Elisa in the Sky with Diamonds

With roots that go back as far as 1882 when the first telephone company was established in Helsinki, Elisa, as it was named in 2000, is one of the largest telecommunications companies in Finland providing phone, mobile, internet, and cable TV services to over 2.3 million customers and employing over 4,200 people. Last week, Elisa introduced a new identity — bringing together four different consumer brand names into a single, unified brand — designed by Oslo/Helsinki/New York-based Grow.

Three other main consumer brands that changed their name and logo under the Elisa brand: Saunalahti, Appelsiini, and Videra.

There is not much nice to say about the old logo, particularly that "e" and "a". Much less about the cheap bevel. The new logo is nearly an identical interpretation of the same letterforms as a script wordmark and, as much as I hate the old logo's character proportions, they work quite nicely in this new version. I've always liked bold, mono weight, wobbly script wordmarks and this one fits right in that category. The "sa" ligature feels forced — try writing it as shown, it's nearly impossible to do so naturally — and is almost unreadable but it may be that quirkiness that makes this logo memorable in the long run. Or perhaps it will be the hallucinogenic blobs…

Logo in blob. Blob crops.

I have no idea what these are, what they mean, or what they might represent. I like looking at them. But that's as far as my intellectual appreciation of them goes. There is no inherent visual relationship between the logo and blobs and they are each graphically demanding elements that feel like they are competing for attention. The blobs animate in a cool way and the wordmark looks interesting on top of them but, yeah, just kind of random choice of graphic device.

Business card. Packaging. SIM card. New identity introduction. Someone forgot the music. Logo animation at the 0:34 mark. TV spot with an astronaut squirrel and an old gentleman scientist who appears to be a new spokesperson. I'm sure I'm missing a lot in translation.

Not many applications to see and even the ones above pulled from the mute video feel like rushed prototypes that basically repeat the blob, cropped in different ways. In general I want to like this, because I enjoy both the wordmark and blobs on their own but together they don't make a lot of sense.