Jeff Schox put me on to this amazing Saul Bass pitch detailing his proposed rebrand for The Bell System (now AT&T) in 1970.

(skip to ~9:50 if you want to skip the fun stuff and get right to the meat)

It is an amazing postcard from the pseudo-psycedellic era of business with far out visuals, ambitious goals and “unique” perspectives that seems suited to the wind-down of the hippie generation.

The project itself is amazing too – at the time representing the largest rebrand ever. Not just a new logo, but a comprehensive review of the company’s identity – both through iconography, color-play and even functional redesign of products, apparel and other ways employees and customers interact with the brand.

In the end the rebrand would update 135,000 Bell System vehicles, 22,000 buildings, 1,250,000 phone booths and 170,000,000 telephone directories.

The video contains several gems on brand philosophy from the brand-master behind Girl Scouts of America, Minolta and others. Here’s one of many on different logo types, their positives and drawbacks:

We can break-through and at the same time help unclutter the visual environment. Quietly. With a look of excellence. beginning with a trademark.

There are three basic categories of trademark: monochromatic form, logo type form, and the symbol logo type form. Each has its strengths and weaknesses.

Monochromatic form’s strength is that it’s simple, concise, quickly identified. Its weakness is that the viewer must first be taught what the letters stand for before they make sense, otherwise it blends into the environment as so much alphabet soup.

The strength of the second category, the logo type form, is that the name of the company is itself trademark. But it has a weakness; lettering that is easy to read gets lost in the typographic environment.

Try to make it stand out by stylizing it and you lose legibility.

To help solve this dilemma some companies surround their logo types with a geometric shape, but shapes being generic can never be unique.

The third category of trademarks, AT&T and the Bell companies use now; the symbol logo type form. It has several strengths:

The symbol creates the uniqueness of the mark so the lettering in the logo type can remain clear an easy to read. With an organization like ours, composed of many companies, the symbol becomes a flag, uniting the company’s into a single organization.

By itself logo type is just another word in a sea of words, but combined the symbol serves as a focal point directing attention to the name. This form of trademark as its weaknesses too, such as requiring the use of two elements; the symbol and the logo type.

All in all, it’s right for the Bell System.

Follow me on Twitter at @Aten. Interested in building a great consumer brand? Join us at Merchbar.

Sat down with my friend Scott Orn of Kruze Consulting a couple of weeks ago to help kick off his new podcast “The 1 California“. Had a great time talking about the new Pearl Jam merch we have in stock, what Apple looks for when featuring apps and building businesses in the music industry.

We had a great time and hope you learn something. Hit me on Twitter at @Aten if you liked it, have a question or have feedback.

Listen here – http://www.the1california.com/episodes/14737-ed-aten-of-merchbar-aten

Update: Just today Merchbar was featured again. This time in the Back To School section of the App Store. Wahoo!

For years I’ve joked with friends that, statistically speaking, getting into an Uber is the most dangerous thing I do.

I haven’t run the numbers on each of my activities but it seems pretty likely – cars are terrifically dangerous (nearly 100 people die each day in traffic accidents) and probably 95% of all the trips I take are in via Uber.

That’s why when my friend Carolyn told me it was her New Years resolution to buckle up in Uber’s I instantly adopted it as mine. Life is too short and it’s just too damn easy.

Not that I was bad at buckling up but for short trips across town, or just driving around on city streets, it was easy to forget.

Last night made me glad I adopted the resolution.

About 9:30 my girlfriend and I crossed Market street in San Francisco in the back seat of an Uber. Unfortunately while our light was very very green, the car coming across on Market street apparently didn’t see the red light and came across traffic at full speed. He hit the car to our left, which was thrown into our car. We were tossed sideways, and though I’m not exactly sure what happened there was a pretty good vertical component as well.

It was fast. It was scary. Everyone was ok, but it was definitely way off the “fender bender” chart. Once we checked everyone was ok and started gathering our wits we started to get out of the car and tried to find my girlfriend’s purse. We looked and looked but couldn’t find it. It has been on her wrist during the accident, where could it have gone?

Turns out the impact had pulled it off her wrist and thrown it into the front seat.

That could have been us if we weren’t bucked up.

Thankfully everyone was ok, but it is a great reminder: even on city streets traffic moves fast enough that it can really hurt you. Be safe. Buckle up. I will.

</grandpa lecture blog post>

I woke up this AM wondering if I had somehow messed up my settings – Facebook was notifying me that one of my friends was reported safe from some game called Nepal Earthquake. 

It only took me another minute or two of checking my morning news to learn that it wasn’t a game, that a 7.9 earthquake had struck Nepal and not only was one of my friends there, but that she was safe.  

     
Like a vast majority of those utilizing this feature for the first time today, I was on the receiving side of the information and I was very glad to know the was safe. 

But it wasn’t that long ago I was on the other side.  

In April 2013 I was in Boston during the marathon bombings and instead of being reassured that someone I loved was safe, I was the one doing the reassuring. 

Within just minutes of the bombs going off my phone was filled with texts, tweets, Facebook messages and calls of people that cared about me wanting to make sure I was safe. 

While I felt loved, at the time I was much more focused on the immediate crisis: what was going on? Where should I go? Where were my family and friends I was meeting up with near where I had just heard explosions?

Thousands of people were going through the exact same situation and within minutes the cell networks were either overloaded or being controlled by law enforcement to ensure no one was using them to trigger bombs remotely (note: I never went back to find out if that was true, but during a crisis person to person information, speculation and any thread of information turns into a game of telephone).

When I did get messages or connection, it seemed like it was only friends from around the country asking if I was ok, but I couldn’t get through to my parents (who I was supposed to meet at the finish line) or my friends in Boston (who had been finishing their race around the time the bombs went off). 

To be clear, I don’t blame anyone at all for reaching out. I am very happy to be loved and appreciate how scary it must have been for the people that loved me to know I was somewhere and could have been hurt. 

But in an emergency your phone is a critical lifeline and its connection is supremely precious. While I know now that I was in a safe place, I didn’t know that at the time. I was working to deal with that was happening at that moment and those plans, information and communication with friends and family there had to be top priority. 

But our phones can’t tell the difference between essential communications and nonessential – so it was frustrating and scary to receive nonessential communications when I had essential things I couldn’t do because my phone was overloaded. 

That’s why I’m very happy Facebook has created this feature: It allows those in crisis situations to notify others they are safe and the people that care about them to know if they are ok without individual messages. 

The reach and ubiquity of Facebook can not only provide peace of mind on a large scale but it can free up the phones and networks of those in crisis situations to use them for their immediate critical needs.

“I knew this patient was going to die. I knew whatever procedure I was going to do was just going to keep her husband away from her for the last two hours of precious time she had left.”

Sometimes the most compassionate treatment a doctor can prescribe is to stop treating the illness and talk to the patient and family with compassion and empathy.

Even if you aren’t a doctor, this presentation from Dr. Jessica Zitter will change your perspectives on death and dying and give you a new perspective on the “concerning tendency of of doctors to hide behind interventions rather than to talking to patients.”

(her talk starts at 3:20)