The question makes sense, because we've grown used to expecting a brand to have an explanation for everything. The traditional way to build one is to give every choice a meaning, so that the founder's story gets polished until it sounds like fate.
Apple is a good example of how far that logic goes. Its first logo, from 1976, was an engraving of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree, about as literal as it gets. It was too detailed to work at small sizes (fair enough!), so the following year they brought in the apple we know. The bite became a pun on byte, then the apple of knowledge, and eventually a supposed tribute to Alan Turing, the computing pioneer who was found dead with a bitten apple beside him. To this day we keep speculating about the logo's perfect storytelling, and even about the reason behind Steve Jobs's black turtleneck.
Still on the meaning of things, it was very curious when, even after Venna's brand had been developed, I came across the Big Duck, a classic case in architecture: a shop on Long Island that sold poultry and eggs from inside a giant concrete duck (yes!). A duck is a building whose entire shape is a statement about itself (VENTURI; SCOTT BROWN; IZENOUR, 1972). The modernists had thrown out decoration, the columns, the ornaments and details, convinced that a building should simply be what it is. Venturi and Scott Brown's argument is that the meaning didn't go away, it just moved into the shape. I think about this whenever I see a brand that calls itself minimal. Taking the decoration off doesn't make it say less. The clean surface is doing as much talking as the concrete duck, only more quietly.
Yes, brands need to be easy to take in, and that comes from Gestalt, from the idea of Prägnanz, one of the fundamentals of design. Which is what justifies simplifying Apple's apple. Things need a reason to exist. Intention. Bad design, in my opinion, is the kind that stops halfway: you can't tell what it intends. It confuses you. But what if that confusion is intentional? What if the nonsense is the sense?
I ask because the moment is strange. A lot of people are afraid their work is about to be automated, images and sentences come out of systems trained to find the most probable next step, and half the brands on my feed look like the same software company with a different accent color and the same Inter typeface on the interface, with rounded, clean, noiseless minimalist buttons (zero personality). The other half, AI startups included, tries to offset the tech look with organic strokes and ads shot on film. But even so, with a strategic reason to be there.
In that context, once everything around you has been polished, what you start to miss is the thing that snags, the one with no function and no good reason to be there. In our case, a duck that never fully explains itself. The South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han says the aesthetics of the smooth is the signature of our time. By smooth he means whatever offers no resistance and doesn't hurt. For Han, the smooth is something you can only like, and it lacks the negativity of the counter, of the anti. In my reading, the duck is the anti-brand, the negativity that gets in the way of the smooth.
There's another thing that resists optimization: cheek, the kind of irreverence that sits between teasing and affection and usually lives in a raised eyebrow or in the half second before someone laughs. If AI systems work by predicting the most probable next step, cheek works precisely by breaking expectations, and it depends on a shared context that nobody needs to say out loud. We read it in microexpressions, often before we could say what we read, and it only survives as long as it stays implicit, because the explanation is exactly where it dies: “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process” (WHITE; WHITE, 1941). The historian Johan Huizinga came close to this when he said that the fun of playing “resists all analysis, all logical interpretation” (HUIZINGA, 1955).
It was while thinking about how goofing around shapes culture (memes, for one), and about his argument that play is older than culture itself, that I came across a concept that seems made for skateboarding: ilinx. The sociologist Roger Caillois developed the idea as the pursuit of vertigo: games that exist to scramble perception for a moment and “inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind”.
Our promo video happened more or less like that, through spontaneity, adrenaline and play. We planned it as far as we could, but it only exists thanks to a run of coincidences and the urge to get together and make something fun. One friend was passing through São Paulo on her way back to Europe, another had just handed in her final thesis, two more were already in the city, and a public holiday happened to fall on the same day in Brazil and in Canada, where the agency I'm currently under contract with is based. We shot for a day and a half, with no budget and hardly any structure. I knew from the start that I wanted silly little duck inserts to give the film its rhythm, sure, but none of the lines were scripted. The best of it came out of clowning around.
I've directed a few live-action films and a fair amount of motion work, I spend a lot of time in post, and all of it comes with a particular kind of pressure. There is always a tension between the creative process and a temporary boss, the client, who often gets in the way of that process and also pays the bills. That's the deal, and I understand why it works that way. Venna doesn't pay any of my bills yet, which by Caillois's definition actually makes sense: one of the traits he uses to define play is that it produces neither goods nor wealth. It's a bit contradictory to say that when the whole idea is a shop, but for now it's true. I can say I've spent time and money without any market research or certainty that I'll get anything back. I did it because I wanted to. What the brand gives me in return is room to play and improvise, with nobody to sign anything off. It's been almost ten years since I started design school, and for a while I had forgotten what that felt like.
So that's more or less where the duck stands. There are more traditional ways to build a brand, and I've helped carry out quite a few of them. I chose to put a duck on a skateboard and keep the reason to myself, partly because I like it and partly because an explained duck would just be a dissected joke that, like the frog, would die in the process. If that counts as rebellion, it's a small and slightly ridiculous one, and I like it that way.
References
CAILLOIS, Roger. Man, Play and Games. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961.
HAN, Byung-Chul. Saving Beauty. Cambridge: Polity, 2018.
HUIZINGA, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
ISAACSON, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
VENTURI, Robert; SCOTT BROWN, Denise; IZENOUR, Steven. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972.
WHITE, E. B.; WHITE, Katharine S. A Subtreasury of American Humor. New York: Coward-McCann, 1941.