Radio-canada. we have a northern service. with this profusion, not to say confusion, of names and initials, it is essential that we have a graphic system that identifies us clearly as one corporation.’
RinG bindinG
notable features
Specification
CBC CBCGraphic Standards Manual Graphic Standards Manual
CBC CBCGraphic Standards Manual Graphic Standards Manual
CBC Graphic Standards Manual
CBC CBCGraphic Standards Manual Graphic Standards Manual
CBC Graphic Standards Manual
CBC Graphic Standards Manual
CBC CBCGraphic Standards Manual Graphic Standards Manual
CBC CBCGraphic Standards Manual Graphic Standards Manual
CBC CBCGraphic Standards Manual Graphic Standards Manual
CBC CBCGraphic Standards Manual Graphic Standards Manual
CBC CBCGraphic Standards Manual Graphic Standards Manual
an ExcERpt fROm manuaLs 1:dEsiGn & idEntity GuidELinEs
www.unitEditiOns.cOm