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The thing that really caught my attention, was something that involved my work. Branding. BP have rebranded itself in 2000, claiming they were “Beyond Petroleum”. While less than 1% of their business were actually not petroleum and natural gas. They painted all their buildings in green, changed the logo to a nice greeninsh flower ( WTH, a green flower for a oil company?) They spent 600+ million dollars in this rebranding ( including ads, painting their building, etc. ).

With an expensive brand like that and a huge ambiental mess to clean up, I decided to help them, and I rebranded BP for free. It’s just a small change on their logo, I think it now reflects better their business. I hope you guys like it.

Recently the world is seeing a big trend for greener companies, and environmental care in all areas, but what we are seeing is companies paying huge branding bills so we, designers, can make them look green, instead of doing the right thing. Looking green won’t solve our problem. I don’t believe we will be able to revert the situation on planet, nor I believe we are the only cause of the global warming, but I do think we can slow it down and gain some time. But if the world doesn’t do things right, we won’t even be able to postpone our problems, and the world won’t be a nice place to live soon. Yes, I’m that pessimist, when I see lies all around us. And I couldn’t agree more with this Greenpeace activist. ( I don’t know who exactly said that to BBC UK, but I’d be happy to update this post with the right name.)

“This is a triumph of style over substance. BP spent more on their logo this year than they did on renewable energy last year, ” the environmentalist group Greenpeace said.

“BP doesn’t stand for Beyond Petroleum. It stands for Burning the Planet,” it added.

from BBC News UK

EDIT: After reading a bit more about the BP disaster, I found out that there were 3 safety valves in deep horizon. BUT none of them worked. So we need to ask a different question. Why none of them worked, and why there aren’t 20 safety valves since they aren’t that safe afterall.

You can see a timeline of BP’s tries at NY Times

Here you can see pictures of BP’s the disaster

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David Airey, made a nice post at his blog today. He posted this video of William McDonough, talking about the responsible design. I really liked it, and since I do love this subject, I decided to contribute to the discussion. The problems of human development have gone far beyond acceptable, and a very tiny part of the population is doing “green” things. In my opinion, being “ecologically correct” is a life style. There are tons of small thing we can do on our daily life that makes things better. But you won’t see any difference by doing it, cause what we can do is very small, but it contributes.

Things you can do to help the world:

• make your shower 10% faster
• use your air conditioner 1 degree hotter ( I’m in Brazil, so I don’t use climatization apparel to make raise the temperature, but those who do, could put theirs 1 degree colder, and wear a sweater )
• always tear paper, cause when you crumple paper, you break it’s fibers, causing it to be unrecyclabe.
• don’t leave the lights on, unnecessary ( this will be awesome to your pocket too)
• if you are like me, and likes to sleep with the TV on, remember to set the “sleep function”, so it will shut itself down, after you have slept.

This are some small things that we can do on a day-to-day basis, and it doesn’t kills you. If everyone did these simple things we would have a huge impact on power demands around the world. This is a practical approach to the cause.

I started thinking like this, about 3 years ago, when I read Massive Change, by Bruce Mau. I think that nowadays, Bruce is one of the big guys that adopted this cause, and he is doing very nice work.

After researching about this subject, I understood one simple thing about how stuff will work. Green things must be cheaper. I am a designer, and I do like to think about this ecological subject, and try to make my work more ecologically correct. I can offer my client a recycled paper instead of a chouché, but if my client gives a shit about the trees, I can’t do much but print it on the couché, and screw the trees. I’m talking about a tiny minority of the world’s population that have money to spend on things other than food. And in this small parcel of the humans, there are a lot of people that doesn’t care about environment either. If we, as “rich people” with money to have computers, and time to blog and all this, aren’t all worrying about the planet, how can I ask for a laborer here in Brazil that earns 250 US dollars a month to worry about the planet? He has more important things to worry, like food for him and his family, for example.

From what I see, we gotta invest on 2 fronts for this battle.

The creative/logical front, that needs us, designers, architects, engineers, and other professionals to think logically and creatively to create good looking, cheap and ecological options, like the green roofs for example, that William showed on the video, and Bruce shows along his book. This way we can show to the people, the governments and the private companies that we have options, and good ones to help solve this problem.

The other front to take action, is to make our existing recycling processes cheaper. Making recycled paper cheaper and as good as non-recycled paper, will cause a lot of people start using recycled paper. I don’t care if the people are ecologically conscient, as long as they are doing the right thing, I don’t care what they think.

What about you? What do you think can be a good option to make our planet a better place to live, or at least postpone the problems we already know will happen?

UPDATE:  Nov. 04

Here is a nice blog I found today about recycling. Worth a visit. It’s in portuguese.

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Be part of it, download Google Side Wiki

I’m also watching the long video of the presentation of Google Wave, which from what the big guys are talking about, will be a huge blast.

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Interesting talk about how Stefan Sagmeister and his crew uses their time. I wish I could do it too.

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We already deal with clients that simply don’t realize that Branding is much, much more than just drawing a symbol, or using that fancy font. What iStock is doing, is just use their massive media to spread this absurd.

The amount of research, and knowledge put behind a strong branding project is much bigger than the clients imagine. Lots of basic things like, the company’s market positioning, the size of the company, where this company is, what does it do, etc, are taken under consideration, and a logo picked up in iStock won’t have that kind of background.

A professional designer usually does some skecthes of different logos before presenting the big one to the client. That means a professional designer usually has at least one log that will be discarted during the creative process. That logo is discarted because it doesn’t fit the needs of that specific client. I can see a “good” way for professional designers to use iStock Logos. Just get that B graded logo and upload it to iStock. That would probably fit for the needs of a B graded clients, right? Since, at first, the client that goes to iStock Logos, doesn’t know the power of branding, so he will likely be satisfied by a “not that good” logo. This way, professional designers can still make some money out of the discarted logos. We could even re-brand iStock Logos, for something like Recycled Logos. It would be nice to see that.

Sarcasm apart, I don’t like the idea, and don;t think I will be uploading any of my logos there. I just like my old fashioned way to create a logo. Talk to the client, find whats the problem, diagnose the problem, and craft a beatifull solution for that problem.

For more info on this David has some nice posts and discussions about it at Logo Design Love.

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It’s Nice That Talk #16 – Sam Winston from It’s Nice That on Vimeo.

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Great Ads crafted by people that can see farther than the usual, that can feel the experience of the public, when it sees their piece of comunication. Very nice, specially the last one, which is a master piece.

via looksgd

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The world lives in capitalism, and the rule #1 that dictates what all the big and small business will are doing and will do is money. If we can offer a cleaner solution for the same cost, or less, it will work, no matter what.

If an 18 year old guy goes with his father goes to a Car dealer to buy a brando new car for him, and they have ten thousand dollars to buy a car. The salesman offers a model for 9.999,00 that runs on gas, and the same model, with every accessories that runs with eletric energy for the same price, the chances of that guy to choose the eletric car are huge. But if you can buy 2 smokey gas powered cars with the price of one 60 km/h eletric car, I’m sorry, but I will get the cheaper car, and screw the air we are breathing.

This same thing happens with aluminum cans here in Brazil. The numbers for aluminum cans recycled here are 96,5% of all the cans are recicled. Thats pretty amazing, is’t it? But the reason why people are recycling so many cans is not that they are ecologically responsible, or just overly good people. I don’t bite that shit. So many cans are recycled here, because the energy cost of recycling a can is 5% of the energy cost of producing the same can using raw materials extracted from our planet. It’’s simple as that. Thats why aluminum can recycling is hot around the world. Brazil is the #1, Japan #2, and teh list goes on. Because the industry spends 95% less energy to produce cans, the planet wins in 2 things. 95% less greenhouse effect gases emissions from those industries and less extraction of raw material to make more cans.

So, I do think we gotta make our green stuff sexier, and more efficient, but the most important thing we gotta keep in mind is to make green things cheaper than the dirty things. This way, they will win.

numbers extracted from guiadasiderurgia.com.br

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