Designing The World's Biggest Brands - Bruce Duckworth - #167

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, friends. That's right, it is podcast time. So get ready for this one. Bruce Duckworth is a designer. He's the co-founder and co-chairman of Turner Duckworth. It's an award-winning international brand identity design firm. That is a complex way of saying that Bruce and the people that work for him build the biggest brands on the planet. And when I say the biggest, I mean Amazon's Smile logo, which you'll have seen on every box you've ever had delivered, was designed by him. And they do Coca Cola and Samsung and Elemis and Metallica. So I just had to sit down with him and ask, what's it like to work for Jeff Bezos? You know, to sit down in a briefing and have Jeff Bezos sat opposite you, or to be charged with doing the rebrand for Coca Cola. It's just so cool. So many awesome stories. There's some great tips in here if you are a burgeoning graphic designer or just someone who has an artistic tendency. There's some really nice takeaways from Bruce about how you can monetize your passion and some principles that you can follow. I'm pretty confident that if you couple this episode with a couple from Richard Shotten and one from Rory Sutherland, you've probably got the beginnings of a world-beating branding, design, advertising and marketing company. So there you go. Some free gains for you there. Credit Modern Wisdom. Feel free to pay me 10%. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Bruce Duckworth.
First things first, did you come up with the Amazon box smile design?

**Bruce Duckworth** (2:01)
Yes.

**Chris Williamson** (2:03)
How many people do you think have seen that? Everyone that's listening, think about the last Amazon parcel you got. It was probably this morning. The fact that underneath Amazon, there's a little smiley face, but it didn't used to be like that, apparently. I went on your website, didn't used to be like that, it used to be the other way, like a frowny face. Tell us about that.

**Bruce Duckworth** (2:23)
Yeah, so that's how many people is an interesting question. I think that somebody had worked it out, that just the logo printed on packaging had been printed on packaging about 100 billion times.
That's just extraordinary, isn't it? That's just packaging, that's let alone not on outside of airplanes or lorries or websites, with gift cards or the rest of it. So that's just an extraordinary thing, isn't it? When you design something and you're responsible for drawing it, and then it's repeated so many hundreds of billions of times, it's just unbelievable, isn't it? I suppose we didn't think it was ever going to be as big as that. Obviously, who could have imagined? I'm sure even Jeff Bezos didn't realize it was quite as big as he's got now. I think it was about 20 years ago. Amazon, they were the biggest bookseller, online bookseller, if you remember. And that's all they did, just bookselling. And we have an office in San Francisco, and we were working on a lot of.com boom and the subsequent bust kind of companies around the kind of 98 type time.
And Amazon wanted to change their business model from being just an online bookseller to sell everything on the internet. And so the meeting with Jeff Bezos was, we need to, the brief from him was, we need to tell everybody that we're now selling everything on the internet, not just books. And we also need to tell everybody that we are the most consumer-friendly, we want to be the most consumer-friendly company on the internet. Because at the time, although that seems like everybody is that now, at the time, that was quite a big deal. And so those are the two things we had to communicate. And, you know, logo design is about communication. And so you have to try and find the unique thing that has to do with their name and what they're trying to communicate. So Amazon, we were lucky or we looked hard, I guess, there's an A and a Z in Amazon if you think of the name. And so an arrow that went from A to Z means everything, right? So we thought if we could link the A to the Z with a smile, which was a sort of, you know, looks a bit like an arrow but is also a smile, it goes from A to Z and it's sort of consumer-friendly. Which is a sort of, you know, that's the answer, right, to the brief. As it turned out, the logo before had a sort of an underline, which was a sort of like a sort of frown smile, like an upside down smile. So actually just by inverting that and adding the arrowhead to the end, we managed to move it, sort of manipulate it from being one look of a logo into the new logo with meaning. And I think that sort of has done as well. I mean, wherever I go in the world, there is a piece of my work on someone's desk.