Clients who have worked with me know that I don't do logos. I do brands, and brands may or may not involve the finding of a name or creation of a logo. If a logo makes sense for a brand, it should become part of the branding process. The goal of that process shouldn't be the creation of a logo (or the creation of a visual identity), it should be the creation of a brand. A brand involves the entire user experience, from product- or service experience to customer management and internal company behavior. A brand is based on virtues (or values), which should be naturally reflected in a brand's identity design. Consequently, designing a brand doesn't mean designing a logo or just the visual interface where the brand interacts with people. It means designing the entire brand experience.
]]> Processing the brand ideaIt is understandable that even if they get this, most companies are not ready to go for it. The excitement and the anticipation for their own brand is just too overpowering. I often experience clients overwhelmed when they're talking about their brand. They know what they want to do as a service and they have a pretty good idea of services or features they are going to involve with their offer. But if you ask them "what distinguishes your brand from others?", you can hear the crickets chirping.
Hence the idea of a process: a workshop or just a good meeting, where we're together processing the brand will result in finding out what this brand is really standing for. It's the pathway to a good brand strategy.
This is the question I hear quite often, and again, I understand the motives for it. Yes, you can quicken it up, but you can not override the process. Even if you're designing just the logo, you have to think about brand values, whether you want to or not.
If you try skipping this step, you are basically letting your gutt feeling decide what your brand is standing for. Which can be a good thing once you have processed the brand idea and you have a pretty good imagination of what it's standing for. But if you haven't done that, you are looking at pretty colors and fonts, nothing more.
I believe the role of a logo is overrated. A logo has often symbolic meaning, more for the organization carrying it than for the people it is catering to. If you think about it, the functional role of a logo would be recognition. It should serve as a an emblem saying "this is from us". Nothing more, but nothing less.
I often refer to brands like persons, because that's how people are treating them. A logo is like a signature, it is not the signing person itself. A logo alone doesn't represent the brand.
The effect of misunderstanding or simply overrating the role of a logo comes from our current state of design- and lifestyle culture. Logos are experienced to have a lot of power in a world of media omnipresence, but in reality, their true influence is just happening if they are standing for a really powerful brand. If Nike didn't have its brand history, it would be a mundane logo.
I often experienced that in the process of creating their identity, as in becoming who they are and what they are standing for, companies and startups are struggling with their personality. They are immature and haven't figured out yet who they really want to be. And you know what? That's totally normal. If a brand is like a person, it needs to go through puberty, just like everybody else. But in this important process your brand is finding its identity. It will happen a lot that your identity is questioned, from the outside and from the inside out. A brand that went through a lot of trouble becomes a stronger brand. Look at Apple: It took a "Think different" campaign to strengthen the brand, to bring it back on track, the track that was its nature. What most people don't see is how this campaign enforced the brand from the inside out.
Sure you can. You can do anything in design. The question is if you want to make a quick buck or if you want to create something you can put in your portfolio, and it doesn't stand out for its glitter but for its stronger qualities.
An even better question is, do you want to do a service to the people using the brand's products?
History proves, a logo doesn't need great design to make a brand successful. If the service or product is great enough, it won't matter what the logo looks like. Truth is, some things don't need to be very well done to last for a while.
If you want a logo people remember, three qualities of a logo will always remain important:
I have to admit, the last one is a tough one these days. The logo explosion world-wide seems to be flattening any option to find a unique shape for your logo. None the less, the rules of good design won't change. They're founded on psychology and cognitive science.
The process behind good branding excludes options before it results in finding the most valuable one. Good design leaves things out, as many as possible, before it adds something. A soap bubble in the air is round, because it's the most efficient design for its formation.
It's quite easy to explain "I chose blue, because it is a calm colour" for an example, or "I chose an asterisk, because it is used for annotations".
It is by far harder to tell why you excluded an option than why you chose one.
The issue with quick-and-dirty design solutions is, the decisions have no source, so they are just explanations and make the branding process irrelevant: anything can be right, but nothing would be wrong.
My friend's client chose to go with a different consultancy. They came up with a logo, despite there was no branding process behind it, and at first glance it looked okay. It features a blue word in a washed out typeface, complimented with a red asterisk sign.
Why did they choose this font and not another one? Why is the asterisk red and typography in blue, why not the other way around? Why has asterisk a chewed look to it? The positioning at the end and not the beginning of the word, was there an idea behind that or not? The asterisk may work if you explain it, but what if you don't?
In the description of what the logo should communicate, one line was standing out: "Typeface and colors communicate: fun, humor, leisure, accessible".
I remembered that was what my friend's client regarded as their brand values: "fun, humor, leisure, accessible". What a unique set, don't you think? Any typeface/color combination has the power to communicate this, if you just explain it. Lime green/rusty red, pink/egg yellow, orange/blue can all be fun colour combinations.
If you are explaining design choices, the question is not why you made a choice, the question is why you withdrew an option.
For every logo design one needs to answer questions, and it's easier to do so before you start looking at fonts, colors and elements. Of course you can find your way gradually when it comes to drawing a logo or finding the right font. But at this point you should already know where you are heading. The worst you can do is start finding explanations when you are looking at a dozen of logos. You will end up comparing one logo with another, and your only measure for distinction will be "I like it" versus "I don't like it". That's hardly a good process of logo selection.
My advice for all startups, ventures, companies and organizations looking for a logo is:
Forget the logo. Think about the brand first. It often doesn't take more than a couple of hours and you don't have to be afraid you won't find anything. There's always something that makes one brand unique. If your logo is more important to you than your product, something's wrong with your brand. It may be you need more time for this than you thought, but that means you're just not there yet. Don't underestimate the power of experience. In the end, a shortcut now may cost you the momentum of a lasting impression for your brand audience.]]>
Dear Hulu,
After you ignored my first email, I will give it one more try, before I'll go ahead and post this message on my blog.
In my first note I tried to point out the futility of putting shackles on a service that is hosted on the Internet, which by definition is not locality-based, but independent of countries and regions. The only binding element of the Internet is the technology it runs on and the people who are using it. Of course humans are bound locally, but the Internet frees them of this barrier, a boundary many acknowledge as the last frontier of free communication.
The nature of the Internet is communication, not restriction thereof. If you don't get this simple principle, then I, and with me millions of Internet users, simply don't get you. Let me have a look at your business idea: you want to bring your TV content to all people, for free, and I assume with this you want to envigorate your hosting TV brands, Fox and NBC. You allow everyone on earth to become a member, but you won't let everbody watch the shows. You are excluding everyone who is located outside the US. A couple of weeks ago I was in Austin, Texas, while I was attending SXSW. I had no problem accessing your content from there. But because I'm in a different region now, my rights to get your content have been crippled and I find myself demoted to second class customer.
You couldn't know I have a blog, but you should have assumed it. These days, everbody with access to the Internet is somehow, somewhere conntected with other people on the Internet. Everyone who consumes online is also publishing online, even if it's only micro content. The Internet just enables the nature of ourselves, to communicate freely. And the longer this thing we are calling the Internet goes, the more it becomes apparent, that this is just the beginning of something different than anything you know from TV. Consumers are not consumers anymore, they want to be treated like people. And they treat brands like people too, so you should be careful with your actions. If you want to be my friend, you need to behave. You need to be loyal, honest and true. Betray my trust and I don't buy your brand any longer.
Communities are not built, they grow by themselves. You should know this most basic principle of all communities. You might have a growing fellowship of users in the US, but by overruling one of the most fundamental ideas of how communities online work, you not only ignore those other users worldwide; you shut them off, you close them out, you actively dismiss them.
In your mission statement, you wrote:
"Hulu's ambitious and never-ending mission is to help you find and enjoy the world's premium content when, where and how you want it."
Did I read "when, where and how you want it"?
Let's have a look at what this means for your brand. A minor effect? Seriously? Do you honestly believe Europeans keep their thoughts for themselves? Do you think they have a different Internet, restricted to the European Community? Like a French, a German and a Dutch Internet? In what kind of world are you living? If you are offering a service that is accessible worldwide, with the very idea of providing content everywhere, but then you are refusing to enabling us to consume this content, you are basically telling us we're not worth it. You are hurting your brand. You make people angry. And you don't need a marketing guru (not even an old-school push-marketing guru) to tell you that this is bad, very bad. Angry customers telling other customers about a miserable brand experience is a pure nightmare for any brand. It has the power to let stocks tumble and fall. It has the potential to bring you down.
I am not really sure if you know what you are doing. It seems to me your actions resemble the same arrogance and paralysis like a government most famous for its failures. Of course you can treat climate change like a local problem too. I'm sure at US command, clouds, winds and storms make a full stop at your country borders. Maybe you should look at the Katrina files in this regard.
Back to your actual problem, blowing off potential customers with an unfulfilled promise. A commending review in Fortune magazine won't cure your problem.
Let me quote one of your statements in this Fortune article:
"'They said big media was too stupid to do anything appropriate on the Web, and that NBC and Fox were incapable of partnering. Both charges have been wrong from day one.' Whether or not that's true, the world will soon judge for itself."
I couldn't find a better conclusion than Fortune authors David Kirkpatrick and Adam Lashinsky. (To get that, you first need to grasp that the world is not flat.)
I really recommend you go back to your drawing boards and reconsider different options. I don't need to lay them out to you, but here's a hint: Make your stuff accessible to everyone, or no one at all. Stop playing China or Cuba, by attempting to control the Internet and applying artificial barriers. A polite information that the content is not available in "my country" will not cut it. It will provoke more blog posts like this one.
With Best Regards,
Henning von Vogelsang
Poolga is a site with a simple mission: to populate your iPhones with better wallpapers. It's perfect for those of us who say they've got better taste than what many fanboys have posted on Flickr. Poolga has become my first source for changing boredom on my brand new iPhone.
]]>I have to admit, at the moment I don't even have a nightstand. But I do have books next to my bed, and that pile is in steady rotation. I read them all at once, sometimes no more than two paragraphs a night. Which is resulting in a very slow rotation.
There's a certain quality you will see reflected. None of this writing is about science in a traditional sense, Harvard business tactics, modern management, or how to invest your money best. It is about humans and how they live with each other, in groups, societies, sometimes struggling with human nature, sometimes blindly following patterns we were not aware of, but we're allowing them to rule our path of decisions. These books were written by brilliant minds, tinkerers about all things connected.
Not all of them are easy reads, and with some I'm really having a hard time biting my way through. In fact I'm sometimes tempted to put a book away. But then it does something to me, and this is probably the best reason why you may want to have a closer look: The influence of these books resembles the effect of drinking seawater. The more you drink, the thirstier you get.
One more thing. I hope you will enjoy this series and it might inspire you to read the books portrayed in it. But it would be boring if you only read about what I'm reading. Don't be shy to tell me about your nightstand too. Throw a book in my direction and see if it will knock me out.
The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda
Wir nennen es Arbeit, by Holm Friebe and Sascha Lobo
Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell
Emergence, by Steven Johnson
Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks, by Mark Buchanan
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means, by Albert László Barabási
Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, by William C. Taylor and Polly Labarre
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore
Failed States, by Noam Chomsky
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, by Philip Ball
The Meaning of the 21st Century, by James Martin
Who Are We?, by Samuel P. Huntington
The reason why I haven't been blogging lately is simple. In October 2007, I started a new job at namics in Zurich, and ever since then I have been working for its marketing division namicsrotweiss.
At the time it seemed a good opportunity, based on the experiences I had made when I was working freelance for namics for two weeks. We had been in talks about possible collaborations for about a month before that, and it had come to a point where it seemed reasonable to establish a firmer work relationship, also because namicsrotweiss had won the client pitch I had been involved with as a consultant.
My official job title is Consultant, but with my background, I'm also covering some creative direction and of course concept creation and strategy, which are part of my core competence. Consultants at namics are always also project managers.
When I started working for namics, it looked like a good joint venture of our both experiences. I felt namics has a great spirit and I was eager to help shaping its future, or at least the future of namicsrotweiss. Meanwhile my impressions and outlooks are more complex and certainly adjusted to a more sober reality.
I am quite certain that namics will keep its leadership for the upcoming time and I am proud to be part of this development. But without being critical, I have to admit that, while namics has a great spirit and as a company, it is actively looking for innovation to maintain its leadership ambitions, it isn't free of the laws of gravity when it comes to the Swiss market and the European state of the Internet scene and development.
By some measures, namics is a very innovative and extremely modern company. It is unique in its own way and clearly sets itself apart from all other IT-, Web- and Communications companies I know in the German speaking hemisphere. It really is a different kind of animal among them, and I think that may well be the source of its biggest challenge and its greatest potential.
In many ways, even when trying to be innovative, namics manages also to be a conservative company, not much different from the clients it is serving to. In fact, it's conservative to the degree it can work with its clients, because as a company, you still have to be economically successful, reasonable and efficient.
That being said, I think there are also a few solid and good reasons why namics is a leader in its field. Over the course of the past couple of years, it has established a number of partnerships with companies like Google and Microsoft. It has created firm client relationships, many of them for longer than three years (a rarity in this business, which is rather project and solution-driven). Plus, it is continuing to grow, but takes great care of not losing a grip on the balance between growth- and success rates.
The reason why namics got interested in my work was a concept presentation I had sent around in the industry. Elephant Seven in Hamburg, who merged with Pixelpark, and namics were the two companies in the German-speaking market who were interested to talk to me. Since I live in Zurich and namics has a main office here, and because the spirit felt right, I chose to work for namics.
There is more to come about the story between core and namics, but for now, this entry covers the basics to keep you updated. For the upcoming time I will continue to work for namics, but I hope that I can pick up again on blog entries. Later on, I also hope to find time to publish a couple of ideas I had in store since Autumn 2007.
]]>
It seems that everyone agrees: the environment is one of the most important issues. Again. That's right, there was a similar movement going on in the eighties, and it subsided in Green parties, Greenpeace and a few laws about whale hunting, which have been undermined and loopholed by Japan ever since.
I remember anti-nuclear energy stickers on school bags next to ACDC stickers, local WWF collections to save Pandas and schools here in Europe were spreading the belief that earth's supplies of fossile energy would not suffice beyond the year 2007. In 1985, that seemed a long time away in the future.
Having lived in San Francisco off and on, from about 2003 until spring 2005, I learned that having anti-SUV bumper stickers on your car is fashion of the same chic like wearing an old army jacket with a pink ribbon, while you're walking down Upper Height, demonstratively presenting your solidarity with a widely overrated and romanticized group of college dropouts with rich parents in the sixties.
I can see the same patterns reappearing today. It's all tres chic. Of course we are all for saving the environment. Who isn't? Since we're all one happy family of geeks, I feel it's safe to say we all are on top of this topic, with our RSS feed readers with 41'365 messages waiting for us.
Together with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, and while reading about his new book (which I honestly heard is good), we right-clickingly buy a symbolic bottle of water to support well drilling somewhere in Africa.
I am no better, I am no different. The question is, what could make a difference? Many say, turn off the lights. Turn off your computer. Do a walk in the park instead. While I agree that 20,000 life switches being turned off in the same moment sounds like such a pretty idea, I'm not sure if it's really cutting it.
Let's face it: the biggest source of trouble on earth are humans, and the biggest oil guzzling, energy demanding, pollution crating source among all humans are the United States of America. (I know China has more citizens, but guess what, they also use more bicycles.)
Among some of my friends, I am known to support quite unpopular ideas, such as removing all borders and getting rid of the concept of countries and nations. Yes, I know, it's radically utopian and frankly sounds like a nut idea. But it wouldn't be the first nut idea that carried further than the words proposing it.
Prepare for even more insane ideas: What if we wouldn't have nations and borders? What if our value system was equalized and the same matter wouldn't cost ten times the price of what it costs at another point on this planet? What if we had local governments ruling over small communities, connected in a network that is supported by global laws, not national ones? I am not thinking about the United Nations. I am talking about truly global laws to protect the environment.
Nature is a global thing, you know. It's not a local issue or a national discussion topic. Nature has no borders and nations. That's an invention of humans. Nature is evolution, and currently we are interrupting its natural development, disrupting it with massive shifts of elements. This is what pollution and oil consumption are all about, a shift of elements, caused by Western Civilization.
By now I might have lost a couple more readers than just the ones who were looking for gossip about Paris Hilton. But if you're still here, do me a favor. Pardon me, it's two favors. One, go read Al Gore's new book. (It's less about environmentalism and more about the troubles caused by the U.S.) Two, tell me your idea of changing the world in global context, not only as one, or a couple of nations. I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on new concepts of living together, ideas beyond our worn out models of nationalism, economic efficiency and our all too well established value-system of "you have it and we want it".
]]>
Since February 2007 I have been a member of MyBlogLog, a Web service that offers simplistic user tracking. I had found MyBlogLog through one of the widgets posted on several websites, among them Stephanie Booth's blog.
MyBlogLog looks a little bit 1999 design wise, and it doesn't really offer substantially useful content. And it only works if you are a member too, otherwise it won't track your visit. It also doesn't provide the kind of data you get with Google Analytics, which is entirely for free. MyBlogLog reminds you to upgrade to a pay account in a rather pushy way, but given the basic functionality I like, I don't plan to upgrade any time soon.
There is one big drawback though, which MyBlogLog has in common with a number of so called Web 2.0 services out there. We have 2007, so mentioning Web 2.0 in one sentence, I would assume that this includes a Web design that is following Web Standards. It's not like CSS 2 was invented last week and we are first adopters of CSS based layouts.
Yet, MyBlogLog seems to think we need a nasty table as a widget. That alone wouldn't make it bad, if there was a good way to replace the table and use XHTML and CSS make a useful and clean snippet of code. A lot of people are doing this all the time with widgets, like Flickr for an example. The Flickr bar you see on top of Theory applies the JavaScript from Flickr, sans any table or formatting, with a new set of CSS styling from my style sheet. Veerle has posted a good guide on her blog.
After spending the good half of one morning with trying to use MyBlogLog's nasty widget code, I decided to pull the plug. No widget from MyBlogLog on my blog. I can't have such a clunky 1999 styled box destroying the look and feel of the core experience, and if MyBlogLog doesn't let me produce a simple, clean code snippet without a table and horrible styling, I won't deal with their annoying code.
MyBlogLog, if you are reading this: Once you cleaned up your widget code crap, give me a call.
]]>Netdiver has been around for, like, forever. Seriously, it has remained to be a great source of inspiration, stirring the news in the digital design age long before CSS Zen Garden saw the daylight, or any of the newer CSS inspiring sites were born. My Internet experience today grew alongside with Netdiver over the past seven years. They never ceased to be great source, and I am glad and proud they have featured core once again.
]]>Today, life on the fast lane means something slightly different. At least for the geeky crowds I sometimes exchange myself with. Some live a life so fast, or on a lane so far out, I don't even get any life sign from them in several weeks. Like last week, when I completed a demo for soil / seed / plant, a new project I had started to work on several weeks ago. It's basically a concept to improve collaboration and help sorting our thought process out.
I sent it out to my closest friends and the brightest minds I personally know in the blogosphere. But until today, nobody has replied. I know I shouldn't put that on the content of my email, or the ideas proposed in the demo. It's just an idea after all. The reality is, most of the people I know and sometimes work with don't have the time to look into everything they get. Talk about Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero.
Another project I'm working on is notepin. I can't disclose too much about these two projects, but if they come along like I envisioned them, they will both bring something new to the Web 2.0 universe. So stay tuned for my life on the fast lane, and if you do, I promise I will be a good boy with updating you with what's going on.
]]>
Google's Ride Finder is the kind of application that will become handy when you have an iPhone. A Google Map shows updated real-life data of cabs in U.S. cities, tracked by location. I zoomed into San Francisco and clicked "update location" a few times. It really shows how the cabs are moving. Say you are stuck in the city and need a ride. You simply walk to the next cluster of cabs and get a ride home.
Expect a lot more of these applications to emerge with devices like the iPhone. A year from now, competing phone manufacturers will have updated their browsing experience to catch up with the iPhone. On the users side of the experience, the Web is now leaving the desktop or laptop and evolving towards a semantic web, where Web applications tie in with real life objects and situations.
]]>This was perhaps the most common question I was asked when I was visiting San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo/Conference. It usually took me a couple of sentences to explain what I do. If their eyes told me they didn't get it, it took a little longer. Still, it was easier than writing a description.
When I returned, I finished up some client work and then took the time to have a good look at my self-promotional stuff, my résumé, my email templates, presentations and showcases. And I realized what was wrong. The image I presented was a blurry cloud consisting of design, user experience, some information architecture, some creative direction, mixed with workshops, presentations and showcases, skills and methods, meticulously listed as bullet-points in my résumé. If I weren't I, even I wouldn't know what I was doing...
]]> The work I've done, my blog and my résumé give you a fair idea about what I'm capable of and what I've done so far. But they don't present well what is my offer, and distracted by the designed material, you could get the impression I want to present myself as a designer.
In a first attempt I tried to roll it up backwards. I started by editing my résumé, and once I thought it was cleaned up enough, I sent it to a friend of mine who works in an advertising agency. She sent it back with one line that said it all: You want to say too much.
There I had it. She was right. I always wanted to transmit everything, to make sure my audience wouldn't miss anything. I wanted to make sure I would qualify for any thinkable job in Web business, be it branding, strategy, IA or design. And while I was packing product-features in my own résumé, I missed the point of transmitting a concise, reduced package of information.
The average résumé is reviewed in 15 seconds. Okay, I made that one up. But it's true none the less; the principle behind it is a good measurement. It puts me on a track: If I had a stage and 15 seconds and need to convince a lady in the audience that we are made for each other and that she must marry me, how would I sell myself? Which words would I use and how many? What kind of media would I use? How could I tell what she knew about me, or needed to know in order to make such a decision?
The stage and the marriage proposal may be metaphoric, but they aren't too far from the real situation. My potential client has a short attention span and within this brief moment I need to show him I am worth looking at closer. Chances he will marry me are low, but perhaps he wants us to work together.
To present myself the best way I can, in relatively short time and so anyone would understand me without my physical presence, I needed to do the following:
So what did this mean for my presentation material? It meant good bye résumé. Farewell showcase. What I needed was a single file that shows my thinking rather than making the client think. I have 15 seconds on stage and I want the audience to feel comfortable and laugh with me. I want them to listen up.
This document for potential clients needed to play both roles, one of a résumé and be a portfolio at the same time. But it shouldn't be bloated or too complicated. I wrote down a list of notes, random thoughts that basically summarized my thinking about everything I found important: brands, marketing, advertising, direct marketing, media, communications as a whole, strategies, concepts, user experience, social networks and design. Out of these notes I developed a few thoughts with a hook. And one thing seemed to stand out above everything. It became a meta topic: honesty.
I believe honesty is what can save the future of marketing as a business. I believe this is our only chance, and it is here now. I also think it is part of my mission to make this happen. You will find my solution below as an interactive Quicktime movie, or your can watch it directly, hosted on SlideShow.
Download the Zip file with my latest presentation (English)
Hosted on SlideShow (English)
Die Präsentation ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbar.
In the history of Apple's software, this was the most disastrous updates I ever experienced. Granted, I should have waited. Beta software is called beta for a reason. On the other hand, there is not much that can be beta about it. Moving tabs is not really the feature I expect to crash my whole system and make Safari die.
I was fine with the previous version except of two things. Speed and the disability to remember my browsing. Firefox on the other hand lets me save sessions and it remembers the tabs I closed when I shut down the software. Why not Safari? As far as my perception goes, this was one of the longest awaited software updates since the release of OS X. Even with proper CSS support, Safari was outdated compared to modern browsers like Firefox.
Now I am sorry to say Apple killed it for me. I don't know what made it incompatible with my system. Frankly, I don't care, because I am deeply disappointed. I would have expected something more stable out of Apple's development. I could have lived with a browser that crashes now and then, but I think killing a functional software, making it plain unusable, is not acceptable. Not from any browser vendor and particularly not from Apple.
Here's a warning to all Tiger users. Do not install Apple's Safari 3.0 beta. It will not work.
]]>Mark Greatrex, senior VP-marketing communications and insights, will launch the "Sprite Yard", a mobile community where its young-adult target can share information, photos and chat. And by using numbers printed under bottle caps, they'll be able to collect mobile treats such as ringtones, mobisodes and other content. The U.S. launch is June 22; the Yard was launched in China in early June.
Treats? So that is what makes me go and use communities? Interesting. Coca-Cola's brand Sprite tries to delve into Web 2.0-like community spirit. But they don't use what is already there, they're trying to start something new. I'm not sure if this is a mistake. Okay, you can start something new, but then you need to offer something that makes a difference to what is out there. They still haven't got the right idea about how these things work. Even worse, they think it's ringtones that makes people participate and start with yet another community site.
"Sprite wants you to participate in its brand new community site!"–"Why should I do that?"–"Uhm, because we're Sprite?"
I'm not saying it's going to be that way, but they have to be careful to not come across like that.
]]> My former client wis.dm saw itself as contender on a take of Facebook. Now, one year and six months later, the scene is name-dropping Myspace and Facebook in one sentence. Facebook has become the leading platform among students, whereas wis.dm, well, is nowhere compared to Facebook. Which may be the reason why they changed their product idea just recently.My consulting for wis.dm (which they politely listened to but didn't apply) included to incorporate platform connections to Flickr, Twitter etc. Two weeks ago Facebook released new "Facebook apps", which are exactly that, on a greater scale. You can add content and mashup the stuff you've already got on other platforms.
Back to Coca-Cola and their stuck-up marketing thinking. The problem with these big brands is, their owners don't like the new Web. They don't like the people either, who don't want to be consumers anymore but just people. Now they're trying to cope with a changing situation, but honestly, they don't really get it. I think it will take a little longer until the generations have replaced the old-school members on the corporate management board.
Online communities are based on people, not on the brands they use. If you're smart enough, you can be a brand that provides the space people want for their activities. But ringtones isn't really an activity, is it.
]]>The community website wis.dm is a Web 2.0 startup in Boston. At the time core collaborated with wis.dm, they had a staff of around ten people. Core consulted them in design, user experience, usability and information architecture and provided solutions for their identity, web development and interface design.
The original idea of wis.dm was a mixture of community features, somewhere between Facebook with Digg-like functionality.
Wis.dm had asked core for creative direction and consulting, but in the end they decided to hire a graphic designer.
None of the executed design work from core was directly applied by wis.dm, but the consulting had a lot of influence and provided help and direction for wis.dm. In its most recent version, wis.dm applied many of the design principles and learnings we had discussed in video sessions between core and wis.dm.
]]> Conditions
The company seems to be on a quest of finding the right format of what it is and how it works. Since core had consulted wis.dm in autumn 2006, the website has had three facelifts, changing the logo and the brand look in colors and experience, and the idea behind the project has also gained maturity. It was first a community of people giving comments and rating news they had found online. Now it is about asking questions and starting discussions about anything
This is not unusual for Web startups. Part of the Web 2.0-experience to the outside and inside is to look at the company as a changing and growing, living organism. The only drawback of that is the lack of consistency in brand experience. While you add new features and dismiss concepts that didn't work out, your new visitors will embrace these things, while your existing user base will have trouble getting used to the changes.
Changing colors, a logo, icons, graphical language or the placement of navigational elements may be less disturbing than we would think, but they do have an influence on the overall feeling for the brand.
The following list includes consulting results and materials core has developed for wis.dm:
All work core developed in collaboration with wis.dm was based on the situation of September 2006. Meanwhile these conditions have changed a lot. Wis.dm has not only changed its website and user experience, they also changed their very definition of the product. The current line of wis.dm is "Question everything".
Of course it would have been nice to see some of the actual design work of core being used, but overall it was a great experience to work for wis.dm. Their approach as a Web 2.0 company and their open mind towards simple, clear design solutions match with what core stands for. A lot of the thinking behind those solutions went into wis.dm and can be experienced on the community site today.
In March 2005, core was assigned to create a concept and lead the project to develop the new website of JWT+H+F, the Swiss advertising agency, part of the international JWT network. The project took three months to get lined up and started, and nine months in realization. Complete with training and user manual, it was finished in September 2006.
It was a complex project, highly demanding, and at the same time a very small budget was limiting our resources and action radius. Core collaborated with Ben Hayes, who did the majority of the development work. Large parts of Wordpress were hacked, taken apart and reassembled, in order to meet client demands for a simple user interface and ease of use.
]]> ConditionsThe original website of JWT+H+F had been a static website, with a classic approach of displaying content with practically no interaction. The task was to shift the user experience towards Web 2.0, enabling direct user interaction with all content, adding rating, giving space for personal opinions and integrating the site with existing Web services such as Google Video.
A major part of the assignment was to develop a concept that was both, intelligently designed and flexible for the future. Coming from an old, table-based website design, a website with limited interactivity and an awkward user interface, we aimed to create the very oposite: A site that would taste like fresh orange juice, fun to surf; it would be a pleasure to dive into its content.
Another important part was content: Theoretically, it should be possible for every member of the agency staff to publish content. Core chose Wordpress as a CMS foundation because it was a perfect match with the requirements. Wordpress is easy to use, it is widely spread, has an excellent and flexible API, it is supported by a great Open Source community, and its software design is prepared for the future of Web development.
Our solution was based on a simple but changing insight, which makes a huge difference in comparison to most other ad agency websites:
People don't come to look at ad agency websites if it is just a static show. Threads of comments will lead to more intensive interaction with the website's content. If you enable an interactive platform, providing tools to rate and give comments to the ad agency's published work, chances rise that your visitors will return to see who else left a comment, and how the rating of a certain advertising campaign is doing.
The client brief was developed by core in a workshop with the client, and it included the following important points:
Throughout the development of the website the client changed the list of requirements and features. This is normal for clients, as no one can possibly grasp such a project fully from the start. Some things you conceptualize turn out to be impossible later, or they simply need a redesign of elements. The commission contract allowed a certain flexibility within reasonable terms, so the project wasn't getting out of hand.
Core used Basecamp for project management. This solution was extremely helpful in the process. It allowed centralized communication in threads between project manager and developer, and at the same time it allowed us to provide a certain transparency to the client, letting them observe the individual steps of development and giving them controlled access to some resources.
The Swiss website of JWT now ranks in the first results of a Google search, while the international JWT website is listed in the lower ranks. This is a great example for the good effect, if a website was developed with consistent use of Web standards, using a solid, logical Information Architecture, avoiding Flash and integrating third party services. Combined with a higher degree of activity on the website, this practice leads to better ranking results in Google search.
Additionally to the actual website, core also developed training material for the ad agency staff, with a centralized user manual that can be updated online.
The Swiss ad agency website of JWT+H+F
The website of JWT International
Ben Hayes' Website, Jackfruit Design