FIRST:
For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology

Dean Kamen is America's closest approximation, today, to Thomas Edison... a hugely successful, self-employed engineer-inventor.  Dean is best-known for the neat if quirky Segway vehicle; his fortune, however, comes from such medical devices as the first wearable infusion pump and the first home kidney dialysis machine. (For more, see DEKA.)

Dean also wants to change our culture. He wants to make science and technology as much fun for kids as basketball or football. So he invented FIRST Robotics Competitions, which are now a very big deal indeed. In 2004 FIRST engaged more than 20,000 students,  on over 900 teams in 27 competitions... teams, from Canada, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Great Britain, and almost every U.S. state. The competitions are high-tech spectator sporting events, vibrant with the kids' passions and robust creative achievements.

Despite good publicity, however, FIRST fame has not grown in pace with its  success. Tony Spaeth concluded the problem was the name itself, great for those already committed but a weak peg to seek new converts. Under the leadership of John Abele (the founding CEO of Boston Scientific), FIRST's board agreed. The solution Spaeth proposed was simple... just add "Robotics" when you first mention "FIRST," to give the otherwise common word a more specific and ownable identity peg.

"But Dean's larger dream was vested in the idea of the FIRST name," Spaeth reports. " He saw 'FIRST Robotics' as giving up, to some extent, on expressing the 'Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology' message, and was simply not willing to accept defeat. Our job, then, became to do everything else we could to make it work."

One tool would be redesign. BrandLogic, in a generous pro bono contribution, provided a new mark at once more functional, elegant and dynamic, yet with zero cost in visual equity.