Sonos, the home audio company with a palindrome of a house mark, created quite a buzz when its new logo went viral. Designed to suggest sound waves, the design creates an optical illusion when viewed on digital devices. Can you see it? If you scroll the page quickly up and down, the radiating lines surrounding the SONOS wordmark pulsate.
The logo’s designer humbly confesses that the illusion was a happy accident: “No real scientific data went into initial ideation," explains Laura Stein, creative director from Bruce Mau Design. "It was meant to be a logo in motion, something radiating, something happening." Design and branding authorities call it brilliant. Fast Company raves that the new logo “pulses much like the brand’s speaker products, in a move that sees the branding go above and beyond to promote the firm's message” (quoted in fastcodedesign.com).
According to Adweek: “It’s sound branding that lays down a visual beat, an effect so cool that the logo got tweeted by the Verge and went viral.” And RGA Future Vision adds: “We spend our days scrolling through website after website, which makes Sonos’ new visual identity rather genius.”
From a trademark practitioner’s perspective, the new mark is also “genius” because it communicates motion without having to be registered as a motion mark. Motion marks are notoriously difficult to register for a variety of reasons, including the difficulty of describing and depicting the mark and convincing the registrar that the mark functions as a source identifier.
On 24th March 2015, Sonos has filed a simple design mark application for its new logo, US Application Serial No. 86/575,079, that does not even refer to the optical illusion.
Sonos, it seems, stumbled on an innovative branding concept that is literally as old as the hills: prehistoric men used similar techniques to animate their cave paintings, albeit without the benefits of a computer mouse (see A night picture caveman-style).
Issue 052
MARQUES has provisionally welcomed the agreement announced by the European Parliament, Council and Commission on trade mark reform, which incorporates many changes that MARQUES and other users associations had called for, and looks forward to examining the agreed texts in detail when they are available
For this month’s interview, James Nurton spoke to David Goldring, MARQUES Treasurer and one of the founders of the association
Design patent abuse in Ukraine, Louis Vuitton in the General Court and a Kit Kat case in Portugal are among the issues discussed on the MARQUES IP blogs in the past month
WIPO is hosting a Madrid System Users’ Meeting on Sunday 3rd May during the 137th INTA Annual Meeting in San Diego
OHIM will be demonstrating its global trade mark and design tools and solutions, such as TMview, TM class and the Enforcement Database at the INTA Annual Meeting in San Diego