I don't do logos

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.

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.

Post a comment →

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.

Coming up

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

Post a comment →

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.

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".

Post a comment →

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.

Post a comment →

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...

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.

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.

Assignment

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.