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Visceral Games – EA's new brand



My long standing position on logo design, dedicated logo designers and logo obsessed media demonstrates the limitations of the term 'logo' that is being used to measure the value of the Visceral Games brand identity.

At a push the Visceral Games skull and type is a logo. The 'viscerally' textured EA is more obviously a logo but both are better grasped as brand marks and brand marks on brand marks.

A brand mark can be any mark that is central to an identity, no matter how open, ephemeral or own-able. The Visceral Games brandmark (one word) is not the sanitised, hard-edged, easily scalable and robust brandmark we might expect from traditional corporate brandmarks but they can be usefully held as own-able brand marks (two words) and it is by this measure that the Visceral Games brandmark should be assessed.

The Visceral Games symbol is skeletally visceral and death is the obvious currency. Visceral might ordinarily imply blood and guts but the x-ray brand mark adequately conveys the visceral theme.

A photographic brandmark succeeds where perhaps a hard-edged graphic might appear too tame, cliched or cute. This is a brandmark with an immediately graspable hit of meaning for a brand that may not benefit from a longer term strategy to embed a different kind of brandmark with the relevant attributes.

This is a highly localised brand with a core audience in mind. This should exempt it from many of the criteria we as brand identity designers might expect from corporate brandmarks. Within this context there is no reason why EA should not be able to build specifically directed equity into the Visceral Games brand.

There is no right or wrong when it comes to assessing the value of brand marks. The criteria should be the effectiveness in defining a memorable and evocative identity. The Visceral Games identity is indeed viscerally evocative.

That gamer needs some serious dental work. Dentists be afraid and logos be gone.

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