I can understand the idea of Kodak wanting to reinvent themselves, and even their desire to distance themselves a bit from the old-fashioned film industry to whatever it is they do today.
But, really, folks — not only is this major change in a 70-year logo throwing away a lot of positive image association, the result is generic and undistinguished to the point of banality. Gone is the implicit “K,” formed stylistically from film running under a lens. The vivid, highly visible gold-and-red of the old logo box now become a fragment of color, using the unimaginative word-between-two-lines format. Blah, and bleah.
(And, it appears, that the horizontal lines are unofficial, too. Meaning that the logo is — the name, in red, in an unimaginative typeface.
Bad move, folks. I’m not saying that if Kodak goes under it will be because of this, but if it does go under, that passing will be that much less noticed.
(via kottke)
The old logo sparks pleasant memories of childhood trips to Disneyland, and my mom stopping us at the “Kodak moment” signs to take pictures of us in front of the riverboat and such.
It’d be a shame if they scrap it.
Consider it scrapped. Which, of course, is one of the problems.
Of course, the Kodak execs clearly think they’d rather have you think of Kodak as something new, and bold, and different, rather than as a company you’ve previously associated with good times and recorded memories.
I don’t understand why companies throw out assets like that. “U.S. Steel” is arguably the coolest company name ever, but they renamed themselves “USX” because some suit-wearing pinhead consultants told them to. Later they realized their mistake and went back.
“Illinois Power” – another really cool name – has changed to “Ameren IP”, or “Amerenip” if you prefer something that sounds like a breath mint.
I will miss the Kodak logo. The new one looks, stylistically, like a paragraph header in a McDonald’s corporate memo.
I think the answer to your question, DOF, is that motion is sometimes mistaken (by boards, shareholders, and/or executives) for progress, and when a business is in trouble, doing flashy and surface is easier than doing something thoughtful and productive.
Plus, of course, for “image consultants” there’s a lot of money to be made in convincing businesses to change things like this (whether it helps or not).
Feh.