This Week, Every Rebrand Went Home First

Downstairs from my desk in Kanda, the print shop keeps a drawer of old proofs. Every few weeks someone comes in with a business card gone soft at the corners and asks for the same again, and the owner digs out the proof from years ago, and nobody redesigns anything. I thought about that drawer all week, because the wire was full of very large companies opening theirs.

The cleanest case was McLaren. Creative Boom reports that the racing marque has evolved its identity with a new wordmark inspired by Bruce McLaren's family garage, a service station in Auckland. The Speedmark stays, and so does the Papaya. What changes is the lettering, and the lettering goes back to the garage. One of the most engineered brands in sport went looking for its next word in the place where the family fixed cars.

That is a decision about type before it is anything else. Letters on a service station are there to be read from a road, by someone driving past, once. They have no time for elegance, so they get character instead. I spent five years in Ginza watching clients try to buy that character out of a foundry catalogue. McLaren had it in the family history.

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet did something similar with more paper. In Communication Arts, Laura Stein of Bruce Mau Design talks through the company's refreshed identity, inspired by the ballet's archives and by the prairie around Winnipeg, and carried by a new, dynamic typography system. Archives and a horizon. I like the pairing. An archive alone tends to produce nostalgia, and a flat prairie alone tends to produce a lot of empty space. Put them together and a typographer has something to push against.

Then Peru. The Dieline has Epoch's refresh of Inca Kola, Peru's favourite yellow soda, which updates the typography and the patterns and keeps what the piece calls the beloved visual frame. Creative Bloq, covering the same rebrand as the world's other cola war heats up, promises a controversial detail. I will leave the detail to them. The word I keep going back to is in The Dieline's first line: the soda is defending its crown. A brand in that position redesigns to look more like itself, and it draws the new letters inside the old frame.

In Zurich the history was the ground itself. PAGE reports that the agency Wecatch built the identity for ZOHO, a residential quarter rising on the site of a former printing works, and that the design takes its cue from printing and from the sunrise. I read that one twice, sitting above a working press. A print works becomes flats, and the flats get a mark that remembers the presses. It is a kind thing to do for a piece of land, and probably the most honest idea that site had to offer.

Vancouver gave the week its gentlest version. Creative Boom has Rethink's rebrand of one of the city's best-loved social-enterprise hotels, which dropped a confusing old name, the YWCA, for Hotel Willo, a name rooted in a native tree. This time the past the designers reached for was botanical. The name went looking close to home and found something growing there.

Why all of this at once? The Dieline's look back at the best redesigns of the summer hints at it in a single line, which opens with Jif's first major refresh in thirty years and Coca-Cola quietly fixing its brand identity. Quietly fixing is the phrase I would pin above my desk. At a festival in Hamburg, Lukas Cottrell told PAGE that the strongest brands are recognised before you see their logo, and spoke about aura as a strategic value. Aura is a large word for something the drawer downstairs understands perfectly. People come back for the card they remember.

Japan had its own version, and it was the most cheerful one on the wire. AdverTimes reports that Tohato marked fifty-five years of Caramel Corn with a three-day event in Harajuku starting September 4, with a packaging experience in 110,000 variations, and Hakuhodo's Yuki Sugiyama talking about what the character means to the work. Fifty-five years, and the headline number is a package that comes a hundred and ten thousand ways. My guess is that this is the Japanese instinct in one figure: keep the face everyone already knows, and play with it until the party is over.

And if you want the car version, Dezeen spoke to design director Robin Page ahead of the unveiling of the Torcal, Bentley's first fully electric car, about how it balances an electric future with the brand's heritage, in what the headline calls a progressive way. I will leave the car to the car people. The phrase fits every studio in this column.

On Friday evening the owner downstairs had the drawer open again. A man in a work jacket wanted his shop cards reprinted, same as last time, and they found the proof on the third try, a small sheet gone the colour of weak tea, the name of his shop set in a heavy sans nobody in Ginza would have chosen. He held it up to the light by the door and said yes, that one.