Summer 1998
Money. Magic. Light.
Factors of scale ensured a glittering take-off for two corporate identities. But what do they actually communicate?
“You can’t get fired for hiring Landor”, a colleague of mine once said. Playing on an identical quip about IBM, she was making reference to Landor’s position as one of the world’s largest design firms, creator of such Fortune 500 identities as FedEx, Japan Air Lines and Netscape. With offices in the US, UK, France, Spain, Italy Mexico, Japan and Hong Kong, and annual billings rumoured to be somewhere in the region of $60m, Landor is the IBM of graphic design. Its global reach is made unabashedly clear in the opening sentence of its corporate brochure: “Anywhere you go in the world today, the work of Landor Associates is there”.