🎓 📙Paperback │ 📜

Distributed Identities

README:
Distributed Identity of the Internet Archive

By: ✍️F. N. van der Vlist │ On: 🕓2012, June 11 │ In: 🏢Willem de Kooning Academy (Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences)

📂Designing for Distributed Brand Identities The contemporary new media environment requires an overhaul in the way one thinks about brands and brand identities. In particular, it is essential to consider the brand as a distributed network of identity expressions comprising various characters, marks, images, messages, and narratives, but also their adoption and appropriation in culture and society. Some of these expressions come from brand representatives following strict identity guidelines and style guide documents, but today many expressions are not as controlled and may be appropriated in different ways. Hence brand identities are no longer strictly visual, nor controlled in their circulation. README: The Internet Archive’s Distributed Identity presents an analysis of the current graphical brand identity of the Internet Archive and proposes a reconsideration of their identity as one that is networked and distributed. That is, the brand identity of the Internet Archive is one that is a collection fo visual and non-visual echoes circulating across the live Web and in Web archives, which aligns with distributed narrative forms that arguably characterise contemporary new media environments. The paperback presents the variety of brand expressions concerning the Internet Archive and also presents a typology of these expressions. These expressions were collected through a number of Google Search queries. While brand marks are included, there are also former brand marks and slight variations on them. Furthermore, the analysis also includes alternative expressions, including homepage screenshots, circulating content and maps, photographs of the institution’s brick and mortar building, photographs associated with the institution and its founder, and screenshots of ‘12 Hours Dark: the Internet Archive vs. Censorship’, which refers to the controversial SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bill introduced in the United States in early 2012. These examples demonstrate the value of thinking about brand identities not as fixed and controlled graphic expressions, but as networked, dynamic, and distributed assemblages of goals, content, people, buildings, images, issues, and concerns associated with brands.