Miguel Ángel Echeverría is one of the foremost pioneers of design in Spain whose extensive international career and broad experience of creating and implementing corporate identity programmes have never quite received the kudos and recognition they deserve.
Echeverría, who founded the company Gabinete Técnico Echeverría, maintains that you cannot design a visual identity and then ignore its evolution in a changing market.
As he asserted in the magazine Experimenta: “You must have great professional integrity and put a stop to the wave of ‘communicative graphic forms’, avoiding the vampirism of certain signs over others and eschewing the idiocy of a divo”.
Gabinete Técnico Echevarría developed, and still does, dozens of corporate identity roll-outs for big companies. One early example is this manual designed for AVIACO (Aviación y Comercio S.A.), a company founded in 1948 and the second largest airline operating as a subsidiary of Iberia, Spain’s flagship company.
The introduction to the AVIACO Manual, designed in 1975, features the following text written in a style reflecting the time:
“This Corporate Identity Programme presents information regarding the starting point and form of applying the new logo and international initials which shall differ, graphically, from AVIACO as of 1975.
Since our company was founded, different signs, logos and graphics have predominated AVIACO’s visual representation. Yet, at the present time, these signs do not cover, neither in form nor approach, the multiple demands the company requires in its current endeavours.
In our era, even large, well-established and global companies cannot always preserve the same image, never mind cling to it ferociously at any cost. Our age is much too flexible and kinetic, and the future belongs to the ability to adapt, not to tradition.
The firm decision to launch a new logo is due to the guaranteed efficiency of AVIACO’s new undertakings, the success of which is due to the values of discipline, coordination and the ability we all have to adapt”.