Wal-Mart to Walmart
July 1st, 2008 | Tags: corporate nonsense, fonts, myriad, typography | 2 Comments
Well, if you needed any further evidence for my claim about Myriad, I’m happy to oblige; Wal-Mart’s new branding eschews the hyphenation and is obviously based on a certain ubiquitous typeface:
Armin Vit is, I think, essentially right about the effect of removing the hyphen and all-caps:
[W]ith no reasoning or no explanation of what the new star burst stands for, or why the decision to change to a single word, all we have to go by is the logo that replaces the 16-year-old sans serif that was as thick and heavy as the beige boxes it adorned for so long…. The change to title case helps humanize Walmart with a name that reads more like John, Albert, Sarah or Wilbur….
It will be interesting to see how, or if, this new branding affects public perception of Walmart over time. I don’t have the sense that Walmart is a particularly image-conscious company — all of their current branding seems clumsily transparent and rhetorically amateurish to me. Will a new logo steer Walmart’s brand away from its current association with philistines who don’t mind melamine pet food?
In any case, removing the hyphen from “Wal-Mart” is far less jarring than it was when “Kmart” did the same thing. Honestly, “Kmart” seems like the name of a talking duck from a fake Icelandic children’s book: “Kmart was sad, because he had no more cookies and couldn’t play with his brothers and sisters. Suddenly, a friendly dog arrived!” “Walmart” at least looks like a string of letters that could be pronounced “wôl-märt” and might naturally occur so ordered in American English.
(via DF)
July 1st, 2008 at 02:08:51 PM (#)
The star burst maybe represents the star that used to be between the words “Wal” and “Mart”.
July 1st, 2008 at 11:22:08 PM (#)
Perhaps. (According to something I read, the star was supposed to honor Sam Walton and was added after his death.) It doesn’t recall that star for me, though — going from a five-pointed star to a shape that is pretty clearly an asterisk (albeit from a different font) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if that’s what they were trying to do.
The asterisk/star/sun looks a bit tacked-on and generic, I think — but it’s at least not as bad as the BP “crazy spirograph exercise” logo, which is probably the nadir of tacked-on, generic, geometric element application. Overall, I think the logo is fine but bland. I do like the fact that they tweaked the face for the main wordmark, and didn’t simply use Myriad like everyone else.
Also of interest: the commenters at Brand New (linked in my post) have a lot of interesting reactions. Some seem to be having a lot of trouble separating their evaluations of the logo from their aesthetic (or otherwise) distaste for Walmart as a corporation, which is sort of amusing on its own.