Why we do our '60 Minute Makeover' exercise.
At Truth we spend a lot of time getting to know our clients, this is because we believe it is essential for us to understand what they do, how they do it and why they do it. Only then can we identify the problems they need to solve and where we can add value in overcoming these challenges. We spend a lot of time conducting workshops (or Truth Labs as we call them) to better help us gain more of this vital insight.
As a creative agency that has focussed on branding for almost 15 successful years, we fully understand the amount of time, effort and dedication that goes into undertaking a successful rebranding exercise. Projects often take anywhere between 3 months, up to several years to be completed and implemented, depending on the size and age of the business.
It is for these reasons that many designers often challenge our reasons for undertaking our 60 Minute Makeover. While many take it at face value and see it as an interesting experiment, some feel we are being arrogant and devaluing the design process by claiming that a rebrand can be completed in an hour. But that is where they might be missing the point of the whole exercise.
The 60 Minute Makeover process is an internal exercise we use because we feel it has several benefits for the team...
It liberates us from the brief.
Have you ever looked at a logo and thought ‘I would have done that differently’, ‘that typeface is terrible’ or that shape is ‘badly drawn’? I do, all the time. But most of the time we do not know why these decisions were made. Was it a bad brief? Was it client interference? Was it a lack of skill? We don’t really know. What we do know is we don’t like it how it is, and as a designer, this can often be frustrating, particularly if you love the brand. This is exactly what makes the exercise so liberating. There is no brief, no client and no judgement. The goal is to have fun and do it your way. There is no pressure to improve the logo in the eyes of the customer, the goal is to create your own interpretation of the logo, free from the burden of insight.
“When musicians often cover songs by other artists, it is not necessarily because they think that they can improve them, rather because they want to walk in the shoes of the original songwriter. To experience what they might have been thinking or feeling when they put pen to paper. ”
When top musicians often cover songs by other artists, it is not necessarily because they think that they can improve them, rather because they want to walk in the shoes of the original songwriter. To experience what they might have been thinking or feeling when they put pen to paper. Some artists cover a song in their own style often because they want to interpret the lyrics differently or in a way they feel satisfies their needs more. Some artists may just want to play the music they love free from the burden of having to write the lyrics or compose the melody. It could also be aligned with the way top chefs reinvent or reinterpret classical dishes to make them their own. It is not a process to improve the recipe, it is an exercise in reinvention and creativity, to keep them moving forward creatively.
When I was 12 years old I discovered my passion for design by creating my own sleeves for the albums and mix-tapes I had copied onto cassette tapes for my Sony Walkman. This process made me challenge the current design and create my own visual interpretation of the music. They were never intended to be better than the originals, just my own take, that in some way made me feel more connected to the music. That is when I realised that I wanted to be a graphic designer before I knew that it was even a job.
It keeps our tools sharp.
The process allows us to test and evaluate our design skills in a way that’s both quick and fun. We often carry out a 60 Minute Makeover in our downtime over lunch or between client projects. A lot of the time we have spent years thinking about why this particular brand mark bothers us, so we often can get to a visual solution quite quickly. I won’t lie to you and say we always take exactly one hour because we don’t. We usually get to the solution in an hour, the refinement and visuals can double that easily. It is important to say that we often attempt brands where we feel that we failed to get to a solution that we’re happy with (within an hour) either, so we abandon it and move on. If a member of the team is working on a long-term client project, the exercise gives them the chance to briefly refocus on something else. What I personally love most is that it often provokes debate internally and most definitely externally if we choose to share it.
So far we have shared makeovers for Manchester United, Wikipedia, Lufthansa, Spar, KLM, Enterprise, Panini, Vauxhall, Go Outdoors, GoPro and our latest one BIC, to name but a few.
Whatever your opinion of the exercise, we hope it makes you all look at the logos that surround you a little harder and maybe even redesign them in your head, just for fun.