• Serve Surprising and Pleasing, but Don’t Overcook
• Manifest Plainness, Embrace Simplicity, Design Terrific Logos
• I’m just trying to “build an instant"
• Why Settle For Something When You Can Make It Shine? – An Interview with Hooping Fan Extraordinaire and Design-Award Winner Danielle McIntosh
• What I am doing is new and exciting - An interview with Tom Rossau
• Meet enPieza! and Some of Their Friends – or How to Help Daily Objects Forget Their Initial Destiny for Fun and Profit
• The value of the material determines the value of the act of cleaning itself - an interview with Jurgen Bey of Studio Makkink & Bey
• The Road is Clear for Colors – an Interview with Lieke Ypma
• I feel more alive in insecurity
• Try not to repeat what already exists
• A sense of balance between pixels and pencil
• The Magic at Sun Rise
• To create means to express your inner self
• Muses of a Midwestern Maker
• We are perfectionists …
• Always start from scratch
• Don't Read This, Go Design Something!" – An Interview with Daniel Pelavi
• Design is a consequence of the process, which in turn is a consequence of the material – An Interview with Max Lamb
• Concrete: Material of the Future!
• Finding Beauty in Problem-Solving – An Interview with Illustrator Jean Tuttle
• Complaining is Silly - An Interview with Stefan Sagmeister
• My starting point is the graphic reworking of surface
• Self-sufficiency, environmental protection and cultural promotion – All in a day’s work for Ute Hübler and Sonja Nitschmann of espírito brasilis
• Designs Unseen – An Interview with "Micronaut" Martin Oeggerli
• The Passagen Interviews – Katja Gehrke
• The Passagen Interviews – Doty Horn
• Taking Security from Effects – an interview with Dieter Hermann of Printcolor
• Designers, have your say! The XYMARA.com Passagen Interviews!
• Personal magic – the art of Alison Ann Martin
• Design Trends in Asia - Nature, Harmony and the Embrace of the New
• What color is a piece of string?
• Straight Lines, Hidden Value
• I feel I gave a little something, a little beauty to the world
• We believe it’s a new industrial revolution
• How about good things? Or interesting things?
• Design also always has a function
• Wood is a Very Modern Material
• I don‘t care what color a car is, just as long as it is black.
• Every design process is inspired by something else, what the designer has seen, heard or felt.
• Aren‘t our color preferences always based on our childhood memories?
• There is a strong need for richness
• We live in an inflatable culture. It‘s hard to know which values are real.
• Colors that create value are trendy ...
• There is a corresponding emotion to each color
• We would love to live outside the city. But we stay and use countryside colors ...
• There are too many colors around. I only need black.
• Interview with Warren Neidich, Artist
• Interview with Simon Husslein, Product Designer
• Interview with Clarissa Tossin, Graphic Designer
• Interview with Uleshka Asher, PingMag Chief Editor/Artist

Brand Vision and Designing Corporate Uniqueness – An Interview with Bruno Schmidt of MetaDesign

Page 1 | Page 2: Colors and trending at MetaDesign

By Ziggy Nixon

MetaDesign, with offices in Zürich, Berlin and San Francisco, is well known globally and considered by many to be one of the most respected interdisciplinary design consultancies in business today. Its portfolio of services ranges from strategic brand management to the design and implementation of complex corporate identities and images, and even to the design of corporate sounds, fashions and publications.

Bruno Schmidt is the Managing Director of MetaDesign Suisse in Zürich. In his time with the company, he has managed projects for key clients such as Audi, the Dusseldorf Airport and the Berlin Transit System (BVG). This latter project has been called an important milestone not only for the company but also for the reunification of the German capital.

Is there a common issue found among your different projects, whether for global or local clients?

There is a common denominator that is found in all customer projects and relationships, namely "change". It sounds a bit banal, but when our customers come to us there are always changes or adjustments at hand that they are looking to successfully manage.

Sometimes change comes from a merger, where it’s necessary to fuse together different cultures. Other times, it comes from "outsourcing" given activities, where again a common bond must be developed between units or services. Or it can be a dramatic, historical type of change such as we experienced first-hand when the Berlin Wall fell.

How do you begin a project with a customer?

With every project, our work begins with a dialogue with our customers about their market and corporate strategies. This process may even reveal that these need to be reviewed and more clearly developed before moving forwards with a new brand concept. No matter where these plans stand, it is very important from our side that we begin working immediately as a full partner of the customer. We see our role very much as “facilitator” as, of course, we can not know better than the customer about their own business.

We then examine, among other factors: what the market strategy is, where the customer is positioned, where they stand against the competition, and what activities there are in their circle of business. This leads as well to the question “what is the brand architecture?” particularly if there are quite a number of different players in the same field.

We provide all the support we can through these very structured and also very intense processes. And all of this is done well before the actual "design" begins.

How do you promote your proposals for corporate brand design to a company?

Before "selling" anything, it is vital that we ensure that the people within the company that make the decisions are fully behind these decisions and commit to do all they can to support them. Otherwise nothing will happen. Quite simply, "the brand has to be lived".

We know all too well that a successful integration is just not possible without buy-in throughout the organization. Everyone must be in agreement in terms of carrying the responsibility for the integration and that they fully stand behind it. Clearly, it’s not sufficient if a company's CEO decides to move ahead on a brand strategy; instead, the vision has to be fully integrated within both the immediate team as well as "outside" teams within the company.

The persons involved have to be both able and comfortable to carry the concept within themselves, as everyone involved will be represented by the brand. It's important that people feel good about the brand, that they're proud to tell their friends and family about it, and that they can share it with their colleagues in a positive way. The best way forward is that a brand image is developed such that a person works with a company that they can identify with.

Then we take all this together and work with the customer's decisions on what they want to achieve strategically. We begin in earnest to work on the approach for a communication concept: designing the visual design concept, the platform that will take the brand forwards. Key questions begin to be asked, namely: How will the brand appear, what do we want to say with it, and how is it perceived?

It’s very important to understand as well that MetaDesign is not in the advertising business. What we do provide is a brand platform from which, for example, advertising – as well as other aspects of brand communication – can be built from. We work with the concept of a single brand introduction, not something that goes off into many directions at once.

What aspects are included in your services?

Everything is included in terms of what will be associated visually with the ultimate acceptance of the corporate brand. This can include logos, the colors of the website, even clothing, it’s literally everything that touches or will be associated with the brand design. Our target is to develop a very clear vision of what people should have in their mind when they view the brand.

How far into the future do you try to project your vision for a brand?

To develop a successful corporate brand, one really must think long-term ... that is, as much as anyone can say that today. We always have to keep in the back of our minds what could occur in a given market or the business environment, and begin preparing the brand strategy accordingly.

For us, the basic visual presentation that we develop has to be – in our mind's eye – valid for the next eight to ten years. Naturally we have to adjust this as time goes on, but we always work in this direction, namely that the brand must and will have a high degree of permanence in its most basic form.

During this eight to ten year follow-up period, do you stay in contact with your customers?

Of course. You see, we view brand leadership as a marathon. One can see this every day: the dynamics of the markets change, you see new mergers, new split-ups, changes in market conditions, etc. The positioning of a company within a given market can also change rapidly. This requires continuous review of how the brand is being accepted, even when new parts come into our customer’s business, or that of their competitors. We therefore remain very close to our customers even after the initial integration is closed.

For example, in the automotive market where we are quite active, brand images change continuously. In our role, we have to constantly look forward and develop a sense of what is coming or could come ahead for these markets and what consumers are looking for. We must be always ready to adjust the vision of what the brand will need to represent in the future, whether it’s about environmental issues or whatever else the future may bring.

Can you explain a bit more about the vision for a corporate brand?

Vision is a big word today. We do our best to develop a brand image that also anticipates where the market will move tomorrow.

It's funny, but one of our customers once said we were his "most critical sympathizers." Certainly, companies that are looking to drive their success do not want to deal only with "yes men". Instead, what our customers are looking for partners that are on their side, that are going to help them analyze their brands critically, and with a different perspective than they could internally. And they know that any advice we give will be with their best interests at heart and will be clear in terms of what's best for the brand image in hand.