Update, December 15, 2011: Brand New received this statement from HP on the rebranding:
In 2008, HP asked marketing agency Moving Brands to propose new ideas for various elements of HP’s brand identity, including fonts, graphics, and logos.
HP is one of the world’s most valuable brands and has no plans to adopt the new logo proposed by Moving Brands. HP did implement some of the other design elements shown in the case study.
So HP is re-branding, and Moving Brands, their agency, has a big page dedicated to showing it off. Needless to say, it sounds like a sizable effort; here are a couple excerpts:
Moving Brands partnered with HP as their lead agency to set a creative vision for the HP brand. The vision was to transform the world’s biggest technology company into the world’s most powerful brand. HP would become the blueprint of a moving brand, built for a moving world.
HP was founded on the belief that technology will improve people’s lives, and HP should always aspire for better. This founding principle was unearthed through co-creation workshops with the key stakeholders across the business groups, the HP Labs, product design and insight groups. It was articulated as ‘Human Progress’.
Now, I could offer the suggestion that HP’s problem isn’t so much their branding as it is their products or executive team, or make some crack about the clichéd practice of retrofitting an awkward message into a company’s initials, but cheap shots aside, I don’t think this effort is totally misguided. It’s good that HP goes after some kind of consistent visual identity, and watching this video certain aspects of this will probably serve them well. I rather like this:
The defining signature of the system is the 13° angle. 13° represents HP’s spirit as a company, driven forward by ingenuity and optimism about the future and a belief in human progress. It also refers to the world of computing by recalling the forward slash used in programming. 13° exists within the brand identity, in the graphic language, product design and UI.
The problem is that these ideas should be just guidelines, and not actual rules 1, and my praise ends when they extend it to the company logo:
This takes the dedication to an idea so far that it now becomes a chore to decipher the letters they’re trying to convey. 2 Why change what you already have? Compare the 1941 version — a distinct, respectable logo that has, with few alterations, stood the test of time for 70 years — to the comically unimaginative 2021 one. A single slash? That’s your idea going forward? I mean, c’mon. It sounds like something out of the Onion, or the black record cover from Spinal Tap.
But the logo, to me, is not the problem, the red flag that symbolizes everything wrong with HP and their priorities. This is:
Read it carefully. If you can, ignore the oblique nature of those blue descriptors 3 and jump straight to that black-circled Vision:
Everybody On: seamless, secure, content-aware experiences for a connected world.
That shallow depth of field is blurring “Vision” 4, but assuming I’m reading it correctly, what does this even mean? “Everybody On”? “Content-aware experience”? These are buzzwords, complete hot air. They provide no indication of what products HP makes or has in mind for the future. It means nothing to ordinary people — so generic a statement that you could apply it to any other technology company.
Why not just drop the bullshit and say something like this:
Creating personal, intuitive, robust computers and tablets, unrivaled for work and play.
Hardly final, but at least you’d know what HP does.
Vision is not about being blindly and vaguely idealistic. What products do you make? What solutions do you have to offer that will resonate with regular people like me, sans explanation, and will motivate me to evaluate you? It has to convey your sense of passion, focus, and in a world cynical of corporations, a bit of humanity.
Just look at the rest of the page. Some vague images of people looking at things and who apparently have nothing to do with HP. 3D renderings of conference rooms (?) that might as well be stock photos, and worse, products that don’t exist. How much money does it cost to produce something that isn’t even real?
This revamped brand is a denial and symptom of the bigger problem: that HP has lost its focus and makes boring, uninspiring products.
