¶ The Color of Money · 13 December 2004
My bank, which wasn't small or cozy when I opened a checking account there many years ago, has now merged up into a larger corporate megalith for the third time since I joined. My part of it was BayBank, which merged with Bank of Boston to become BankBoston, and then with Fleet Financial Group to become FleetBoston, and has now been acquired and absorbed by Bank of America, whose line of the merger chart is even bristlier.
The usual cynical view is that these changes are of little consequence to individuals. Fees go up, and levels of service go down, but that happens in non-merger years, too. You don't sign up with these banks because they're virtuous, you do because these banks are big. More specifically, you join them because they have ATMs everywhere you live.
And this is where the Bank of America change is actually startlingly significant, in a way that I doubt was ever raised in the merger negotiations. The previous three incarnations of this, the largest New England street-level banking presence, had different names but the same color. Ever since the ATM era began, the coolly luminous greenish-teal of the BayBank/BankBoston/Fleet signs has been an omnipresent component of the New England urban color scheme. Arguably it has been the single most distinctive brand element in a thoroughly branded visual environment. It has become the signal color of commercial critical-mass, the flag of normalized rules of exchange, and whether through coincidence or an obliquely enlightened collective consent, remarkably little other signage adopted and thus polluted the semantics of the hue. You could walk out onto a sidewalk in New England, look one way or the other to find the nearest glowing greenish-teal, and know immediately what sort of place you were standing in.
Bank of America's color is red. As the signs are changed, this time, the greenish-teal is being removed. Of course, whole signs were replaced the other times, too, so this change to red involves no more labor than the others. But it is the genius of evil to do more and more-permanent damage with the same small gestures. Red is bright, but overwhelmingly banal. There are countless other red signs, everywhere, and the new Bank of America signs are thus effectively swallowed and invisible. Where the old signs defined and delineated commercial presence, the new ones herald nothing but oblivious intruding anonymity. In replacing something with nothing, Bank of America has ripped little holes out of thousands of intersections and squares and centers across New England.
Of course, it doesn't really matter. Greenish-teal was not a moral quality, and distinctiveness is not an inherent good. I should have found a better bank long ago. Visual coherence in the built environment should be neither the responsibility nor the privilege of ATM signage. We are used to this process in New England, greens turning to reds in a thousand little flares of temporary death.
The usual cynical view is that these changes are of little consequence to individuals. Fees go up, and levels of service go down, but that happens in non-merger years, too. You don't sign up with these banks because they're virtuous, you do because these banks are big. More specifically, you join them because they have ATMs everywhere you live.
And this is where the Bank of America change is actually startlingly significant, in a way that I doubt was ever raised in the merger negotiations. The previous three incarnations of this, the largest New England street-level banking presence, had different names but the same color. Ever since the ATM era began, the coolly luminous greenish-teal of the BayBank/BankBoston/Fleet signs has been an omnipresent component of the New England urban color scheme. Arguably it has been the single most distinctive brand element in a thoroughly branded visual environment. It has become the signal color of commercial critical-mass, the flag of normalized rules of exchange, and whether through coincidence or an obliquely enlightened collective consent, remarkably little other signage adopted and thus polluted the semantics of the hue. You could walk out onto a sidewalk in New England, look one way or the other to find the nearest glowing greenish-teal, and know immediately what sort of place you were standing in.
Bank of America's color is red. As the signs are changed, this time, the greenish-teal is being removed. Of course, whole signs were replaced the other times, too, so this change to red involves no more labor than the others. But it is the genius of evil to do more and more-permanent damage with the same small gestures. Red is bright, but overwhelmingly banal. There are countless other red signs, everywhere, and the new Bank of America signs are thus effectively swallowed and invisible. Where the old signs defined and delineated commercial presence, the new ones herald nothing but oblivious intruding anonymity. In replacing something with nothing, Bank of America has ripped little holes out of thousands of intersections and squares and centers across New England.
Of course, it doesn't really matter. Greenish-teal was not a moral quality, and distinctiveness is not an inherent good. I should have found a better bank long ago. Visual coherence in the built environment should be neither the responsibility nor the privilege of ATM signage. We are used to this process in New England, greens turning to reds in a thousand little flares of temporary death.