Heads Corporate Communication AG BSW
Mainaustrasse 35, Postfach 1522, 8032 Zürich
Telefon +41 44 389 92 00, Fax +41 44 389 92 01
Mainaustrasse 35, Postfach 1522, 8032 Zürich
Telefon +41 44 389 92 00, Fax +41 44 389 92 01
The Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany is awarded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. It is Germany's highest distinction in the field of design, with nominations being Ministries and Senators of the Federal States and the German Design Council.
Heads was nominated for the „Real Time Corporate Identity" they created for Namics AG. This nomination builds on the Red Dot Award that the agency won last year for this innovative corporate branding approach.
www.designpreis.de
Die traditionsreiche Marktführerin der finanziellen Vorsorge unterzieht ihr Corporate Design einer sanften Auffrischung. Nach einer Agenturevaluation gewann Heads den Auftrag, das im Jahr 2004 eingeführte Corporate Design zu überarbeiten und zu vereinfachen, um so die Prägnanz des Unternehmensauftritts und die Effizienz in der Anwendung weiter zu steigern. In der Entwicklung besonders berücksichtigt werden dabei auch die unterschiedlichen Anforderungen der drei Ländergesellschaften Schweiz, Frankreich und Deutschland.
Corinne Pellerin, Head of Corporate Marketing Swiss Life: «Wir haben uns für die Zusammenarbeit mit Heads entschieden, weil uns der klar strukturierte und dennoch pragmatische Ansatz überzeugt hat.»
On the 1st October the 94-year old Nordostschweizerische Kraftwerke AG (NOK North East Swiss Power Plants Ltd.) was renamed Axpo AG. Heads supported the almost one hundred year-old enterprise in this historical transition. The transformation of NOK into Axpo AG has created an even stronger brand in the Swiss energy market: Axpo.
In less than three months, Heads applied the Axpo design across the organisation, changing over 4'000 signs, 2'000 electronic forms, almost 1'000 electronic documents, company graphics on 150 vehicles and redesigning over 50 NOK brochures. Heads doubled its personnel for this major project: the team led by Raph Hermann and Mike Stillhard includes consultants Andrea Bruggmann, Kristina Brunner and Lora Franceschini, PR specialist Felix Müller, IT specialist Dr. Jürg Eberhard, Esther Hirzel as project leader for the signage, layouter Petra Jörger and Art Director Andreas Preis. The Axpo AG project leader Dr Martin P. Everts says: „Working under great pressure, Heads has made the impossible possible in a very short time frame."
Namics, the dynamic employee-sourced brand has won the „Red Dot Award: communication design 2009“. This year’s Red Dot Award for high quality design attracted 6112 submissions from 42 countries.
www.red-dot.de
The September edition of Hamburg’s Design magazine PAGE featured a title story about cross-media corporate identity and featured the work by Heads. According to PAGE „The crowd-sourced corporate identity of Namics proves that technical advances have expanded the potential for visually and conceptually exciting approaches.“
» heads_page_wortmarke_Namics_september09.pdf (2.1mb, PDF)
www.page-online.de
The Texan website www.underconsideration.com attracted over 60 comments about the Namics branding in their «Brand New» Blogg. Here is a selection of the often controversial statements:
www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/namics
«This branding is absolutely diabolical. And I mean that as a high compliment.»
Ethan Allen Smith, Portland, OR.
«This is just typographic minimalism taken too far.»
Amanda Morante, New York, NY
«It’s perfect for a web-based company. It’s unique. Very clever. I like it. Namics.»
Joey Vestal, Reno, NV.
«Arial, really? Typography teachers everywhere just died a little bit.»
Brian Pelsoh, Milwaukee, WI
«Ahhh, like a nice tall cool glass of Lemonade in a desert of insufferably bad design/brandmaking. Danka shein!»
Anonymous
www.namics.com
Heads translated the large amount of co-determination given to Namics employees into a radical new CI concept. Employees can now submit impulses via various channels that will contribute to a dynamic word brand that forms the company logo. Marco Simonetti, the Heads Creative Director: „The design is a reflection of the authenticity of the Namics corporate culture. The impulses of the employees are central.“ The web service provider is launching a new corporate image that is suited to the internet as a dynamic medium. Simonetti: „It is a corporate image that is always changing and where content and form are separated. It can be created and experienced from anywhere and by using the ubiquitous system font Arial, output to any channel is possible.“
The impulses from the employees are sent by Twitter, Spider, SMS or intranet. Following a format check, the impulses are passed to the system and immediately employed as a formatted part of the dynamic word brand. To ensure that the word brand stays dynamic around the clock, corporate words are also included during the employee’s regeneration times or other low impulse periods. While most companies have some kind of logo or name plaque in their entrance, visitors to Namics branches will be greeted by a Namics-Tripod. The three-legged screen developed by Heads shows visitors how the employees are feeling at any given time.
» heads_werbewoche_wortmarke_Namics_juni09.pdf (998.1kb, PDF)
Heads is promoting the „ewz.selection“ event again this year. But this time, the agency is also creating the photography platform’s magazine. The text of this year’s „SCOPE“ is in the hands of Sascha Renner, a freelance journalist and art critic of the „TagesAnzeiger“. For this edition, he has interviewed personalities like the former director of photography for ‚Time’ magazine, MaryAnne Golon. The feel of the publication may be reminiscent of the good-old American satirical magazine MAD –recycled paper pages with a super-glossy cover – but the content shows that all the madness of the financial crisis has not affected great photographers. As MaryAnne Golon explains, the secret of photographic success in difficult economic times is, as always, a courageous personal vision as opposed to run-of-the-mill works.
Heads designed a poster and flyer campaign to motivate residents of Meilen to attend the Assembly of the Commune and to vote to approve the loan application to build a new football pitch with artificial turf and a fantasy playground at a cost of CHF 2.36 million. The campaign conveyed the notion that both projects are not principally about infrastructure. They are about creating space for children to develop an unfettered imagination. Although the proposed investments were sizeable and despite the opposition of both the local SVP and CVP parties, the residents sympathised with the children’s imagination and a large majority voted in favour of the credit for the artificial turf football pitch and the fantasy playground at the Assembly of the Commune on 9th March 2009.
Heads has won Kia Motors Iberia as a new internal branding client. To mark the beginning of the relationship and to nicely introduce the new Swiss Vice President Tom Anliker, the agency supported Kia Motors by staging a dealer event in Madrid with a team motto, a motivational trailer and gift for each dealer. For 2009, further communications measures are planned for employees and trade partners of Kia Motors Iberia. Heads is well prepared for the challenge thanks to many years of experience in the area of internal branding for the Swiss subsidiary of a large US car corporation. According to Ralph Hermann, Managing Director of Heads: „Given the current difficult economic conditions in Spain and the dramatic fall in sales across the whole Spanish automobile industry, it is essential that employees and dealers are in full agreement on how they can cope with the crisis. Once that joint strategy is in place, the Kia brand with its great value-for-money vehicles has the potential to come out of the crisis a winner. We are committed to helping Kia Iberia make the most of their opportunity in these turbulent times.“
Namics, a leading IT and web service provider in Switzerland and Germany announced a pitch for the job of creating a new image that would reflect the constant transformation within the industry. Heads took the challenge rather literally and developed a corporate design that presents the company „Real Time“. Namics was at once surprised and persuaded by the idea. Philipp Lämmlin, Namics Partner: „Heads understood us. They took a big risk with the pitch but they exceeded our expectations. We are very much looking forward to the unique new CD/CI image that will be launched in 2009.“
In the Neuen Zürcher Zeitung of 3rd November 2008, Professor Bestetti, Head of KTI Medtech, was quoted as saying, Switzerland should actually be characterised as a nation of medical technology companies rather than banks. The Swiss Medtech Report supports this assessment with facts and figures. It reports on the country’s high density of medtech companies and the advantages of Switzerland as a medtech production location. The nations’s good medtech networks are covered as is the Swiss tradition of financing medtech enterprises. Heads produced the Swiss Medtech Report 2008 for the following stakeholders: Ernst & Young, SWX Swiss Exchange, The Innovation Promotion Agency CTI, Osec, Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, the Swiss Association of Technology Transfer SwiTT, IBM, Swiss Medical Cluster, Swiss Medtech.
At Heads we just love to create corporate design and advertising for our clients. But every now and then we have to think about our own needs: after nine years, the time has come to update the Heads image. Online, the changes are not just limited to the design – the speed and functionality of the reference cases tool has been improved so much, that it makes most agency websites look quite passé. www.heads.ch
When thinking about succession, Heads is taking a thorough, logical and far-sighted approach. That is why Mike Stillhard, Founder and Managing Partner will become the President of the Board of Directors of the Agency, but will also remain involved in operative business and as a client advisor until at least 2011: „I have no intention of slowing down yet, but it is vital to set the points in the right direction for the future.“ The job of CEO will go to Ralph Hermann who has been a Heads Managing Partner for five years: „I’m glad that Mike Stillhard will still be around for operational and strategic questions for a long time. It is a privilege to lead this team of talented, bright minds and perpetuate the development of the agency that has been very satisfying in previous years. I am also obligated to our bright minded clients whose loyalty we want to retain through our reliability and extraordinary engagement.“
The Swiss Biotech Report 2008 was presented today at the Swiss Stock Exchange on the occasion of the «Swiss Equity Biotech Day». The publication promotes Switzerland as a location to foreign Life Science companies and investors. This year’s report focuses on the location advantages in a „War for Talents“ and looks at the benefits of the dense and dynamic networks that exist in the national biotech sector and shows that Switzerland has a long tradition in financing life sciences enterprises. Ralph Hermann, Managing Partner of Heads: „While working on the Biotech report we were impressed by the close collaboration and mutual respect that exists between companies, scientists and investors. One interview partner summed it up nicely with the statement that Switzerland is very similar to Silicon Valley in this respect.“ The Report stakeholders are Ernst & Young, SWX Swiss Exchange, OSEC, The Innovation Promotion Agency CTI, Swiss National Fund (SNF), Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, the Swiss Biotech Association, SwiTT, the Swiss Association of Technology Transfer, Swiss Private Equity & Corporate Finance Association (SECA) and biotechnet Switzerland the national competence network.
On Saturday 8th March 2008, the University of Zurich’s „Science Parcours“ opens on the Zurich Sechseläutenplatz. The public exhibition of inter-disciplinary research is part of the University’s 175 year anniversary celebrations. Heads created a world of special cardboard furniture for the „Science Parcours“ inside a white cubic tent with a 1700 m2 floor area. The agency used the recycled material to produce a modular 18-piece furniture system that allowed flexible multimedia presentations of various inter-disciplinary research projects. The result was an exhibition where the design was as surprising and sustainable as the content.
» printer friendly
Heads was nominated for the „Real Time Corporate Identity" they created for Namics AG. This nomination builds on the Red Dot Award that the agency won last year for this innovative corporate branding approach.
www.designpreis.de
Die traditionsreiche Marktführerin der finanziellen Vorsorge unterzieht ihr Corporate Design einer sanften Auffrischung. Nach einer Agenturevaluation gewann Heads den Auftrag, das im Jahr 2004 eingeführte Corporate Design zu überarbeiten und zu vereinfachen, um so die Prägnanz des Unternehmensauftritts und die Effizienz in der Anwendung weiter zu steigern. In der Entwicklung besonders berücksichtigt werden dabei auch die unterschiedlichen Anforderungen der drei Ländergesellschaften Schweiz, Frankreich und Deutschland.
Corinne Pellerin, Head of Corporate Marketing Swiss Life: «Wir haben uns für die Zusammenarbeit mit Heads entschieden, weil uns der klar strukturierte und dennoch pragmatische Ansatz überzeugt hat.»
On the 1st October the 94-year old Nordostschweizerische Kraftwerke AG (NOK North East Swiss Power Plants Ltd.) was renamed Axpo AG. Heads supported the almost one hundred year-old enterprise in this historical transition. The transformation of NOK into Axpo AG has created an even stronger brand in the Swiss energy market: Axpo.
In less than three months, Heads applied the Axpo design across the organisation, changing over 4'000 signs, 2'000 electronic forms, almost 1'000 electronic documents, company graphics on 150 vehicles and redesigning over 50 NOK brochures. Heads doubled its personnel for this major project: the team led by Raph Hermann and Mike Stillhard includes consultants Andrea Bruggmann, Kristina Brunner and Lora Franceschini, PR specialist Felix Müller, IT specialist Dr. Jürg Eberhard, Esther Hirzel as project leader for the signage, layouter Petra Jörger and Art Director Andreas Preis. The Axpo AG project leader Dr Martin P. Everts says: „Working under great pressure, Heads has made the impossible possible in a very short time frame."
Namics, the dynamic employee-sourced brand has won the „Red Dot Award: communication design 2009“. This year’s Red Dot Award for high quality design attracted 6112 submissions from 42 countries.
www.red-dot.de
The September edition of Hamburg’s Design magazine PAGE featured a title story about cross-media corporate identity and featured the work by Heads. According to PAGE „The crowd-sourced corporate identity of Namics proves that technical advances have expanded the potential for visually and conceptually exciting approaches.“
» heads_page_wortmarke_Namics_september09.pdf (2.1mb, PDF)
www.page-online.de
The Texan website www.underconsideration.com attracted over 60 comments about the Namics branding in their «Brand New» Blogg. Here is a selection of the often controversial statements:
www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/namics
«This branding is absolutely diabolical. And I mean that as a high compliment.»
Ethan Allen Smith, Portland, OR.
«This is just typographic minimalism taken too far.»
Amanda Morante, New York, NY
«It’s perfect for a web-based company. It’s unique. Very clever. I like it. Namics.»
Joey Vestal, Reno, NV.
«Arial, really? Typography teachers everywhere just died a little bit.»
Brian Pelsoh, Milwaukee, WI
«Ahhh, like a nice tall cool glass of Lemonade in a desert of insufferably bad design/brandmaking. Danka shein!»
Anonymous
www.namics.com
02.06.2009 «My Corporate Design» – Heads develops a corporate identity that is driven by employee inputs.
Heads has developed a new corporate identity for the IT and web service provider Namics AG that turns control of CD/CI over to the staff. Now every one of the 300 Namics employees can directly influence the corporate design – round the clock, 365 days a year. Heads translated the large amount of co-determination given to Namics employees into a radical new CI concept. Employees can now submit impulses via various channels that will contribute to a dynamic word brand that forms the company logo. Marco Simonetti, the Heads Creative Director: „The design is a reflection of the authenticity of the Namics corporate culture. The impulses of the employees are central.“ The web service provider is launching a new corporate image that is suited to the internet as a dynamic medium. Simonetti: „It is a corporate image that is always changing and where content and form are separated. It can be created and experienced from anywhere and by using the ubiquitous system font Arial, output to any channel is possible.“
The impulses from the employees are sent by Twitter, Spider, SMS or intranet. Following a format check, the impulses are passed to the system and immediately employed as a formatted part of the dynamic word brand. To ensure that the word brand stays dynamic around the clock, corporate words are also included during the employee’s regeneration times or other low impulse periods. While most companies have some kind of logo or name plaque in their entrance, visitors to Namics branches will be greeted by a Namics-Tripod. The three-legged screen developed by Heads shows visitors how the employees are feeling at any given time.
» heads_werbewoche_wortmarke_Namics_juni09.pdf (998.1kb, PDF)
Heads is promoting the „ewz.selection“ event again this year. But this time, the agency is also creating the photography platform’s magazine. The text of this year’s „SCOPE“ is in the hands of Sascha Renner, a freelance journalist and art critic of the „TagesAnzeiger“. For this edition, he has interviewed personalities like the former director of photography for ‚Time’ magazine, MaryAnne Golon. The feel of the publication may be reminiscent of the good-old American satirical magazine MAD –recycled paper pages with a super-glossy cover – but the content shows that all the madness of the financial crisis has not affected great photographers. As MaryAnne Golon explains, the secret of photographic success in difficult economic times is, as always, a courageous personal vision as opposed to run-of-the-mill works.
Heads designed a poster and flyer campaign to motivate residents of Meilen to attend the Assembly of the Commune and to vote to approve the loan application to build a new football pitch with artificial turf and a fantasy playground at a cost of CHF 2.36 million. The campaign conveyed the notion that both projects are not principally about infrastructure. They are about creating space for children to develop an unfettered imagination. Although the proposed investments were sizeable and despite the opposition of both the local SVP and CVP parties, the residents sympathised with the children’s imagination and a large majority voted in favour of the credit for the artificial turf football pitch and the fantasy playground at the Assembly of the Commune on 9th March 2009.
Heads has won Kia Motors Iberia as a new internal branding client. To mark the beginning of the relationship and to nicely introduce the new Swiss Vice President Tom Anliker, the agency supported Kia Motors by staging a dealer event in Madrid with a team motto, a motivational trailer and gift for each dealer. For 2009, further communications measures are planned for employees and trade partners of Kia Motors Iberia. Heads is well prepared for the challenge thanks to many years of experience in the area of internal branding for the Swiss subsidiary of a large US car corporation. According to Ralph Hermann, Managing Director of Heads: „Given the current difficult economic conditions in Spain and the dramatic fall in sales across the whole Spanish automobile industry, it is essential that employees and dealers are in full agreement on how they can cope with the crisis. Once that joint strategy is in place, the Kia brand with its great value-for-money vehicles has the potential to come out of the crisis a winner. We are committed to helping Kia Iberia make the most of their opportunity in these turbulent times.“
Namics, a leading IT and web service provider in Switzerland and Germany announced a pitch for the job of creating a new image that would reflect the constant transformation within the industry. Heads took the challenge rather literally and developed a corporate design that presents the company „Real Time“. Namics was at once surprised and persuaded by the idea. Philipp Lämmlin, Namics Partner: „Heads understood us. They took a big risk with the pitch but they exceeded our expectations. We are very much looking forward to the unique new CD/CI image that will be launched in 2009.“
In the Neuen Zürcher Zeitung of 3rd November 2008, Professor Bestetti, Head of KTI Medtech, was quoted as saying, Switzerland should actually be characterised as a nation of medical technology companies rather than banks. The Swiss Medtech Report supports this assessment with facts and figures. It reports on the country’s high density of medtech companies and the advantages of Switzerland as a medtech production location. The nations’s good medtech networks are covered as is the Swiss tradition of financing medtech enterprises. Heads produced the Swiss Medtech Report 2008 for the following stakeholders: Ernst & Young, SWX Swiss Exchange, The Innovation Promotion Agency CTI, Osec, Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, the Swiss Association of Technology Transfer SwiTT, IBM, Swiss Medical Cluster, Swiss Medtech.
At Heads we just love to create corporate design and advertising for our clients. But every now and then we have to think about our own needs: after nine years, the time has come to update the Heads image. Online, the changes are not just limited to the design – the speed and functionality of the reference cases tool has been improved so much, that it makes most agency websites look quite passé. www.heads.ch
When thinking about succession, Heads is taking a thorough, logical and far-sighted approach. That is why Mike Stillhard, Founder and Managing Partner will become the President of the Board of Directors of the Agency, but will also remain involved in operative business and as a client advisor until at least 2011: „I have no intention of slowing down yet, but it is vital to set the points in the right direction for the future.“ The job of CEO will go to Ralph Hermann who has been a Heads Managing Partner for five years: „I’m glad that Mike Stillhard will still be around for operational and strategic questions for a long time. It is a privilege to lead this team of talented, bright minds and perpetuate the development of the agency that has been very satisfying in previous years. I am also obligated to our bright minded clients whose loyalty we want to retain through our reliability and extraordinary engagement.“
The Swiss Biotech Report 2008 was presented today at the Swiss Stock Exchange on the occasion of the «Swiss Equity Biotech Day». The publication promotes Switzerland as a location to foreign Life Science companies and investors. This year’s report focuses on the location advantages in a „War for Talents“ and looks at the benefits of the dense and dynamic networks that exist in the national biotech sector and shows that Switzerland has a long tradition in financing life sciences enterprises. Ralph Hermann, Managing Partner of Heads: „While working on the Biotech report we were impressed by the close collaboration and mutual respect that exists between companies, scientists and investors. One interview partner summed it up nicely with the statement that Switzerland is very similar to Silicon Valley in this respect.“ The Report stakeholders are Ernst & Young, SWX Swiss Exchange, OSEC, The Innovation Promotion Agency CTI, Swiss National Fund (SNF), Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, the Swiss Biotech Association, SwiTT, the Swiss Association of Technology Transfer, Swiss Private Equity & Corporate Finance Association (SECA) and biotechnet Switzerland the national competence network.
On Saturday 8th March 2008, the University of Zurich’s „Science Parcours“ opens on the Zurich Sechseläutenplatz. The public exhibition of inter-disciplinary research is part of the University’s 175 year anniversary celebrations. Heads created a world of special cardboard furniture for the „Science Parcours“ inside a white cubic tent with a 1700 m2 floor area. The agency used the recycled material to produce a modular 18-piece furniture system that allowed flexible multimedia presentations of various inter-disciplinary research projects. The result was an exhibition where the design was as surprising and sustainable as the content.
» printer friendly