Hungarian advertising agency Café Communications launched a new corporate identity after five years – its colourful, striped logo had been transformed into a dynamic design. A Facebook application was developed to make people able to design their own, unique logo.
Café Communications changed its identity in May, 2014. The new image was created in-house: Café Design executed the task: following the latest trends, they designed a dynamic identity for its agency group. Attila, Simon, managing director of Café Design informed that the question about the image was not that it would be dynamic or not, only that how would it be dynamic. “It was very important for us to implement the old, cheerful identity into a modern design, keeping its liveliness and playfulness, and at the same time, getting more applicable for several platforms and channels. Plus we wanted the identity to be recognizable even without the logo itself, only by its patterns.”
Therefore, sticking with the Café trademark of the colourful stripes, but transforming and reshaping it, we a new design, those dynamics were originated in the arrangement of the colourful columns, was created. The evolution of the logo can be followed on this half-minute demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVg5xFjdbks
After the in-house presentation of the identity, all Café employees were granted access to an internal application to make them able to design their own, unique logo which was then used on their business cards and e-mail signatures as well. There was no chance to design to identical logos, as by varying the order of the colours and the height f the columns, there were more than 4 thousand billion different possibilities of arrangement available.
Encouraged by the success of the application, we created an open, client version of it, so that anyone could design his own, tailor made Café logo. Users of the applications also had a chance to win promotional items such as t-shirts, mugs and USB sticks – of course, with their own logo printed on them.
What does dynamic identity mean?
In contrast with the deeply-rooted traditions of logo creation of the past hundred years that preferred stability, dynamic identity provides the liberty of combination of certain elements of the design according to well-established rules, making it possible to create several variations. This trend became popular at the beginning of the 21st century, when it became obvious that an organization or company should be more diverse than to be represented, together with all its main characteristics, by one unalterable symbol. The pioneers of dynamic identity were MTV (Music Television), using several logo versions at the same time, and Casa da Música, a cultural institute in Porto.