This year, VSAers are embarking on an ambitious journey to redesign logos, websites, apps, packaging and more. It’s our contribution to businesses, brands and society by exploring potential solutions to the many types of expressions and experiences in the world we think have the potential of being better. We have not been commissioned for these solutions, but rather it’s our passion for great creativity that motivates us.
.gif)
In some instances, we’ll be considering what exists today. At other times, we’ll consider the opportunity for something yet to be solved, but we see it as critical for the future.
%20(1).gif)
Visit design4better.co to see the ever-evolving sketchpad for ambitious concepts that push design and organizations forward. From bold ideas to new interactions, we create with curiosity and purpose.
BNY Mellon announced this week that it is updating its logo and simplifying its company umbrella brand to “BNY.” This collaboration with VSA complements BNY's evolution, and brings the logo and brand into its next era.
“This is a 240-year-old company that has never stopped asking ‘what’s next,’ and this new logo is really grounded in their strategy and who they are,” said VSA Associate Partner and Executive Creative Director YanYan Zhang. “It’s been a great partnership and a really significant moment to be a part of.”
The refreshed brand gives new life to the storied institution by recognizing its bold ambitions. Designed to speak to both its rich heritage as the country’s oldest bank and its relentless spirit of innovation, the new brand was built with flexibility as a core capability. The broader brand system allows its users to scale from formal to expressive and deliver best-in-class creativity to a wide range of audiences.
The new BNY logo embodies these key brand attributes of simplicity, flexibility and boldness.
“With this shift, the visual length of the logo reduces by two-thirds. The bold custom sans-serif letterforms are essential in establishing presence and substance. The arrow was retained and modified to convey forward thinking and modernity,” said VSA Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber.
While the logo is new, the refreshed brand has already received recognition, including a Gold award in the “Visual Identity System: Corporate Image” category at the FCS Portfolio Awards earlier this spring.
Our client Chime recently announced its new “MyPay” offering by taking out a center-spread ad in the New York Times.
Part celebration of Chime’s members, part rallying cry, the letter is written directly to all the Americans who’ve ever had an unexpected expense and found themselves in need of a little financial flexibility.
Chime’s latest offering, “MyPay,” gives its members access to a portion of their paycheck at any time during the pay period, helping them navigate the surprise costs that can pop up between paydays.
Very proud to be part of this announcement—congrats to Chime and the team.
Very proud to share that VSA received two awards at this year’s Financial Communications Society (FCS) Portfolio Awards, taking home a Gold and a Bronze alongside our client partners BNY Mellon and CME Group.
Our collaboration with BNY Mellon on its revitalized brand identity was recognized with a Gold award in the “Visual Identity System: Corporate Image” category. BNY Mellon’s refreshed brand expression gives new life to the storied institution by recognizing its startup-like ambitions. Designed to speak to both its rich heritage as the country’s oldest bank and its relentless spirit of innovation, the new brand was built with flexibility as a core capability. From colors to typography, the refreshed brand allows its users to scale from formal to expressive and deliver best-in-class creativity to a wide range of audiences.
Our partnership on the MarketTech Forum events with longtime client CME Group was also recognized with a Bronze award in the “Event Marketing: Corporate Image” category. MarketTech Forum is an ongoing series tailored to CME Group’s power users where they can hear directly from CME Group personnel about key developments and technological advancements to get the most out of their experience. From stage branding to wayfinding, landing pages to event mementos, VSA partnered with CME Group to create a full event-experience design that would support and scale as needed.
OpenAI had big dreams for the name GPT. It even published brand guidelines on the internet that refer to the acronym as a “trademark.” However, the company’s dream of owning the rights to GPT will fade on May 6, when its trademark application is slated for a “final action” denial from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Although OpenAI has petitioned the USPTO for an extension of the deadline, the mark is all but dead. Anyone who needs to name something can learn from its demise.
OpenAI’s failure hinges on the fact that its acronym stands for the name “Generative Pre-trained Transformer.” According to the USPTO, the name “merely describes” the service’s capabilities.
Adding insult to injury, the USPTO also states that the name “appears to be generic.” In other words, “Generative Pretrained Transformer” is the equivalent of Hershey naming its newest treat “chocolate candy bar” or Nike calling its latest sneaker “high-performance running shoe.”
GPT is so generic that more than 200 related names have been submitted to the USPTO for trademark consideration, and most have not originated with OpenAI. Applications include “Cat GPT,” “BrainGPT,” and the crowd-pleaser “GPTJesus.”
All is not lost for OpenAI. The USPTO has already approved two of the company’s other trademark applications for “GPT-3” and “GPT-4.” But this is a second-rate solution. It’s as if Apple had been prohibited from trademarking the generic name “Smartphone,” so, instead, it named its products “Smartphone-3” and “Smartphone-4.”
If OpenAI had invested more thought into developing a proprietary name to match its revolutionary technology, it could’ve inaugurated the age of AI with a world-building asset on the level of the iPhone.”
OpenAI botched its “iPhone” moment, but we can learn three naming lessons from their failure.
It’s hard to predict what’s next for GPT. If OpenAI had invested more thought into developing a proprietary name to match its revolutionary technology, it could’ve inaugurated the age of AI with a world-building asset on the level of the iPhone. Instead, it created a marketing 101 module: How NOT to brand a product.
There’s also a more significant lesson. Business history isn’t written with sales numbers, market share, advertisements, or logos—all of which change over time. The story is told through brand names that seldom, if ever, change. That’s why every naming project is an opportunity to write history. Don’t “GPT” your chance at immortality.
This piece originally appeared in PRINT Mag; view the published piece here.
Image created by Josh Berta.
This piece originally appeared in AllBusiness.com; see the published piece.
At this point, anyone in marketing has seen (or been the accomplice to) an unnecessary website overhaul.
To be fair, there are very persuasive reasons to burn it all down to the ground. Our culture deeply values the new over the old—particularly in a corporate world where “newness” can get more attention and accolades than the much less flashy “improvement.” The “what sounds better on a resume” question is compounded by clients repeatedly being sold or given the impression that they need to start over entirely to solve their business issues. It’s a chicken-or-egg question: Which idea came first—the one that website overhauls are necessary for creating change or that it is easier to sell a website overhaul when it is critical to change?
Here’s the problem: website overhauls don’t work—at least not in the way they’re promised to.
Website redesigns are often initiated because there’s a business problem: low conversions or poor lead capturing mean the website isn’t driving a significant portion of revenue; an underinvestment in the website leads to an outdated and out-of-touch image; acquisitions have grown the capabilities of an organization, but those aren’t reflected on the website. The list goes on.
Sure, a website overhaul may solve those problems … in the same way that firing your entire staff and hiring new people may improve employee morale.
But, like that analogy, website overhauls are expensive and hopefully unnecessary. In both the time they require and the financial investment needed, website overhauls demand the dedication and focus of large teams working for weeks, months, and sometimes even years. This time commitment poses problems of its own, adding in a layer of “well, we’ve spent so much time on it, now it really has to perform.” In other words, the perfect recipe for stakeholder disappointment, delivered late and way over budget.
It can also create more problems than there were to begin with. From structure changes to broken links, a great deal of complexity is involved in successfully migrating a site without decreasing SEO rankings. Data and content migrations are often underestimated herculean efforts, not to mention external integrations. A misaligned overhaul can also turn users off to the platform, creating frustration or confusion and causing a loss of trust and familiarity.
Lastly, it’s just not the best way to work. A website isn’t a static billboard—it’s a selling tool that should be responsive to customer needs. Responsiveness means it adapts as customers or the business adapts. Every month you spend on an overhaul is time that could have been put into making the site 5% better for the customers currently interacting with it. By the time you finish, the insights that you were implementing may no longer be relevant.
A website isn’t a static billboard—it’s a selling tool that should be responsive to customer needs.”
When we spread the gospel of incremental change, we cite three reasons to believe: speed, sustainability, and CMO satisfaction.
Incremental change is fast, allowing you to respond to customer needs in real time. Let’s say you have a news website where an increasing number of readers are complaining about readability on mobile devices. Rather than adding this to a potential list of significant redesign efforts, a quick analysis reveals that this affects phones with folding screens. The team can consider how to handle multiple viewport segments on those devices instead of assuming there’s a larger problem.
Just because a change is fast doesn’t mean it can’t have a big impact. You wouldn’t believe how radically different a site can look by simply changing a typeface or how much more engagement you can drive by making minor improvements to a website’s user interface.
An incremental approach is also sustainable. Rather than burning out your teams with a monumental overhaul, short sprints with tangible results keep everyone happy.
Lastly, it meets the needs of CMOs today. Top marketers are increasingly reporting that they are being asked to do more with less and prove ROI all along the way. Incremental change is a way to accomplish both. You can make a tangible impact quickly with a nimble team—testing, measuring, and improving as you go.
Top marketers are increasingly reporting that they are being asked to do more with less and prove ROI all along the way. Incremental change is a way to accomplish both.”
Leadership might have concerns. We’ve been indoctrinated for so long that a website overhaul is the only way to remove legacy baggage. So, the idea of forgoing a splashy rollout for minor improvements over time can be a tough sell. When advocating for an incremental approach, answer this question: What is the one change we can make that will prove to leadership that this approach can work?
Another common complaint is that implementation or approval will take too long. If that’s the case for your business, rectifying this is the first step. If an organization cannot quickly and confidently change copy, images, or other basic elements of an experience, it signals internal misalignment about how digital experiences are best utilized. The incremental approach doesn’t work if things don’t keep moving incrementally.
An incremental approach should also include a commitment to stop chasing trends. While a fashionable typeface, parallax scrolling, or aggressively minimalist (or maximalist) website may seem like a good idea at the time, this user experience quickly becomes outdated because it’s tied to what everyone else is doing, not what your brand stands for.
It also behooves teams to pick boring technology. Industry staples are staples for a reason. Sometimes, a start-up disruptor can bring real value to the table, other times it brings a host of problems and minimal support to fix them.
Keep your core teams small, ideally only 4–6 people. Choose experts over junior staff that may need a lot of oversight, and reduce meetings wherever you can by using asynchronous communication (like Slack) to keep everyone up to date.
You should also time-box every activity—don’t allow any single effort to run indefinitely. Always have a timeline in any hypothesis, and track it ruthlessly.
Even though you’re running with a tight team, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be getting input from across the organization. A successful incremental approach will be one where there’s buy-in from all stakeholders, and their needs are balanced with those of their colleagues and the audiences. Have listening sessions with different departments affected by the website. What do they wish was different? What are their pain points? This tactic helps you figure out what will have the biggest impact and how to prioritize.
Once you know what matters to your internal and external stakeholders, commit to measuring it meticulously. You should continually assess what works and what doesn’t and prioritize changes that can be measured against some kind of progress metric. If its impact can’t be measured, don’t do it.
As you begin to design, always reduce and simplify before expanding. Prototype with the lowest effort possible to achieve your goals—finding ways to consolidate changes and reduce redundancies in design can have substantial time-saving benefits over the life of an initiative. This tactic will mean starting with components you already have—ideally ones that exist in a design tool—and current code. The most optimized teams can prototype ideas in staging and run no-regrets experiments in production for quick feedback. They also create reusable assets that can be used for final delivery. Adaptable designs will lend themselves to adaptable prototypes and implementations.
When you reach something that feels good, make it happen. Move to the real product as quickly as you can. If it’s better than what you currently have, ship it.
The incremental approach comes with a hard truth: a website will never be “done.” At least not as long as you’re in business! There will always be new technologies, customer needs, and insights to incorporate into your digital experiences. Always measure, adapt, and revisit previous changes to make them a little bit better. It’s like Boy Scout’s honor: Leave it a little better than you found it.
VSA’s CEO Anne-Marie Rosser was recently interviewed by Top Interactive Agencies (TIA), where she talked trends, human nature versus data, and the thing people are most surprised to learn about her. See the interview below, or view the original piece.
I started out in an account role function but really felt that I was doing the strategy lift. At the time, I asked our CEO if I could start a strategy function and he said “sure.” So, I played in the strategy space for about 15 years at a few agencies, and then ultimately decided I wanted to apply what I had learned in strategy to grow relationships in a more consultative way. I did that for about 10 years before moving into a role as agency president and then CEO.
The food and the people! It’s a beautiful city that has scale—but also has great neighborhoods and can feel small. It’s a very livable city. It also has a great food scene with anything you can imagine. Like any city, it’s really about walking the neighborhoods to get a feel for it.
It’s been a really transformational time in the industry at large, and for our agency. So much so that our attention can get very fragmented. My focus now is on prioritization and execution. It’s easy to get distracted, but execution is still imperative, and that requires the ability to prioritize what is most important and let some of the rest wait.
I’m still learning! As a relatively new CEO, this is one of my challenges. But I think it’s really critical that executives are close to the work to ensure their vision is relevant and achievable. In some ways, vision is the easier part. It’s execution—through the day to day—that determines your success. I have a really great team that challenges me and keeps me honest on both fronts as we try to reserve time that is focused on 50,000-foot issues and time that is reserved for day to day. This helps all of us change gears together.
I want people to experiment and not view it as a failure if an idea doesn’t work out. This doesn’t relate just to client work, but to our own internal structure and processes as well. Right now I think it’s about staying very close to culture and the pace of change, and encouraging teams to meet clients where they are while still having the courage of their convictions. We also have an internal drive to “own” ideas and innovation. We hold each other accountable.
There is more and more data that supposedly tells us EXACTLY what people want and where. I think it’s useful to take some of that data with a grain of salt because it is inherently backwards looking. People are unpredictable, so human-centered design in part means remembering the human tendency to surprise.”
Most recently, we rolled out a campaign for our client FactSet that I think really embodies that goal. FactSet is a global financial digital platform and enterprise solutions provider—it’s heavily in the B2B space. When we were designing the campaign for them, we thought about how so much of B2B advertising is frankly very boring and decided to do something different. The campaign has three different spots, and they’re all really funny! [You can check them out here.] We think that a smart departure like this from the category norms makes B2B brands stand out in a good way and keeps people thinking about that brand experience long after.
Honestly, I think it comes back to basics versus always focusing on just “what’s new” in digital. For an ecosystem to work, it has to have movement, and that means 1) know your audience and what they are about, and then 2) reduce friction as they move freely within the ecosystem. If you miss these fundamentals, the rest doesn’t work. I think the other secret is in your question itself: “prioritize.” As I mentioned a few answers ago, prioritization isn’t easy—it takes real discipline. Brands that can prioritize, which inherently means giving other things up, stand a much better change of thriving.
Relevancy is achieved by deeply understanding your audience and acknowledging that even once you know them deeply, you’re never done. You have to keep returning to that well to understand what has changed, because what’s relevant to them changes. Trends can be significant or fleeting, but certainly understanding cultural currency is important. It becomes truly meaningful only when you can connect it back to your specific audience and what they care about. So, I guess I’m less concerned about the trends that may stay or go, and more about how audiences are shifting their attention and why.
What a great question. Our purpose is to “design for a better human experience,” which is a lofty goal for an agency. But it’s because we fundamentally believe that behind every business or marketing problem is a human problem to solve. There is more and more data that supposedly tells us EXACTLY what people want and where. I think it’s useful to take some of that data with a grain of salt because it is inherently backwards looking. People are unpredictable, so human-centered design in part means remembering the human tendency to surprise and remembering to have empathy for a real human problem that needs to be solved. Sometimes trusting your gut and pushing to disrupt the data is the best way to think about where human-centered design will go because it looks forward rather than back.
I would have to say TikTok is the platform or emergent player that I still say “wow” to in terms of how disrupting it is. It is fundamentally changing our relationship with all content—news, information, brands, entertainment. Building off of what social platforms started, TikTok is changing information and commerce more profoundly. The biggest takeaway for me is the serious shift in our attention span and how information is consumed. The ongoing shift from a “broadcast to your audience” model to “show up where the conversation is already happening” has big implications for everyone, and I don’t know that we’ve fully cracked the code on what it will mean.
It’s alive and well. I am seeing small startups of every stripe, including agencies, pop up everywhere and do great work. Chicago remains a place where people are more focused on the ideas and the work than the marquee, so I think that’s a real strength.
VSA brings brand strategy and activation to the table for MTP. Our deep design heritage and consultative style allows us to go deep with clients to drive results. MTP’s belief that agencies can still be independent while benefiting from shared values and collaboration is part of VSA’s ethos and how we work.
This is such a great question. As a parent with three kids nearing college age, it’s one I’m asking! I absolutely think that creatives can break into this industry through routes other than traditional education. The most important attributes are having ideas, communication skills, and the ability to collaborate.
Designers, creators, writers—they all play a huge role. We know that representation matters, so whether that is via illustration, casting, voice talent or accessibility in technology, they all drive our ability to reflect the world we live in with a more accurate and inclusive approach. It’s exciting. We don’t always get it right, but it’s something we continue to challenge our creative teams to think through.
My mom is an artist, and I think spending summers with her growing up in New York was very formative. Learning to see and appreciate aesthetics in all different areas of life is a huge part of my work life, but also my life outside of work. While I’m not a creative and came up through strategy, I am fascinated by the work that creative can do. I speak the language.
I’ve been a bookworm for life, and then just being outside, gardening, travel. All the good things!
There are so many! But I would say that issues around women’s rights are closest to me. This is because of my own experience, but also having three kids at a time when access to women’s rights are being reduced. I’m also very cognizant of what has been changing in the workplace for women and how I can model the type of behavior and leadership that I feel women should be able to claim for themselves. There is still a lot of “micro-misogyny” out there: exclusionary behaviors, mansplaining, lack of confidence in a different leadership style that favors listening as much as pontificating.
People tend to be surprised by my sleeve tattoos. That’s not the vibe I give off when people first meet me (apparently).
