Our friend Rob Johnston recently interviewed Creative Director Ben Crick on Meet The Creatives. Ben speaks about branding at scale and designing systems to excite and live far past the launch date. And, of course, lots of shout-outs.
Happy Fri… — checks the date — yes, Happy Friday!
We could all use a little boost in spirit.
The first half of the playlist is for lounging around, working from home, and looking out the window longingly. The second half is for dancing in your room tonight (sorry neighbor!).
We invited 86 year-old (and busy as ever) designer Richard Danne to speak with us about his celebrated 1975 design program for NASA—and its surprising, triumphant return. We asked him if he would discuss his career and his thoughts about the future. He agreed.
Thank you to everyone who joined us.
And thank you, Richard, for being such a wonderful guest.
From graduate to design leader.
Megan Bowker spoke to The Brand Identity about her experience growing as a designer at COLLINS, developing her point-of-view, and how creative decisions ladder up to great outcomes.
The San Francisco Symphony — the 108-year cultural icon with international acclaim — has a deep legacy as a boundary-pushing Bay Area creative institution committed to advancing the reach and relevance of the orchestral arts by questioning the status quo.
We were invited to build a new brand and identity system that honors the Symphony’s heritage while growing the direction of their art form and organization. We collaborated with their musicians, audiences, staff, executive leadership, and board members to define a shared vision for the brand, one which would become the foundation for creative and design experimentation.
To signal this new direction, we’re thrilled to share the first part of the Symphony’s new identity.
Leveraging new creative technologies, the new identity will use a custom variable font to bring the essence of sound and music to life. The identity juxtaposes the traditional with the contemporary — introducing new, dynamic, behavior for classical letterforms. Our hope is to create a memorable visual expression as rich in emotional range as the music of the Symphony itself.
The logo is just the beginning. With the full launch crescendoing in the Fall of 2020, audiences can expect more glimpses of the road ahead. Keep your eyes – and ears — open throughout the year.
CREDITS
COLLINS San Francisco
Typography: Dinamo
San Francisco Symphony
We’re grateful to be invited to creative conferences around the world to talk about our process and projects.
Below is a list of events that we will be presenting at. We hope to see you there!
Better by Design CEO Summit, New Zealand
March 6 - 12, 2020
Kellogg School of Business, Chicago
May 10 - 11, 2020
D&AD, London
May 19 - 21, 2020
Design Thinkers, Vancouver
May 26 - 27, 2020
Birmingham Design Festival, London
June 4 - 7, 2020
Webit Conference, Spain
June 17 - 20, 2020
COLLISION, Toronto
June 20 - 25, 2020
We’re honored to be included in Working Not Working’s annual list, “Top 50 Companies Creative Want to Work For in 2020” for the third year in a row.
Recognition like this is a timely reminder to keep pushing ourselves; to take good care of our clients; and above all, to love the process and the people that make up this work.
And congratulations to the other nominees for championing creativity, pushing the world forward towards better tomorrows.
The futures that our friends at Mailchimp, Dropbox, and Ogilvy have grown into has kept us in awe—especially when design has been at the center of reimagining their new futures. We’re so honored to have worked with these great teams.
Cheers to our friends and the other honorees for winning the inaugural Type Champions Award by Monotype, which recognizes and celebrates brands from around the world that are committed to excellence in design and typography.
We’re grateful to be invited to some of the world’s forward-thinking conferences to speak on our philosophy of design and creativity.
Below is a list of events that we will be presenting.
Design Thinkers, Toronto, Canada — October 25, 2019
AIGA, Dallas Forth Worth, Texas — October 30, 2019
Web Summit, Lisbon, Portugal — November 3 - 5, 2019
TEDxIndianaUniversity, Bloomington, Indiana — November 8, 2019
RiseUp, Cairo, Egypt —December 5 - 8, 2019.
If you’re attending, say hello!
The evolution of Mailchimp maintained the quirkiness that made them loved while also looking towards the future. Since then, they’ve expanded and launched a podcast, short films, and documentaries following the lives of entrepreneurs.
We’re deeply honored to be recognized in Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards 2019 in partnership with our friends at Mailchimp.
Freddie, this one is for you.
How can we normalize inconceivable futures?
In this session, Brian invites Julia Marsh, his SVA MFA Design graduate student, to share how she’s combatting environmental degradation by developing flexible single-use plastics with seaweed based packaging.
For brands to stay ahead of the curve, they must refresh themselves while expanding the edges of who they seek to become. Rebrands are imperative because companies are growing quickly and the future is coming at us even faster.
AdAge generously highlights our work with Mailchimp and shares thoughts from our founder Brian Collins and others about why rebrands are becoming increasingly popular across all industries.
In this personal essay, our founder Brian Collins reflects on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, living in NYC throughout the early ’80s, and how symbols, like the rainbow flag, are used to imagine and install a more benevolent future.
“On a good day, this is the quintessential nature of design: signaling and rehearsing new tomorrows. To craft symbols, stories, and artifacts that ultimately shape hearts and minds for the better.”
Print Magazine reviews the talk Brian gave at this year’s 99U Conference at Lincoln Center.
Writer Ellen Shapiro highlights how we help our clients create a new, expanded vision for their future and then design their way into it.
Design is not what we make. Design is what we make possible for others.
That’s been our mission from the start.
It appears to be working.
We’re honored that AdAge selected us as their first Design Firm of the Year.
Thank you to our teams in San Francisco and New York for pushing us into the future.
And thank you to our clients and partners who give us opportunities to do amazing things - and who make us better, every day.
We’re just getting started.
COLLINS was recently named to Ad Age’s 2019 A-List, highlighting companies that are shaping the future of creativity.
Thank you to our partners who trust us to imagine and create better tomorrows.
“We see design as a problem-seeking process. Seeking, asking increasingly bigger questions, allows you to reframe a problem.”
In a recent interview with Forbes, Founder Brian Collins speaks to design being an agent of change and how it can create a better and brighter future. Click here to read the full interview.
“Great designers don’t invent the future. Instead, they sense where the world is going, what it needs, and install that future for the rest of us.”
In Adobe’s Blog, CCO & Founder Brian Collins and Chobani CCO Leland Maschmeyer highlight the key elements to a successful rebrand and encourage today’s designers to use stories, symbols, and systems as a starting for point for creating a future that inspires them.