I Want to Make My Clients Design Smell Like B.O.

Yeah sure, Apple and a handful of other design focused companies do a pretty good job these days, but for jaw-dropping style that spans a generation, Bang and Olufsen takes the gold medal by a mile.

Their cre­den­tials? Let’s start with a small, super­fi­cial exam­ple: Bose makes luxury car stereos for high end Fords and VWs, B&O makes the stereo for the Audi R8, and Aston Mar­t­ian V12 Van­tage. (that’s better) Beyond that, their prod­ucts are often so dis­tinc­tive, they don’t put any badge on the front. If you have a Sony TV you can tell, because its a big silver logo right below the screen. If you have a TV made by B&O, you can tell because it looks like no other TV on earth… and because you’ll be broke after buying it.

That’s all very impres­sive stuff. But any new-​money, design obsessed brand with deep pock­ets can make crazy stuff. (Delo­rian anyone?) The reason B&O is design brand­ing roy­alty is they’ve spent the last 30+ years making prod­ucts with cut­ting edge tech­nol­ogy and design… and their design lan­guage has barely budged. You could place their 1970s turntable in a show­room along side their modern prod­ucts and have a hard time find­ing anyone who’d think it seems out of place. Their design aes­thetic for the last 30 years: min­i­mal lines and phyco futur­is­tic. It’s a bold strat­egy since most people don’t live in the space sta­tion from 2001, but it works for them. Here’s one of my favorite designs:

When I’m design­ing an iden­tity for a client, this is what I’m ulti­mately after. I try not to get caught up in the fash­ion of the moment or short term effect. I define brand­ing suc­cess as a com­pany designed so well, they remain aes­thet­i­cally rel­e­vant for at least 10 years.