Contemporary Visual Identities: Mutant Brands

Introduction

At the beginning of the 21st Century, more precisely in the year 2000, the studies of corporate visual identity (CVI) and the observations of the contemporary practices came into conflict. When reviewing the bibliography about the topic, selecting the main authors of the time, it was observed that the authors claimed that a CVI should be unique, always the same, follow a pattern, so that it could be fixed in the mind of the public, otherwise they would not be able to identify the brand, product, service and/or the company. However, when observing some brands active in society as MTV, Rip Curl, Mormaii or Vivo, what was seen was exactly the opposite. Thus, the next step would be interviewing professionals, researchers and authors who are active in the area to work out a communicational practice of each brand that indicated a less rigid tendency in the graphical representation of a brand.

At that time, it was common for discussions to happen between designers who had diverging ideas regarding the topic. It was the clash of generations, of technologies, from different worlds and different capacities to perceive them. The first stages of the Semantic Basin arose, the conflict generated by the flow of a new cultural manifestation, innovative. The steps of this potamological metaphor, created by Durand (1998), allows the understanding of the complex system of the imagination connected to society, as will be presented below.

The world changed, but mutation, as a word or action, was still a taboo, an aberration. From circuses to cinemas, the gaze of those curious has always been a mixture of admiration and rejection. An example of this is the movie X-Men, in which humans and mutants were considered a threat to society and needed to be indoctrinated for inter-racial harmony.

In general, anything that flees the pattern is not well accepted. The reaction of professionals in relation to non-traditional Corporate Visual Identities was no different. For these reasons and also in honor of the Brazilian Band of Psychedelic Rock, the decade of 1960, called “The Mutants” (which also provoked the society of the time with its irreverence, experimentalism, hybridity), that this visual identity contemporary manifestation was called “Mutant Corporate Visual Identity” and, later, “Mutant Brands”, as it goes beyond the graphic representation of the brand, it embraces its behavior in society.

In this study, the goal is to introduce the concepts of Mutant Visual Identity, Programed and Poetic (Kreutz, 2001 and 2005), as well as examples of them, their categories and characteristics. The methodology was qualitative exploratory (Bauer et al, 2002), anchored in Thompson’s Deep Hermeneutic (1995), and the methodological tools were bibliographical research (Stumpft, 2006), internet (Yamaoka, 2006), case studies (Duarte, 2006) and semiotic analysis (Penn, 2002).

To understand the evolutionary process of Mutant Brands, a brief incursion by notions and contexts of brand and by the Semantic Basin of Durand (1998) will be done, seeking the (in)accuracurte production of meaning in the constitution of visual identity, which depends on the imaginary, the identity and image, reaching the construction strategy of the Mutant Visual Identity. By doing this incursion, it is noted that the context transforms the rigid representations in fluidal, Mutants Programed and Poetics, whose cases addressed seek to elucidate the theme.