“The Nation Media Group is a leader in media and entertainment with businesses in television networks, film, and TV entertainment, and uses its industry-leading operating scale and brands to create, package and deliver high-quality content on a multi-platform basis.”
Oh boy.
First things first.
It’s sometimes hard to distinguish between good minimalism and bad minimalism in logo design. This, rest assured, is the bad kind. A poorly resolved “N” for a makeshift monogram they’re currently using on their social profiles under the guise that they’re now ‘one’ Nation. Standing alone, it’s one curve away from being Nas’ logo circa the time he unceremoniously dropped ‘Ether’. I won’t comment on the different executions floating around that swap the serifs and rotation on the different characters, but I will say this; I’m fairly certain that was not the intended usage.
Also, the graphics on the updated video clips actually made me cringe and laugh out loud from second hand embarrassment.
By now, most Art Directors in Nairobi know not to expect much from the media or government-related design but this one reaches a new low not just in execution but in process where a bunch of different foreign designers with no understanding of the audience here or content plus a flock of opinionated execs with zero understanding of design effective practices worked on it like a game of kati, and miss the mark they did.
This attempt by Netherlands based agency Morrow strives for far too much energy and dynamism forcing a youthful twist to a very rigid and archaic brand, I’m assuming it was to try attract a younger generation and seem friendly and cheerful, however they did it in a very strange way. An unbalanced and oddly laid out graphic with mostly confused use of space and pointless repeat motifs derived from various crops of individual letters in different executions that barely mask how lazily the whole visual identity was done.
Trendy? Yes.
Longevity? Not so much.
The billboards and merchandise options serve as perfect examples of what a bad color palette is for this context and what colors don’t work well together.
Their mockups actually weren’t bad. However the problem usually arises when people decide to interpret execution for themselves rather than follow provided guidelines. This now looks more like the rebrand for a hip 844 publication than for a media conglomerate.
Also how a rebrand is rolled out is a very thorough process and it has to be done in a way that every touch point is addressed to maintain some sense of cohesiveness.
Their corporate site is still a web design atrocity riddled with their old blue badge and I’m fairly certain even their vehicles, and staff are still all rocking the old familiar police man blue and not this whole burst of salmon, orange, yellow and gray.
It’s sloppiness really.
Makes you wonder how this solution was come to;
“A nation is a unification of people, a spectrum of nuanced differences brought together under one banner. Similarly, the branded house and visual concept tie individual elements of the spectrum together.”
the outdoor executions have been thoroughly butchered too. Pew
Then there was this particulary handsome fella at the launch in what they called augmented reality from the rigged models acquired from the free section of Turbosquid.
Replacing decades of a strongly growing albeit pretentious brand in favor of the lamest typography that’s a confused mess of serif and sans serif with a cropped motif of the “O” and accompanying bursts of color and patterns that literally mean nothing especially in representation of the most stiff, profit binging- politically charged media outlet on the continent.
Instead of coming across as meaningful and open to creativity, instead this is just awkward and unbalanced, further driving the fact that they really don’t understand what they are doing in terms of knowing their audience and/or user base.
Can’t entice me with a nice font that’s more suited toward New Yorker-esque articles to shove politics down my throat. Let alone the sometimes questionable photography. I don’t know that’s about. Maybe it’s their compression system because I feel like I take better photos/ videos with my phone. Anyway.
At first glance maybe it‘s not so bad but so far every single execution i’ve seen is inexcusable. There is a lot of subjectivity around typography but one objective, 100% factual, irrefutable aspect of it is that this is clearly typographic malpractice.
What a waste of legacy.
2/10
