 |
|
|
|||||
Austin just got its first official branding in nearly 200 years, and it’s an homage to natural springs, rolling hills, and a city thats emerged as a liberal island in an overwhelmingly red state. The branding, revealed at a press conference on September 4, includes an official logo for the city, a wordmark, and a set of guidelines for how Austins government will show up online. It was designed through a partnership between the Austin-based agency TKO, which handled an extensive preliminary interview process, and the Austin branch of the design firm Pentagram, which led the actual brand design. According to Pentagram partner DJ Stout, the process was a balancing act of creating an identity that was both authoritative enough for the city government and representative of the average Austinite. Already the result is generating a firestorm of negative attention on social mediabut Stout says thats completely expected in todays divisive branding reaction ecosystem. The new logo (left) and the previous city seal [Images: City of Austin] Input from all over In the years since its founding in 1839, Austin has developed many fragmented logos and symbols for various departments across the city, but never a cohesive brand system. By 2018, when Austin began considering a unified identity, Stout says there were more than 300 different amalgamations of logos for the city floating around. Pentagram officially started on the branding effort in October 2024 after winning an initial competition to helm the project. At that point, the city and TKO had already spent several months conducting surveys with citizens, stakeholders, and government employees about how the identity should show up. One of the main challenges that Stouts team faced in the brainstorming process was a common obstacle when working with bureaucratic organizations: The final look had to pass muster with multiple audiences, often with vastly different opinions and agendas. [Image: courtesy Pentagram] Obviously its meant to represent all the Austinites and everybody in the city, Stout says. But [the city] was very clear that our objective was to come up with a solution for the citys needs. Talk about design by committeedesigning anything for city government is the ultimate design by committee. Initially Stout championed the idea of an Austin star symbol that would nod to Texass iconic lone star while also adding some unique Austin flair to a commonly used shape in place-based identities, similar to Chicagos star logo or even Canadas maple leaf. However, just from showing these to lots of different groups, audiences felt that anything that smacked of state government did not fit the personality and the attitude of people who live in Austin, Stout says. Austin is a little liberal island, politically. For a city that lives by the tagline “Keep Austin Weird” and celebrates “hippie” culture, as Stout puts it, the identity needed to tap into a less politically leaning idea. [Image: courtesy Pentagram] A logo inspired by nature Ultimately, instead of referencing Texas at large, Austins new identity is intended as a love letter to the citys natural landscape. Stout was specifically inspired by a movement that started around the time he moved to Austin in 1986 called Save Our Springs, when the local community came together to fight water pollution and advocate for the protection of Barton Springs and the Edwards Aquifer that feeds it. Barton Springs Pool [Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images] I would say without a doubt that the reason people love Austin so much is because we have all this beautiful water, Stoutsays. We have Barton Spring[s], which is this giant spring-fed pool; we have Deep Eddy, which is a spring-fed public pool; the Colorado River runs right through Austin. The whole modern city is built around Lady Bird Lake. [Image: Pentagram] To reflect those water sources, the logoa stylized Aincludes a flowing blue wave. Its sandwiched by two green lines: One represents Austin as the start of Texass Hill Country, and the other references the urban canopy that covers the city. Even the hue of blue that Stouts team chose was inspired by a local phenomenon nicknamed the violet crown, which refers to the purplish color of the sunset. The wordmark font, a serif called Museo Slab, was chosen both because it feels a little Western, Stout says, and because it offered a more authoritative element for the city government to work with alongside the logo. The identitys overall aesthetic is predictably simple and corporate for a project with so many voices at the table. (The colorful Los Angeles Tourism logo is one exception.) Still, the Austin logo does manage several clever nods to the features that make the city unique. [Image: courtesy Pentagram] Why the internet hates rebrands Austinites wasted little time voicing their discontent with the identity. A post from the local Instagram account @365thingsAustin has drawn more than 1,000 comments, most of which are resoundingly negative. Did they make it on Canva?! one commenter asked. [I]t is so bad i want to give it a zero but thats not possible so i give it a 1, another said. Several locals seem particularly concerned with the cost of the project. Jessica King, Austins chief communications director, said in the press conference that the total cost to the city was $1.1 million. Stout adds that Pentagram and TKO split a total payout of $200,000. That cost $1.1M?! I could think of so many better ways to spend that money . . . there had to have been some prepping for winter weather that couldve taken place instead of being surprised every year! one commenter said. Stout is unfazed by the backlash, which he says has become a side effect of working in the industry over the past several years. He points to Pentagrams work on Hillary Clintons presidential campaign and his own rebrand for Loyola Marymount University as two examples of design efforts that received intense pushback when they first debuted but have since been recognized as solid identities. Its because of social media, Stout says. Back when I first started about 40 years ago, nobody even knew what an identity system was. In an era when branding has become a hot topic in the internet reaction economy (see: Cracker Barrel retracting its latest rebrand over backlash) its almost impossible to design an identity that the internet will actually celebrate. As for the Austin branding, Stout believes Austinites will eventually come around to the look after the unfamiliarity wears off. I’ve been a partner for 25 yearsthis is not one of the higher-paying jobs, Stout says. I did it because I love this city, and because I’m from the city, and it really means a lot to me.
Category:
E-Commerce
As I type, Microsoft Copilot suggests ways to continue, restructure, or even rewrite this very sentence. On the surface, it feels like a small thing, no more remarkable than Gmail finishing an email or Google predicting a searchbut small things can have outsize influence. Just as the steady drip of water on rock can carve out new channel over time, so predictive text has already reshaped how we write. Research from Harvard has shown that predictive text systems do not just make texting easierthey change the content of those texts, reducing lexical diversity and making our writing more predictable. This flattening effect is beginning to extend beyond language. Filmmakers have been worried for some time now about the rise of algorithm moviesmovies whose form and content are dictated by what recommendation algorithms tell companies about viewer preferences, instead of by the creative imagination of writers and directors. And if executives arent careful, we can soon expect the emergence of algorithm businessstrategy, operations, and culture flattened out by the rise of LLMs and the race to adopt AI. AI Models as Consensus Machines Large language models have become the invisible architects of business strategy. For an increasing number of executives, these AI systems have become default first advisers, strategists, and thought partners. And, as we have already seen with language and movies, this kind of progression can measurably narrow the range of ideas available to us. Social media is the canary in the coal mine here. Anyone with a LinkedIn account knows that posts from different individuals often sound very similar and that the same ideas are often recirculated again and again. Taken in isolation, this could be seen as a feature of the homogenizing effect of social media algorithms. But the phenomenon is not localized to posts that might be driven by the demands of a recommendation algorithm. Pitches are beginning to sound identical, marketing copy is becoming strangely generic, and if the process continues unchecked, we can expect that the internal documents, analyses, and company strategies will begin to mirror those found in other businesses. In the longer term, we could even see company cultures lose their distinctiveness as differentiating factors begin to blur together. Smarter Alone, Narrower Together Generative AI can massively boost performance and productivity. A recent meta-study found, for example, that humans working with AI were significantly more creative than humans working alone. However, as both that study and a paper in Nature show, while using LLMs improves the average creativity of an individual, it reduces the collective creative diversity of groups. Individuals find their access to new ideas boosted but collectively we end up tapping in to a narrower range of ideas. The result is that AIs promise of supercharged innovation may actually narrow the frontiers of possibility. Competitive Convergence Almost 20 years ago, Michael Porter introduced the idea of competitive convergence. Briefly put, this is a phenomenon that sees companies beginning to resemble their competitors. They chase the same customers in the same ways, their strategies and pricing models become indistinguishable, their operational processes and supply chains end up looking identical. This process traps companies into a race toward the middle, where distinctiveness disappears and profits are squeezed. With AI, businesses risk falling victim to an accelerated and intensified version of this process: a Great AI Convergence in which operational playbooks, strategic vision, and culture become increasingly generic as organizations increasingly drink from the same conceptual fountain. AI can optimize efficiency, but it cant capture the human fingerprints that make a company truly distinctive. Your organizations war stories, hard-won lessons, contrarian beliefs, and cultural quirks dont live in any training set. They live in memory, practice, and identity. And when strategy, messaging, or culture is outsourced to AI, there is a real danger that those differentiating elements will vanish. The risk is that companies will end up losing the authentic, uncommon, and sometimes counterintuitive features that are the vehicle for their uniquenessthe things that makes them them. The Three Pillars of Business Homogenization Business homogenization can be broken down into three pillars.1. Strategic Convergence: When Every Plan Looks the Same Your competitor asks Claude to analyze market opportunities. You ask ChatGPT. Whats the result? Well, the effect is subtle rather than dramatic. Because the same models are shaping the same executives, the outputs dont collapse into outright uniformity so much as drift toward a narrow band of acceptable options. What looks like independent strategic judgment is often just a remix of the same patterns and playbooks. And so, over time, the strategic choices companies make lose their texture and edge. 2. Operational Convergence: The Automation of Averageness Companies are already acting on the huge potential that AI has in the realm of operations. For example, Shopify and Duolingo now require employees to use AI as the default starting point for all tasks, and one of the major reasons for this is the prospect of the efficiency gains that AI can deliver. It is absolutely right that companies use AI to transform operations. But when every company uses similar AI tools for operations, we can expect a drift toward similar processes. Customer service chatbots might converge on the optimal patterns for customer interactions, for exampleand in this convergence lies both danger and opportunity. The opportunity is optimized efficiency. The danger is that companies lose what differentiates them and drives their unique value proposition. It is essential that leaders recognize this danger so they can begin to think intentionally about authenticity as a potential edge in operations. For instance, it might be worth sacrificing a small level of customer handling speed for a chatbot that delivers quirky and engaging responses that reflect the companys authentic culture and character. 3. Cultural Convergence: When Companies Lose Their Souls Perhaps the most insidious risk is cultural convergence. When AI drafts your company communications, writes your value statements, and shapes your employee handbooks, it imports the average corporate culture encoded in its training data. he quirks, the specific language, the unique ways of thinking that define your organizationall get smoothed into statistical averages. Over time, the effect will not only dilute external brand perception but also diminish the sense of belonging employees feel. When people can no longer recognize their companys voice in its own communications, engagement erodes in ways that spreadsheets wont immediately capture. From Artificial Intelligence to Authentic Intelligence If AI accelerates sameness, then competitive advantage comes from protecting and amplifying what makes you different. Heres how: Audit your uniquenessIdentify the knowledge, stories, and perspectives your company holds that no AI model can access. What do you know that others dont? Create proprietary datasetsFeed AI your unique datacustomer insights, field notes, experiments, failuresinstead of relying on the generic pool of information available to everyone. Establish AI-free zonesDeliberately protect areas where human judgment and lived experience matter moststrategy off-sites, cultural rituals, moments of customer intimacy. Adversarial promptingDont just ask AI for answers. Ask it for the contrarian view, the blind spot, the uncomfortable perspective. Authentic Intelligence In a world in which every company has access to the same artificial intelligence, the real competitive advantage isnt having AIits having something AI cant replicate. And that can only come from authentic intelligence: the messy, contradictory, beautifully human insights that no model can generate. AI is the price of admission. Authenticity is how you win.
Category:
E-Commerce
When you apply sunscreen at the beach, it doesnt necessarily stay on your skin. Some of that sunscreen can wash off when you swim, and the chemicals that shield you from ultraviolet rays end up damaging marine life such as coral reefs, sea urchins, and green algae. Each year, an estimated 6,000 to 14,000 metric tons of commercial sunscreen gets into the ocean. Places like Hawaii and Aruba have already banned certain sunscreens. A new sunscreen created by material scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, however, doesnt harm corals. And its not a mineral sunscreen either, which are often thick and can leave a white cast on your skin. Instead of using chemical or mineral filters, it blocks UV waves, thanks to the pollen in camellia flowersand it also keeps your skin cool in the sunlight. The research team was specifically looking at bio-inspired materials as a way to make a more sustainable, safer sunscreen. We were inspired by the natural resilience of pollen grains, which have evolved over millions of years to protect plant genetic material from harsh UV radiation and environmental stress, Nam-Joon Cho, a professor at NTU and the President’s Chair in Materials Science and Engineering, says over email. Though pollen has been studied in cosmetic science before for its antioxidant or nutrient properties, it hasnt, to Cho’s knowledge, been used directly as a UV shield before. Pollen is unique because its structure makes it capable of filtering out harmful UV rays while being visually transparent; its also biodegradable. To turn pollen into sunscreen, the researchers processed the inner parts of the pollen shell into a microgel formula, which applies as an ultra-thin layer on the skin. The pollen-based sunscreen also creates a cooling effect because those microgels block UV light while letting most of the visible and near-infrared light pass through, without absorbing them. Since those wavelengths carry most of the suns heat, less energy gets trapped and converted into warmth on the skin, Cho says. As a result, the skin stays cooler compared to when commercial sunscreens, which absorb more of that heat-carrying light, are used. (Researchers also made a sunscreen from sunflower pollenwhich blocked UV rays but didnt have that cooling effectthough it wasnt as effective in tests.) In lab tests, the camellia pollen-based sunscreen blocked UV radiation at levels comparable with conventional mineral sunscreens, with an SPF of about 30. In lab tests with corals, commercial sunscreen spurred coral bleaching in just two days, with coral death happening in around six days. But the pollen-based sunscreen didnt harm the corals, even up to 60 days. That was crucial for the researchers. Using pollen, which is already a natural component of ecological cycles, allowed us to design with environmental safety in mind, Cho says. The pollen sunscreen may be safer for humans, too. It doesnt include nanoparticles such as titanium dioxide or zinc oxide, which sometimes raise inhalation and safety concerns, Cho says. And even if you suffer from spring allergies, the pollen sunscreen shouldn’t bother you. Camellia pollen is generally considered nonallergenic, and when the pollen is processed, any allergenic proteins are removed. Next, the researchers want to optimize the sunscreen for longer wear and water resistance. They’re also looking at ways to use pollen in all other applications, like drug delivery or food protection. The larger vision, Cho says, is to build a portfolio of bio-inspired, eco-friendly materials that can replace petrochemical-based products in everyday life.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||