I'm going to share with you a story of coincidence, scandal, technology,
and a double entendre that led to designers changing the way we design.
It was August 2001 when a market analyst issued a loan letter questioning
the accounting practices of a 101 billion dollar mega energy and commodity firm.
By December 2nd, just three months later, the name Enron became indelibly scrawled
in the permanent memories of the public as the largest bankruptcy ever filed.
The idea that a company with enormous holdings could have been engaged in highly
questionable trading activities without the investors' awareness
was probably what caught everyone so off-guard.
It was really this event that reignited the use of the word transparency
to describe the ideal visibility a
corporation should provide in their fiscal posture.
At the same time, on desktops around the world, designers were investigating a
palette of new tools that came loaded with the newest version of Adobe Illustrator.
For the first time, there was a
real-time method for illustrating transparency in a design.
The ability to see through one layer, and merging it together with
other imagery in the past, had pretty much required a visit to Photoshop.
With processing speeds, what they were at the time, designers might expect
to take a lunch break, while a single design variant was processing.
Certainly this was not a speed or an efficient way to work,
and thus it was seldom a
consideration, especially during exploration in logo design.
So you can probably see this coming,
but imagine what happened as corporations started to
step forward asking for marketing materials and
branding that demonstrated their company embraced fiscal transparency.
Mm-hm.
Designers presented a literal translation of this,
and their clients could not get enough.
Transparent websites, transparent annual reports, transparent
commercials, and of course, the transparent logo.
Within a year's time, transparent effects were so ubiquitous, and
they had become ingrained as dominant features of the design landscape.
Many of these same companies were in the financial sector and anxious
to show that they were as transparent and unsullied as a crystal ball.
Merrill Lynch introduced Total Merrill,
demonstrating how clients could select from
various products to see all of their investments with the greatest clarity.
In 2009, Merrill Lynch was absorbed after financial challenges.
So maybe it wasn't as clear as it really needed to be.
We can only do so much as designers.
There's probably been no more critical visual effect in logo
design over the past decade than the use of transparencies.
Not only will you find these to be
really beautiful, they're highly informative and engaging for consumers.
They're able to convey concepts quickly that have eluded designers for years,
while identities were crafted in single color, and conform to rigid guidelines.
Let's start by discussing the very simplest of
this style with some well designed two-color solutions.