7 Local Brands we Bid Farewell to in 2017 (Part 1)
Gone but not forgotten.
Here we are, at the end of 2017, looking back at the Hunger Games that is Singapore's business world. Congratulations to all who survived.
Let's take a look at the brands which, for better or for worse, closed shop this year from a design perspective. Part 2 of this series can be found here.
Lush 99.5
After a good 13 years of playing indie, independent local music, Mediacorp announced that Lush 99.5's last day of transmission would be on 31st August. Despite efforts to increase audience numbers and even enlisting powerhouse radio deejay Rosalyn Lee in 2014, listenership has been declining consistently, eventually becoming the least popular Mediacorp radio station. Yes, more people listen to Symphony 92.4 than Lush.
Lush's closure was definitely a loss for the local music scene. However, with local acts such as Nathan Hartono and The Sam Willows gaining more recognition in the region, the problem might not be that local music is dead, but rather radio's gradual death as a communication medium among millennials. Local music would now be featured on Mediacorp's Singapore Sounds initiative on 987 and 938Now.
Designers - mourn the loss of this pastel aesthetic Lush has been using since its 2016 revamp. It has only been a year, but this beats all other local stations' marketing material by carefully mixing warm hues with bold typography. Kudos to the marketing team at Lush - now go and make other stations' visuals great again!
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| Not sure why Lush did not just change its logo to this wordmark... |
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| Came right outta pastel Instagram |
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| As local as it gets |
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| You can view the rest of Lush's colourful goodness on their Facebook page |
Tigerair
The budget airline industry has come a long way since Tigerair's maiden flight in 2003. First, we loved them. Then quality issues with reliability and hygiene started to scare and anger travellers. In the 2010s, budget airlines started to brand (and rebrand) themselves as fun and casual, appealing to the younger generation of travellers. One such example is Scoot, a competitor turned sibling via SIA Group's purchase of Tigerair. On 25th July, Scoot merged with Tigerair, and now operates under the Scoot brand.
Tigerair's most recent logo was designed by The Secret Little Agency (TSLA) in 2013. It was a way overdue redesign as its predecessor screamed Windows 2000.
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| Top left: Previous design style. The rest: posters from 2013 onwards. They changed the font, added a tiger stripe pattern, but kept using real images which made it hard to maintain consistency. |
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| Next level cute. |
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| The document footer is probably the cutest thing to ever come out of the Scoot-Tigerair alliance |
All the best to Scoot and may its unique Scootitude bring the company to greater heights.
AsiaOne
SPH went into a crazy firing frenzy in October, which saw 230 jobs being cut in the unexpected exercise. Among the projects on the chopping board was AsiaOne, SPH's social news aggregator.
Ironically, AsiaOne had just rebranded itself this year in May, significantly changing its logo after more than 10 years of using its blue/red wordmark. AsiaOne's 20th anniversary website done in 2015 has not been taken offline yet (what a blessing for writers like me), so I dug out all its previous logos right from its inception in 1995:
To further rub it in, the site just won 6 creative awards in November for categories including UI, UX and video editing. Between the May revamp and October announcement, AsiaOne picked up 3 other awards for its content and branding. Yay-ish?
Sure, AsiaOne tries so hard to look like a hipper version of The Straits Times, and it could tone down its use of the Muli and Montserrat typeface, but apart from these quirks, one can see the effort AsiaOne put in to ensure smooth a smooth UX and responsive UI for readers.
It's such a shame to end this project in the name of 'cutting costs', when SPH obviously invested a lot of money into making AsiaOne look like Buzzfeed.
Ironically, AsiaOne had just rebranded itself this year in May, significantly changing its logo after more than 10 years of using its blue/red wordmark. AsiaOne's 20th anniversary website done in 2015 has not been taken offline yet (what a blessing for writers like me), so I dug out all its previous logos right from its inception in 1995:
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| 2009 tho. |
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| The updated AsiaOne website |
It's such a shame to end this project in the name of 'cutting costs', when SPH obviously invested a lot of money into making AsiaOne look like Buzzfeed.
Bonus: llao llao
llao llao pulled a Gongcha when its master franchisee, D+1 Holding, announced that Yole will replace the cult favourite in Singapore by December 9. It happened so quickly that fans did not have much time to get their last bowl of happiness.
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| I'm not sure if it's a design trend in the yogurt industry to have rounded wordmarks as fonts |
Putting things in Perspective
All the brands I mentioned in this post (even the bonus, non-local brand), are not standalone companies - their parent companies easily earn more than $10 million annually.
This shows that massive business empires can also make mistakes. Some projects fail to pivot and keep up with the times, causing them to become redundant. In other cases, a shutdown is needed to realign the parent company's focus on their actual mission. Whatever the case, budding entrepreneurs should take heart that failure is just part and parcel of building a business.
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