Gaze upon the HP Spectre 13, argues Moving Brands' Heinl, and you'll see more vestiges from the original 2011 redesign project than just the logo. Without the imperative to appear suitably boring to be accepted in corporate environments (see the refreshed HP Enterprise logo to know what that looks like), HP's latest CEO has felt free to dust off the handsome four-line logo from HP's archives and put it on his company's new line of premium laptops. "We had three CEOs during our tenure," notes Heinl, before adding the classically British understatement of "that's unusual." Mark Hurd, Leo Apotheker, and Meg Whitman each had "a different background, skills, style, and team." HP was a company in the midst of great upheaval, and the fundamental change proposed by its brand overhaul was apparently deemed too dramatic to put into action.Īside from HP finding some leadership stability, the big thing that's changed in the past five years is the recent split of the company into the businessy Hewlett Packard Enterprise, headed up by Whitman, and the consumer-facing HP Inc, which is now led by Dion Weisler. 2011 was the perfect time to flip the switch and revive the brand's tattered image, but instead HP was too busy flipping CEOs. This was an especially positive bit of feedback for a company that had grown synonymous with soulless printers and shabby PCs, and was trying to woo consumers with the mobile webOS products it had gained from its Palm acquisition. It wasn't a simple matter of picking contrasty colors, fancy fonts, and a lovely logo.Įmerging on the web in late 2011 as a design study, the Moving Brands HP redesign was universally lauded by outsiders who found it cohesive, bold, and refreshing. Redesigning its brand meant redesigning the way HP did business. Consider that HP was manufacturing 100 million devices per year and had in excess of 47,000 different models on its books at the time of this proposed reorganization. Absolutely everything associated with the HP name was reconsidered - from recurring user interface motifs to the retail experience to consistent industrial design principles - and brought in line with a unified vision of a tech company for the future. Spanning two and a half years of work, HP's brand reinvention was most impressive for its level of comprehensiveness. Redesigning its brand meant redesigning the way HP did business But somehow they did figure out a way to make it work, even on HP's global scale, and in the end they produced "hundreds of thousands" of graphical and physical representations of a holistic new brand that could be used worldwide without being either identical everywhere or as fragmented as it had been. It’s very, very difficult" to balance internal HP requirements and other external agencies, admits Heinl. And Moving Brands was only the lead agency on the project - HP had also hired a lot of other external help, whose wishes and advice had to be taken into account. Listening to Heinl describe an endless litany of meetings with "somewhere in the hundreds of people" at HP, I'm impressed that his team at Moving Brands was able to accomplish anything at all. For the scale of this work, that is very rare this type of engagements can sometimes breach a year just to get going." It may have been an auspiciously rapid beginning, but Heinl and his partner Hanna Laiko, the consulting lead who'd previously worked at Nokia, soon confronted the full spectrum of HP's enormous global hierarchy and bureaucracy.Įveryone from the CEO and board of directors, through the marketing chief and executive vice presidents, down to regional bosses and design and marketing leads was considered a stakeholder in the redesign. "This type of engagements can sometimes breach a year just to get going" I spoke to Moving Brands CEO Mat Heinl, who served as the creative lead on the HP brand redesign, about the challenges of the assignment and how his company worked to overcome them. Today Moving Brands has branches in San Francisco, New York, and Zurich, but back then it was just a single London studio that was fortunate enough to have been noticed by one of HP's higher-ups. The story of HP's new premium logo began in December 2008 when the American tech giant commissioned British creative agency Moving Brands to redesign its entire corporate identity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |