Super Smash Brothers Brawl is Nintendo’s branding coup de grâce, if not the defining moment in the history of game-as-branding-strategy.
I was over at a friend's house last night, doing design research (read: drinking bourbon and playing video games), and found myself momentarily distracted from my pleasant Kentucky-style buzz by the jaw-dropping visual assault Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Nintendo Wii.
Nintendo draws on its deep stable of characters to create a tightly branded interactive experience.
O! Insidious Nostalgia
Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a branding tour de force. Level designers Kazuhire Irie, Takeshi Suzuki, and Kou Arai have situated the game as a living history of the Nintendo product line, adopting a wide range of design styles to recreate elements of Nintendo's extensive mythology in a way that allows the player to simultaneously:
- indulge in the thrill of recognition
- have an enormous amount of fun game-playing
- be spoon-fed nostalgia for the commercial products of yesteryear, or else feel an immense need to play catch-up ("Why would they have a level from Earthbound? I never played that.") as part of a not-so-subtle upsell. All the original games are available for $4-5 directly from your Wii.
Visually meshing the old with the new, you can see the living history of 30 years of Nintendo.
These three things in combination provide an almost narcotic Gestalt effect that all branding and identity designers could learn something from. It's branded fun.
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Paul — May 5, 2008
Tagged with: Apple,
Brand Design,
Branding,
Facebook,
Fun,
Gestalt Effect,
More is More,
Nintendo,
Super Smash Bros Brawl,
Usability,
User experience,
Video Games,
Wii,
Zingermans.
The 2003 UPS identity redesign is a good example of a bad trend: Identity design that cuts back on signal in favor of the safety of the noise.
In April of 2003, UPS released what has since become a very hotly debated brand update. Summarily, UPS retired Paul Rand's iconic 1961 package-and-shield logo and replaced it with "a two-tone, 3-D-look shield topped with a quasi-swoosh [and a wordmark] set in a customized version of [the common logo font] FF Dax..." (Source*)
* As evidence of how positively engaging this identity redesign was, the discussion on this article received its first comment April 7, 2003 and got its last one on November 9, 2007!
The great UPS logo debacle of 2003
The responses to this re-branding varied from declaiming FutureBrand, the New York-based designers of the new logo as glorified Paul Gaskills to flat-out declamation that "the new logo is better," and subsequently that, "you typography/graphic/illustrator bullies need to relax." (Ibid).
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Paul — Dec 21, 2007
