me studio

anyone who has ever lived in holland will be familiar with the HEMA a chain of shops that is renowned for offering genuine-quality, basic goods (clothing/electronics/food etc.) at a low price, it’s the kind of shop that sees all demographic groups (from low-income to wealthy) standing in the queue together everyday of the week

people shop there because they only sell quality (own-label) well-designed products for a fair price… and they always have…. (see the row of logos above, dating back from 1926 to the most recent blue/red one from 1993)

this year the ‘hema’ decided to revamp their identity and advertising campaign… a dream job (but tough) in my opinion…

now, i’m a big fan of koeweidenpostma (who did the restyle) but i find the result (above) frankly very disappointing… the idea was ‘keep it simple honest & unfussy’ i guess, so they removed the blue underline and chose a series of colours that house the white reversed-out logo in a simple square block…

less is more… sure, but maybe this one is too simple?… the trashy dutch TV station ‘net 5’ unfortunately, had the same idea, their previous logo (below left) was a purple square that housed a hair-line number 5 (a terrible decision: the type was so fine that it tended to ‘vibrate’ when displayed on a traditional ‘lo-res’ TV screen) the new logo features a badly drawn, clumsy, ‘thicker’ number 5 and… you guessed it… has a whole series of different colour blocks that alternate… the similarity between these two logos irritates me, particularly because the first one was made by a great design company for a great client and the second one for a very dubious brand that has been equally badly executed…

to make matters worse ‘the hema’, who regularly comission good designers to make their products, has decided to use the claim ‘world famous design’ in their new campaign, in my opinion an unwise decision, if you are good the last thing you should proclaim is ‘i am good’, just be good and let someone else say so on your behalf…