As a designer with a background in corporate branding, I rarely see my discipline depicted
in pop culture.
But today I'm gonna do a breakdown of one cute example from the sitcom, Parks and Recreation.
The rebranding story is what's known as a "B-plot".
It's peripheral from the main "A-plot" of the episode.
That means there's a rather limited amount of time to tell the story, give it a setup,
conflict and resolution and to also do some character development.
And given all of that, I think the writers have done an excellent job.
So what follows is not a critique of these inaccuracies, but hopefully gives insight
into the differences and similarities it has with real life.
That said, let's take a look.
Tom, I would like you to redesign our parks department logo.
Sounds cool so far.
Rethink our visual brand, take these words and make something amazing.
So you're saying you want me to choose a new font?
Yes, essentially I'd like you to choose a new font.
Jerry I am making you my number two guy on the new font project.
Come on, that's too close... let's make it my number three.
Fair enough, Jerry you're number three.
There's only two of us!
So the main joke in this clip is that rebranding is just picking a new font, which sadly many
organisations think is true.
That's sort of like saying the series Queer Eye is a show where some dudes get a guy some
new jeans and a haircut.
There's a grain of truth, but it's deliberately less than the full picture.
In this clip Chris is giving a creative brief.
So for any brand refresh it is up to the client to tell the creative agency or designer what
success in this project should look like.
Or if they don't know at the outset, there should be a separate discovery or audit phase
where a team will look at the existing brand and assess its strengths and weaknesses, the
target audience or customer base, potentially the competition and then outline a strategy
for how to reinvigorate the brand.
At the very least there should be a reason behind the rebrand.
Usually because the brand has lost some prestige or appeal or is perceived as old-fashioned
by a new generation of potential customers.
Chris here gives no reason for the assignment at all, and the worst possible kind of goal:
make it look amazing.
What looks amazing is mostly arbitrary and usually ends with a solution dictated by HIPPO.
That is: Highest Paid Person's Opinion.
The problem being that highest salary does not automatically mean best informed or most
strategic.
There is no strategy from the outset on this project which would be a huge red flag in
real life, but it's economical storytelling.
Unfortunately, things get even worse.
If you actually listen carefully, Chris gives three different briefs.
One: redesign our parks department logo.
Two: rethink our visual brand.
And three: I'd like you to choose a new font.
These are three entirely different scopes for this project but in terms of story, this
too is likely a deliberate choice.
Okay now see I think that Comic Sans always screams "fun", right?
But man those R's in Helvetica, they're just you know, like really popping for me.
I've never been more bored in my entire life!
Who cares about letters!?
The only good font is the Sopranos one, where the R is a pistol.
Let's think bigger people!
What about a top to bottom makeover for the entire department?
I'm talking new uniforms!
New signage!
New color scheme!
A whole new sexy vibe.
I don't know, this really isn't what Chris asked us to do.
You know what?
Maybe, we should just stick to the assignment.
Cool, Jerry!
I'd take your advice if I wanted to be a dead-eyed government drone with no ambition!
So here we get the central tension of this story arc –Jerry's interpretation of the
brief is very literal and the smallest in scope: just pick a new font.
Whereas Tom's interpretation of the brief is the broadest: rethink our visual brand.
He actually lists off quite a few items you would consider in a proper rebranding.
Uniforms and signage would be what we call applications or touch points, where the brand
is applied.
The colour scheme really is core to the visual identity of the brand.
Try to imagine coke without the colour red or google without its rainbow palette, for
example.
These are really two different stages in a rebranding or even developing a brand from
scratch.
You start first with the brand elements, or toolkit: the logo, corporate typography, colour
palette and imagery style (does it use photography, illustration or animation?), tone of voice
for copy and these kinds of core characteristics of the brand.
Once that's been established then you build out the applications or touch points, establishing
a framework for a consistent look and feel across various media and other instances where
the public interact with the brand.
To backtrack and talk typography – the joke about Comic Sans is here to make us question
Jerry's taste.
If the general public know one font with a bad reputation – it's Comic Sans.
Looking at Jerry's mood board here we can see quite a few system fonts.
Chicago, the classic mac operating system font, as well as Courier and Verdana in both
regular and bold.
But as a group, for a government department these aren't wildly inappropriate starting
points for a logo, bar a few outliers.
The varsity style font in small cap italic which appears twice is particularly poor for
legibility and Bank Gothic which you've seen in sci-fi movie titles.
The rather aggressive and angular Charlemagne which only comes in capitals also feels like
the wrong choice.
But overall most of these are fairly conservative, bland choices which line up with Jerry's character.
He believes that government bureaucrats shouldn't rock the boat and should make safe choices.
Whereas tom thinks...
First up, a personal favorite: the sopranos option.
Now I guarantee you anyone that sees this logo is not gonna "fuggedaboutit".
This is our current community center, ugh!
This is our new community center!
That's right, it looks like an apple store!
Ok, to backtrack slightly: Tom earlier calls this the "Sopranos font".
This is a slight misnomer.
The original Sopranos logo uses the font Compacta, with the R replaced by the silhouette of a
pistol.
The pistol was not part of the font.
But as is often the case when a show or film's branding become iconic, amateur font enthusiasts
will then make a fan font inspired by the show's titles.
A classic example is the Star Wars lettering.
I say "lettering", of course because originally it was not a font.
But due to its huge fan base there are now many many bootleg Star Wars fonts.
In this case the font likely used here is Mobsters, where the creator decided not only
to have a pistol-shaped R but also an uppercase L and lowercase J. Points for creativity,
I guess?
The Apple Store ripoff of course, as ludicrous as it is budget-wise, is slightly more realistic
(unfortunately).
Not from the designer's side, but from the client side.
Usually the product of a poor creative brief or lack of conviction in one's own brand.
"Couldn't we just do what [insert more prestigious brand] is doing?" is a more common question
than most would like to admit.
...and the best way to cope with this job
is to do everything the exact same way every day.
Heck, I still use my original ID card from my first day on the job!
Check this out.
Oh my god!
I gotta go.
Put my sammie in the fridge!
So-called "hero props" for TV are not meant to be exactly true to life.
They're usually exaggerated in different ways to be more noticeable on screen.
You might after all only have a second or two to take in the details.
Given that, the quickest way to say 1970s with colour is to choose orange and brown.
It was very popular at the time, but probably less than we'd now think because of this repeated
TV trope.
The main font they've used here is Cooper Black which is also a bit of a 70s trope,
though the font originates much earlier than that and is still used today.
Estelle Caswell at Vox has a great video all about Cooper Black, which if you've not seen,
you should check out.
The laminated ID is convincing at a glance, though the extruded shadow is a bit "groovy"
for a government department, really and kind of goes against the attitude that Jerry is
espousing through the episode.
But the main anachronism here is how the font has been used for Jerry's employee details.
Realistically at this time these would all have been entered by typewriter.
The overall design without the details filled in might have been commercially printed, but
the only way to use a font like Cooper Black for personal details that changed for each
employee, would have been dry transfer lettering sold by companies like Letraset.
That honestly would have been far too labor intensive and expensive.
Even then all the letters should be the same size, as dry transfer sheets generally came
in a single point size.
Here the name and id number are noticeably larger than the other details.
So we take the old logo from the 1970s and we make limited edition hats, posters, t-shirts
- everything!
People love limited editions.
Plus parents will get swept up with nostalgia and want to go to the parks to recreate the
fun they had growing up.
This... is amazing!
It is possibly the best idea anyone has had in this government in
100 years.
Tom, terrific!
Thanks, but most of the credit goes to my number four, Jerry.
He shared some words of wisdom with me today and while he was yammering on about whatever,
I happen to see his old ID card.
Thanks, buddy.
Yeah.
It's a nice resolution and masterfully foreshadowed at the start of the show.
There's only two of us!
He has been in this department a long time.
I think maybe you could learn something from him.
[Laughter]
So what can we say about the final product?
It's a fun conceit and making a limited time promotion is rather clever, and an example
of something quite common in real life.
When dealing with a nebulous creative brief, the creatives rewrite the brief to fit the
solution!
If you can sell it well, the client ends up thinking it was their own genius idea from
the beginning.
The creative treatment they've come up with is a nice way to update the retro typography.
The yellow-red colour gradient works best on the trucker caps and t-shirts where it's
used without the extended drop shadow.
I think it's less successful with that drop shadow.
Particularly in the flyers, it can be difficult to read, especially in "recreation" which
is mostly red on brown.
The low color contrast and tight tracking are really making the letters smush into one
amorphous blob.
It's particularly awkward on the orange and brown backgrounds where they've had to add
an outer glow to lift it off of that background.
Too many special effects do spoil the broth.
Fittingly, I think the materials they've chosen show exactly why a visual identity or visual
brand is more than just a logo.
Even though the logo is consistent, the usage of colour and typography is very scatter shot.
Particularly in this section, where we see some questionable font usage: Marker Felt
and Papyrus.
Neither of which really jibe with that 70s throwback aesthetic.
Speaking of which, even though Cooper Black quickly connotes the 70s, it's a bit of a
shame they went down this easy path when they showed a different, more interesting retro
typeface earlier in the episode.
Windsor is a less well-known but equally quirky, retro throwback.
And in a heavy weight, would have been a slightly more original take on this idea.
Not saying it was a bad solution, just a little bit played out.
Ultimately it's good this is only a temporary change, as the original logo for Parks and
Recreation is quite good as it is.
It's set in Champion Gothic, a much cleaner, more contemporary font than any of the options
that Jerry or Tom explored during the episode.
Lastly three real life details which had to be overlooked for the sake of the story.
One: we never see any in-house design team or external creative agency in this episode.
Which is a pretty big oversight.
Even for government agencies, production of artwork is often outsourced or (if the volumes
make sense) a designer or design team will work within the communications department.
Two: the parks department is not a self-contained unit.
They would sit within an organisational structure and it's unrealistic that one guy gets to
make the final call.
Usually management up the food chain will need to sign off on any initiatives like this
because they need to work within a larger ecosystem.
In this case: the City of Pawnee's communications.
Also in a more realistic depiction, any branding for the Parks and Recreation department would
be much smaller than the branding for the City of Pawnee itself.
Finally, a creative solution is never presented completed and then simply approved.
Client feedback and changes are part and parcel of the design process, and that's why work
is presented in stages.
First a number of concepts, then feedback.
Then a smaller selection is refined, then more feedback.
Then a single creative route is selected with further changes.
Finally the applications are developed with more client feedback along the way.
Slightly more involved than they make it look in a half hour sitcom.
So that wraps up my thoughts on this story from Parks and Rec.
I hope you learned something!
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My name's Linus, thanks for watching and I hope I'll see you in a future video.
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