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outdated within a year.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