The personal blog of Ralph Broenink
It has been a long time since I wrote my last post at this weblog. Since my last post, much happened, as you might have noticed if you are following my Twitter account. If you want to know what happend in the last five months, just read my Twitter timeline 
!
I would like to mention though that I’m part of the candidate board of study association Inter-Actief. This means that I’ll be (most likely) part of the (full time) board as responsible for the education of our members. Until then, I’ll be busy with the symposium ecomputing. If you’re interested, please subscribe to our newsletter!
Furthermore, Antagonist was celebrating its fifth anniversary last week. What’s keeping us busy lately, is brainstorming about the future of the company. Do we want a new website? Should we launch new products? The main problem is not harming our current identity.
Changing image
As budget webhosting company, we don’t want to have an expensive look; just keeping it simple but smooth should be the approach. At the other side, we’re providing a good product (one size fits almost all), with a high service level. Furthermore, we’re a fresh and young, but grown-up company. Combining all those things into one identity, is a difficult process.
Last year, we were planning to change our company logo into a more corporate one, as we were (and are) growing and becoming (even) more professional. However, our current logo (shown above) is more playful then the new version of it. After designing the logo and redecorating our office, we decided to undo the change and keep us ‘young’ – keeping our current identity.
Changing our website is even more difficult. We think that our website is quite outdated and that it’s possible to get more out of it. However, everyone we ask is quite positive about our website: according to them, it’s simple (just as we are) and that it looks great. We don’t know what impact changing the website will have, even if we keep it playful, simple and smooth – it are the small things that can make or break a deal and a more fancy website, makes your company look expensive.
Timeless
With Antagonist, we try to keep our identity undamaged. The University of Twente, on the other hand, is radically changing its image. They’ve hired a trendy design studio, which decided that the current image is corny. They’ve overhauled the logo designed in 1986. To be more precise, they’ve decided to omit any kind of logo and change it to “Universiteit Twente.” (note the dot at the end, the whole universe is in there, or something else with a deep meaning).
As this is a bit lame, and to make the communication department happy, studio Dumbar (also responsible for several successful images like TNT Post, KPN and the Dutch Police force) added some fancy curly lines. This isn’t really a smart move as it isn’t timeless: it’s currently a trend to add those lines to your identity (they should have read the article about it in Smashing Magazine).
The new ‘logo’ lacks professionality. If I graduate sooner or later, the current logo will be replaced by the new one on my diploma. The current logo is quite professional and seems a good choice for such an important paper. The new image lacks all of this. To be honest, I rather have my diploma in the old style then this one, as I want my formal papers in a corresponding style.
I have to admit, the new house style (the part with those lines) is quite fancy, but it isn’t a real identity. As company (or whatever organization), you should want an unique identity that shows character. You want people to think “ah, that’s organization X and it stands for Y and Z”, just by catching a glimpse of your logo. The university made a really bad mistake by not satisfying this condition – if you see the new ‘logo’, you don’t recognize is as being “the university in Enschede”, with everything associated with it; you’ll just see some text of 19 characters. In other words: “University of Twente” has less associated with it than any logo.
Antagonist does a better job by seriously considering impact and identity. What Antagonist will eventually do with its identity, is unknown. However, I predict the university will change its image within five years; the new identity is lacking personality and, more importantly, what you expect of an university.
(The university is making this change as part of a bigger operation to put the university back on the map.)
One Response to “Unique identity”
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About this site
This website is the personal weblog of Ralph Broenink. He studies Computer Science at the University of Twente and is lead software engineer at Antagonist webhosting. Furthermore, he was member of the board of study association Inter-Actief. More information about him can be found at the 'About me'-page.
Ralph Broenink
June 30th, 2009 at 23:58
The introductiorial movie of the new image states the following:
“We’ve committed ourselves to the following when designing the new image: from the outside, even when you only see a very small part of the university, you’ll have to feel where this university stands for and how special it is. But, it should also be tangible at the campus. At this university, special and fascinating things happen. However, you’ll have to be at the campus, within the buildings, within the programme, before you discover this. If you want to reach your target group with this, you’ll lose at least 35%, because those people won’t ever come that far. Our job was to make that fascinating stuff tangible for the outside world. (…)
Furthermore, this new style has more color. It’s important for the culture of the university to prevent from everyone presenting itself in a straitjacket. The wide collection of shape creates unity in variety. We’re all University of Twente, but we don’t have to present ourselves in a boring uniformity. There’s much more variety and dynamic and that’s important for the university.
The beautiful thing of this new house style is that’s complete different. It isn’t a logo at the top of all your letters (…), we’ve disrecarded all rules, there’s a wide range of shape. The most amazing thing is, when you see it: its University of Twente. The simple logo is a beautiful counterpart for all those shapes.”
Yes, posters and other promotional material will work with the new style. However, everything else will dramatically fail. There should have been put more work in the logo and less in the rest of the promotional material, if it’s a cost issue. I prefer a professional, uniform and clear image above something that can only be justified by terms like ‘unity in variety’. It doesn’t say anything.
“University of Twente. Period.”