Corporate Identity
A few days ago I had the chance to attended a talk about an experimental social networking project of German T-Mobile. The talk was quite good - except that the slides were very text-heavy. The concepts that were presented were buried somewhere on the wall in extensively small continuous text. It was hard to decide if you should listen or read.
When we started discussing the talk afterwards with colleagues, one of the first things that all of us wanted to express was that the slides reminded everybody of the fine print of T-Mobile’s phone plan promotions (… ** Only between 9pm an 23pm on weekdays *** Availability restricted to Europe XXL plan in selected cities **** Partner cards are excluded from weekend data plans…”) - and that that feeling was so strong, that even the spoken words sounded like the sales talk in a mobile phone shop.
The interesting thing to learn is, that if a very strict (magenta!) corporate identity is enforced everywhere from business cards to project slides, it gets very vulnerable to negative connotations. If you try to bring to your mind the nasty fine print of mobile phone plans, it will probably be in T-Mobile’s CI.
