Today we are going small and local… Established in 1995, The Slanted Door, located in San Francisco, CA, is one of the most renown Vietnamese food restaurants in the country. Led by James Beard-nominated chef Charles Phan, The Slanted Door has grown from a hole in the wall establishment to a posh spot in the foodie-friendly Ferry Building and is the center point of a family of four restaurants under The Slanted Group Door umbrella. A new identity has been designed by San Francisco-based Manual.
Established in 1919 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Malt-O-Meal Company is the largest family-owned cereal company in the country. Well known for its eponymous hot cereal, a combination of malt flavor with farina cereal, Malt-O-Meal Company now offers more than 70 different products through ten individual brands — including Malt-O-Meal, Mom’s Best Naturals, and Three Sisters among others with cold cereal being their biggest sellers at the moment. This week Malt-O-Meal Company announced it would change its name to MOM Brands and introduced a new identity designed by Duffy & Partners.
Can you identify a brand without a visible name or fully formed logo? Dutch designer Hendrik-Jan Grievink created a board game, aptly titled Brand Memory Game, that tests people’s ability to distinguish brands through visual association, in which the names are muted from the image. It’s surprising to realize how influential marketing tactics are, based on how easy it is to recognize brands.
Even though I’m not the average Lacoste tennis shirt-wearing customer, the green lettering across a pink backdrop sparks a recognition in my mind of the green crocodile’s embossed profile. I have a feeling that I’m not the only child of target marketing. How many logos can you identify? The answers to these images can be found on Co. Design. If you really want to test your knowledge of 30 internationally well-known brands, Brand Memory Game can be purchased directly through BIS Publishers for €15 (about $20). Fun!
When I first came across Rainer Lagemann’s metal sculptures at Red Dot Art Fair in Miami last week, I knew I had to find out more. Fascinated by the human body, the Düsseldorf, Germany-born artist uses hollow metal squares to sculpt the human form, thereby highlighting both the strength and delicacy of the body. More than anything, by freeze framing these bodies, he makes us come face-to-face with our most vulnerable emotions – whether that encompasses freedom and excitement or panic and worry.
Lagerman tells us that he’s been sculpting bodies like this for the past six years. More than anything he hopes that his works will elicit “a smile or a memory.”