Project brief: To design a logo for Kodak’s new line of digital cameras: Slice. The logo is to exemplify the targeted demographic—25-to-35-year-old female digital-camera users and archivists—while not alienating men. The logo also should speak to the way users interface with a camera.

Approach: The Slice identity takes its aesthetic cues from the modernist worlds of fashion, cosmetics and designer fragrances, and is based on a typeface that is both confident and friendly. Conceptually, the identity references the physical and mental gestures that one makes while using the camera. Based on the motion of diagonally “slicing” the touch-screen user interface, the Slice identity illustrates the active participation inherent to using the camera. From a utilitarian perspective, the Slice identity was designed to be extremely versatile for an array of graphic applications and manufacturing options, e.g. the camera itself, packaging and print ads.

Effectiveness: The Slice logo embodies the device and its user interface. Thousands of photos uploaded to Flickr from Slice cameras and a host of Slice unboxing videos on YouTube further emphasize the popularity of the product with the targeted demographic. A successful product-differentiation campaign—acknowledged by Symon Whitehorn, the director of design and user interface at Kodak, in the April 2010 issue of aXis magazine—helped create an effective pairing of the Slice camera and its trademarked logo.

Simply expresses the name in action: slice—the I slices the center of the logo. Nice characteristics of the product it lives on.