-By Barbara Lippert

NEW YORK Adweek's ad critic Barbara Lippert analyzes the new Wal-Mart logo with Brian Collins, chairman and creative director of Collins, a brand innovation and design company based in New York.

In a wide-ranging interview, Collins explores the issues at the heart of the extreme redesign (by Lippincott). It not only softens the colors, the font, and the case, but also changes the spelling of the store name itself, removing the star between the "Wal" and the "Mart" so it's now all one word, lowercase, followed by a yellow flower-like "spark of energy."

"Every brand has to balance the familiar with the surprising," says Collins. He describes the new identity as "friendlier, more accessible and broader." According to Collins, the new logo is also more polite: "Think of an e-mail message, all caps comes across as rude, like you're yelling."

Collins maintains that the new logo is "a real jump into the future." The old logo was "designed in an era before kinetic movement," he points out. "Nowadays, so many platforms that the logo lives on have motion." He asserts that the corporate identity of the future therefore has to be "dynamic and interesting across all platforms."

Listen now and see if you agree.

CLICK HERE FOR BARBARA LIPPERT'S PODCAST.