MetaDesign Branding Agency Visit

MetaDesign is a branding agency ranked amongst the highest in Europe for more than ten years. Today (Tuesday June 10, 2008) we were able to visit the agency for an inside look on how they work. It was founded on January 1, 1990, by Uli Mayer-Johanssen and two partners. One of their first jobs in 1990 was when the Berlin Wall fell, the public transit authorities in East and West Berlin merged and hired MetaDesign to develop the new corporate design for it.

MetaDesign’s philosophy is “Simplicity and clarity are our guiding principles. We are not afraid of chaos because we always keep an eye on the big picture. We revel in complexity because we are obsessed with detail. We love aesthetic solutions because we are designers through and through.”

The agency is hired to manage and design identity processes for brands. They strive to create emotions associated with brands and create brand experiences. The agency works on two platforms, meta platform and meta brand process. Since MetaDesign develops and builds brand identities, this platform makes sure that these unique identities are applied to the brand with the highest level of brand management relevance. The meta brand process, which is broken up into five different categories allows the agency to satisfy their clients. Time and time again MetaDesign’s unique platforms have proven that their methods guarantee optimal results. Some of MetaDesign’s clients include Volkswagens, Lamborghini, Audi, Ebay, Nike, Siemens, and Lufthansa to name a few. Today we were shown how MetaDesign came up with the Motif for the Lufthansa commercial. We also heard how MetaDesign was hired by Audi to redo their closing sound in their commercials from a harsh not appealing sound to a very soothing sound. The only challenge was that Audi didn’t want the sound changed, but just redone to sound nicer. In my opinion MetaDesign did a great job doing it, it still was the same out as before, but with soothing sounds of a bass and violin.

Before visiting MetaDesign, I didn’t know that there were agencies specifically dedicated to the design of sounds for identity of brands. The sound of a brand can be extremely important in the recognition of the brand. For example, the T-Mobile jingle can be played in many places without a picture and most people will identify that it is T-Mobile. MetaDesign was nice enough to open their doors to us and I believe that we all walked out of their office with a lot of knowledge of what a sound can do for a brand.