With the influx of Web2.0 redesigns and designers' efforts to bring the look and feel of things in general "current" there's a trend, and i repeat... trend occuring. I know you've seen it too but might not have taken note. I'm (not affectionately) referring to the wet floor effect. It's the overhauled old logo with a friendlier and more approachable lowercase type treatment, garish colors, and the gradated reflection below. This category does not include the at&t or ups identity redesigns. Although some may disagree, serious thought went into those.



There's a parody thread at http://yh.yayhooray.com/ where contributors are submitting their own web2.0 redesigns of some better known logos. A quick glance confirms it's a parody. There are other sites popping up too.

I remember briefly being impressed about a year ago by the effect in the iCorn Project flash piece and have since seen it used appropriately by Nike and others to put visual objects or elements into a space and add dimension. The notion of the effect actually being part of an identity is gratuitious and destined to quickly become dated and obsolete once the trend passes.

I've experienced plenty of instances when I felt like all the good ideas were used up. I've also gone through the lengthy process to design an original mark from scratch, only to see an almost identical treatment appear elsewhere right before a client gives final approval. Identity design should always try to seek integrity, originality and longevity for our clients. When it doesn't, the discipline as a whole suffers from mistakes that we didn't learn from.

Financial firms are having an ongoing identity crisis. Received a Check Card offer from your mutual fund lately? How about a mutual fund from your insurance broker? Yes, confusing, isn’t it?

From 1970 onwards, market innovations and competition in the financial sector have compelled state and federal regulators to ease Depression-era restrictions on financial institutions – most notably banks. Banks and their holding companies have been permitted to improve the nature and variety of their financial products, pay market interest rates on most deposits, and expand across state lines. This has meant head-to-head competition in some cases, and no one knows where it will all play out.

The trend toward deregulation culminated in 1999 when the Glass-Steagall Act separating banks from securities firms and insurance companies was repealed in congress. Now banks can combine almost every financial service you can imagine into one big “financial holding company.”
As you can imagine, this has created some severe branding problems. No longer will we see a bank that offers just checking, for instance, it may also offer a vast array of risky or just plain odd financial products.

And so how should larger financial institutions, who are (oddly finding themselves) competitively required to enter into all these product offerings, presenting their new brand to the world?

Today we will look at two brands - or more specifically the logos of brands, and hopefully in the days to come we will investigate a few more.

Credit Suisse has eliminated the “First Boston” sub-brand and moved away from the monolithic modern blue and red, to re-enter it’s sailing past with two fore-sails bravely leading the way into an uncertain future.

Here is the logo before 1997:



Here is the "modern" logo till January of 2006:


And here is the current "post modern" logo:



The new look is dynamic, flowing and progressive. I like it and believe it is both reassuring and will do well for Credit Suisse. I like how the type is pulled forward by the sails.

However, it must be said that the balance, heredity, tone and – modernity – of the old 1997 brand is quite striking and it is worth wondering why they didn't try to evoke it more directly.


Phoenix home life, a life insurance, annuities and asset management company has proceeded from a very contained, strong and resilient mark:



and more recently:


And here is the current curvaceous “phoenix” rising:


I dislike it immensely for a financial services firm, I believe it looks both light and flowery when it should be strong or forward-looking. It reminds me of a hotel chain or some spa brand.

Labels: Fine Financial Branding

Mike Padilla from Digital Web Magazine wrote a great (and courageous) article on the compromises that we often make as UI designers.

In “User Interface Design – Taking the Good with the Bad” Mike writes about the impossible decisions we often have to make. I found this read very interesting for several reasons. Mainly because some of the issues covered we all know to be true but never really feel like we can talk about them freely.

For example, it turns out there is no such thing as a “silver bullet” or the “killer design.” These things are for sales guys to promise and for designers to improve their poker face when they have to stand behind their designs as “perfect.”

The truth is that in an imperfect industry, governed by imperfect constraints, design becomes a point of analysis, and yes, compromise.

There is a pro to every con to every design decision we make. The pros and cons stack up to cost – both financial and cognitive. Mike gives us a good discussion about these decisions, and the frame work to develop your own ruler to measure your designs decision’s ROI.

MediaPost just reported about a study about college student use of the Web conducted by Experience, an online internship and staffing company. They found that 43% of respondents went online 10 or more hours per week, 31% spend 6-10 hours online per week, and 19% use the Web 3-5 hours per week.

While all that's not all that shocking, the data about their offline media consumption habits say a lot about how things are changing. A mere 17% reported watching TV for more than 10 hours a week and only 1% spend 10 hours or more per week reading magazines and newspapers.

The survey also found that these students like humorous ads more than fact-based ads, with 40% reporting that they'd respond to a humorous ad vs. 28% who said they would react to fact-based ads.

The lesson? Old media is probably a bad way to reach college students.

Duh!

On this disgustingly hot summer day, I just stumbled on a site that was refreshing enough to send it around.

The Design Trust for Public Space site is a great case study for how to utilize a clean, well thought-out grid, that features photography in an engaging way and employs a superclean tabbed nav that that is a million times prettier than Amazon.

The content is cross-referenced all over the place and by clicking around you can see how the grid really plays out and accommodates all the information at hand. At the risk of sounding just plain old, I wish the system text was a point larger, but its simple stylesheet is legible and has an intuitive heirarchy. Nothing like some cool design to beat the heat.

The Associated Press reports that the week of July 4th was the worst ever for broadcast television. ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox averaged just 20.8 viewers per prime-time minute, a stat that beat the old record set in July of 2005. Even though the TV industry has mightily tried to explain it away, it's not all the surprising considering that only one in four young people can name the four major networks.

The top 10 shows watched were:

1. "America's Got Talent," NBC, 12.03 million
2. "So You Think You Can Dance" (Wednesday), Fox, 9.78 million
3. "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" (Thursday, 10 p.m.), CBS, 9.7 million
4. "60 Minutes," CBS, 9.11 million
5. "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," NBC, 8.86 million
6. "So You Think You Can Dance" (Thursday), Fox, 8.85 million
7. "Cold Case," CBS, 8.82 million
8. "CSI: Miami," CBS, 8.66 million
9. "CSI: Miami," (Wednesday, 9:30 p.m.), CBS, 8.22 million
10. "Law & Order," NBC, 8.16 million

Of course, considering the innaccuracy of the way ratings are calculated who the heck knows if these numbers are even close to reality? Personally, I didn't watch any of 'em.

Labels: Old Media Deathwatch

Cambrian House is a really cool/fascinating experiment in "crowdsourcing" software and business ideas. Basically folks register and submit their ideas for software. Other users read the ideas and vote on them and the highest-ranked ideas get put in the hopper for production. Users can then contribute to the open-source software building effort (either through coding or contributing creative) and then Cambrian House sells the software, sharing the proceeds with the contributors. It's basically an ad hoc collective software publishing house that reminds me a lot of how things are run in the Bitchun Society outlined in Cory Doctrow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Will it work? Who knows, but it certainly taps into the current open source/social networking/entreprenurial zeitgeist.

According to the "Alternative Advertising & Marketing Outlook 2006" study published by PQ Media:


And right on the heels of this study, another study by Deutsche Bank and Media Post found that online media spending rose nearly 14% in the first quarter of 2006. Spending seems to be concentrated with mainly large players, with the major portals and search engines getting the bulk of the cash:


Of course, all of this makes total sense to us. Why would anyone throw their money away on unaccountable old media advertising when they can get directly measurable results from online ads? John Wanamaker's (that's his picture next to this post, by the way) old saw about how "half the money I spend on advertising is wasted...I just don't know which half" used to be true. Now it's not. In fact, the new accountibility available from online advertising has lead the Economist (and others) to label the previous century "The Wanamaker Era." Whether the new era gets labeled as "The Google Era" or "The Age of Accountibility" remains to be seen, but it looks like we're definitely headed in a new direction.

Labels: Old Media Deathwatch

Here's a hilarious clip from The Daily Show explaining how the Internet works, courtesy of dimbulb Senator Ted "Tubes" Stevens. If you've been wondering why your "internets" sometimes take days to get to you, this video holds the answers. Oh, and if you've been wondering what role gambling on horse racing and lotteries plays in keeping the Internet clean, you'll learn that, too.
Finally, while you're at it, check out this video if you really want to know what's at stake with the new "Net Neutrality" legislation.

A new survey of 15,000 "faulty" wireless devices returned to UK provider WDSGlobal found that 63 percent of them weren't broken at all...their users just couldn't figure out how to use them. The combination of features, the crummy interfaces, and the lack of documentation provdied by most phones seems to be the trouble. And it's not just annoying...the survey estimates that the global cost of dealing with non-broken "broken" phones is somewhere in the neighborhood of $4.5 BILLION dollars!

While these findings seem surprising at first, if you think about them, they're really not...how many of us use more than the most basic features of our cellphones? How much more money could carriers generate if they actually made it easy for users to utilize the fancy data services found in most phones? Why can't a single cellphone manufacturer write a decent user's manual? Why does the experience suck so bad?

Nobody seems to have an answer yet, but I'd be there's gold in them there hills if someone could figure out how to make mobile data services as easy to use as an iPod.

I'm all for redesigns. I'm all for keeping things fresh and updated. And I'm all for designing things with shelf life and some timelessness so that a few years from now they hopefully won't appear to be yesterday's trend.

That being said, I can only imagine the tidal wave of critique experienced by the designers responsible for redesigning Ontario's traditional trillium logo. At a cost of $219,000 to a government reportedly running a deficit, Bensimon Byrne produced a mark described as "resembling holly," "spiky," "unfriendly," and "structurally unsound."


Public and political outrage have ensued, and with the role of the web giving people a voice, the response is a loud one. I personally don't care for the redesign either, and personally don't understand where that money went, to yield such a poor outcome. I'd love to see the focus group testing on this one. Maybe the budget went to paying them off?

Labels: Design

Fujifilm has changed its logo:



http://www.fujifilm.com/news/n060712.html

Here is the old logo:



Indeed: the new one is better, to my mind, and it will travel further.

However, the logo makeover fails to target the source of the brand problem with FUJIFILM, and that is the word "Film."

How many times have we seen a technological/method-based term in a name, and how many times have these names been unable to adapt with the times?

RADIO Shack.
Kentucky FRIED Chicken.
MATTRESS warehouse.
CIRCUIT City.

All of these companies find themselves unable to expand their product line, differentiate their offerings or appeal to an audience that doesn't have an affinity with their key word.

What should Fujifilm be called? Well how about Fuji?

Labels: Design

Microsoft learns slowly, but Microsoft does learn.

I have been intrigued by what amounts to a tacit admission by Nokia’s head of brand experience, Liisa Puolakka, about the unity of a corporate message and how it can interact with fashion trends – and how Nokia, while it has exciting design, doesn’t have a unified brand experience:

“The main thing is to find the right way, the appropriate way, to get across your point of view. A lot of the fashion companies do it very well, especially Prada, or Marc Jacobs. But also Nike - even though they have a huge range of quite different products, the story and the attitude is consistent. Starbucks is another company which understands very well its own point of view, and gets that story across. Apple of course…”

Photo of Nokia's new brand guidelines...


Read more of her thoughts here:
http://www.pingmag.jp/2006/05/12/new-levels-of-experience-design/

Brand Unity VERSUS Fashion
There is a noticeable tension between brand unity and trendiness (or fashion-sensitivity).

IBM has achieved brand unity, but couldn’t be called trendy, but with the emergence of the PEBL and RAZR Motolora could be seen to have both. Google has brand consistency but its fashion sense could be improved a good bit. The companies Liisa mentions could be on the same list as certain car companies, Coke, and no doubt a long list of highly branded smaller niche players.

Lets add Microsoft to the list.
Microsoft is perhaps a company least associated with fashion or design: it is bland, it is boring, it is lame, it isn't cutting edge...

Somehow everyone thinks that Microsoft makes ugly stuff that isn’t internally consistent. While I am not on Microsoft’s payroll (yet!) I have a high regard for where the lead designers – those anonymous hardworking beige people – are going with the design that emerges from Redmond.

The thing to look at here is how fashion sensitive, brand integrated, and compelling Microsoft design really is. If a company that wasn't microsoft were doing this kind of work, I think people would take notice.

Put another way, here are the questions to ask:
Does it look fun or cool?
Does it look like Microsoft?
Would you buy it?

My answer is yes to all these questions.

Office 2007 icons:




Xbox hardware early sketches:


Xbox settings interface:


Wireless intellimouse:


Phillipe Stark Mouse
"This is the first time we've teamed up with such an iconic designer to create a new product," said Ken Fry, design group director for Microsoft Hardware. "Philippe Starck is known throughout the world for his ability to bring extraordinary design to everyday items, from juicers to luggage, making him a perfect fit for this project. We are excited to create products that allow consumers to show their unique personalities with the products they use each and every day."


Fossil Smart Watch
"Design at Microsoft isn't what it used to be," says Horace Luke, a Platform Strategist in Microsoft Research, leading the effort to expand Microsoft's vision of mobile computing. "Design continues to play an increasingly important and strategic role in our everyday product development process." With a background of image and industrial design, Horace developed both Xbox and Windows XP's visual and brand communication strategy. "Design impacts our customers' experience at each and every individual touch point, whether it is the product, the retail experience, or brand communications."


Live Thumbnails in Windows Vista
Really nice sales site: http://www.seewindowsvista.com/


Windows Live: http://www.live.com/
Feature set of windows live: http://ideas.live.com/


Microsoft Backoffice: windows dynamics icons

“Product Design in MD [Microsoft Dynamics] plays a broad and important role in not only the visual design but especially the design of software interaction with our users. If we don’t get it right it simply won’t succeed.” Alan Blood, Product Designer


My point?
Clearly Microsoft is bigger than its iconset, and a few screenshots and a guest appearance from Stark won’t convince anyone Redmond is fashionable.

But who wants to bet that Microsoft hasn’t finally figured out that people will respond with loyalty devotion and yes, dollars, to great, brand consistant, fashionable design?

Surya Vanka, Microsoft’s Design and Usability Training Manager, is a former professor of industrial design at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:
“Surya says that in the past three to five years, the design community at Microsoft has grown in size and influence to become one of the largest groups of user experience professionals anywhere in the world.

"It's a thriving, vibrant, intellectually stimulating place," Surya says. "There are great opportunities for growth because you're working alongside the world's leaders in design and user experience."

Surya feels that at Microsoft, designers take on challenges that don't happen at most places. "A product that you create here may be used by 800 million people, which is an unprecedented scope for impact," Surya says. "Designers here have amazing reach."

Check out more cool things from Microsoft here: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/design/index.html

Once again, this past week I was faced with yet another web design project where a decision was made to switch the body text back from Georgia to Verdana, but I put up the good fight for Arial and then it was settled. I was left feeling less than victorious. In another recent project, I convinced a willing client to deviate from their headline font of choice and opt for system text so that every time an inevitable edit was to be made in the future, a new graphic wouldn't have to be generated by whoever had the specific font. At least I have enough experience to not get sucked into the "final content" trick. (How many times have you seen this? revised_content-finalfinal.8.2_r3.txt)

Modern Life is Rubbish does a nice job of summarizing the limited legacy font set that designers are left to work with and describes their pros and cons fairly accurately.

Does anyone remember seeing sIFR? I know I got all excited about it when I did, probably a year ago, but I honestly have never seen it used in real life. In researching, I saw references to a new group of onscreen fonts Microsoft was unveiling about a year ago, but they promise to be problematic at best for Mac users (imagine that).

So as the internet continues to grow exponentially, and CSS gains more momentum, power and control, I continue to wonder if/when the typeface issue will ever be resolved. I'm looking forward to some feedback.

Down with the hit, up with the niche.

There is an excellent article adapted from the “Long Tail” in Wired. It is about the decline of mass media “hits” and the incredible emergence of niche markets. The article has some terrific stats:

RADIO
Radio’s decline is substantial: in 1993 Americans listened to 23 hrs 15 mins per week to FM rock radio - in 2005 Americans listened to 19 hrs and 15 mins per week.

Time spent listening to the radio is at a 12 year low. Since 1998 the rock radio audience has dropped 26%.

In 1996 the Telecommunicaitons act brought in a perfect storm of competition, adding more than 700 FM stations into the fray, while simultaneously relaxing ownership limitations. This allowed Clear Channel and Infinity to buy up a bunch of stations and bring in the era of true cookie cutter playlists, thereby competing against the greater diversity of stations with LESS diversity and quality. Not smart.

Noticeable competitors to FM rock radio are, surprisingly, the cell phone, which offers a productive way to get business done while commuting, AM talk radio, your ipod of course and then the real killer: quality satellite radio.

MOVIES
Last year box office declines continued as they have since 2001, falling 6%. The average 25 blockbusters in any year of this decade account for 5% less of the total gross than in the 1990s and they have cost 57% more.

NETWORK TV
Network tv ratings continue to plummet as people scatter to cable. Since 1985 network rating have fallen from 75% to less than 50%. Collectively, the hundreds of cable channels surpass the networks in total viewership – no single channel dominates.

Real death knells are ringing louder than ever as the mega-events draw fewer and fewer devotees: in 2005 the World Series had the worst tv ratings of all time, 30% lower than the previous year. NBA playoffs were down 43% compared to 2004. The 2006 Grammy awards were down 31% from two years ago. The winter Olympics had the worst ratings in 38 years, down 36% from the 2002 games in Salt Lake City.

NEWSPAPERS
52% of Americans read a daily newspaper, compared with 81% four decades ago.

MAGAZINE
Magazine newsstand sales are at their lowest since 1970.

NOVELS
The average amount of weeks a best seller stays on the top ten list has fallen by half in the past decade.

---------------------------

The emergence of “hits” is a zero sum game phenomena that really only coincided with limited broadcast time, limited bandwidth and limited shelf space. If there is only one supermarket, and it has limited shelf space at eye level, there can only be one or two winners. But in a world with unlimited shelf space, super megaplexes, 50 billion channels and more every day, the mass market “hit” is fragmenting into a million mini-markets with sub-markets beneath them.

Credibility, quality, endurance and word of mouth has always been antithetical to the muscle behind a hit, but in these days of increased competition and niche markets, it is the only way to succeed.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/longtail.html

Labels: Old Media Deathwatch

"Tuangou, or team buying, aims to drive unprecedented bargains by combining the reach of the internet with the power of the mob. It is spreading through China like wildfire. The practice originated in online chat-rooms but has quickly inspired several specialist websites, such as 51tuangou.com and www.teambuy.com.cn. Zhang Wei, who helped to set up teambuy less than six months ago, says the site has 10,000 registered members. The company plans to expand into Beijing and Shanghai. "

"Team buying turns haggling, a tradition in China, into an art-form. That such aggressive consumer behaviour has arisen in a country without much of a consumer economy and weak individual rights is less surprising than it might seem. In the countryside there are more and more organised protests against government corruption and dictatorial landlords, with even poor people using technology like the internet and mobile phones to help. Now their urban, middle-class brethren are adopting their tactics—if only for shopping. However, if China's economy ever slumps, urban consumers could use their organisational skills to confront the government directly. Beijing might be watching the spread of team buying with trepidation."

Read about it...

What if you outsourced your creative to your customers?




Trendwatching ( http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/customer-made.htm ) has a great category called “customer made” and it is worth taking a look at how this fledgling marketing arena is heating up.



Here is the given definition: “The phenomenon of corporations creating goods, services and experiences in close cooperation with experienced and creative consumers, tapping into their intellectual capital, and in exchange giving them a direct say in (and rewarding them for) what actually gets produced, manufactured, developed, designed, serviced, or processed.”

The idea is to include the customer – or even outsource to the customer – the important early ideation steps of a new ad or product.

While I am sure that the sweet spot between customer research and CRM is somehow placated by this idea, I tend to doubt that customers can be forward looking with their design. By necessity they are exposed to fewer alternatives, have less education about the realistic alternatives and seldom keep the core communication goals top-of-mind. Don't get me wrong, I am fond of the idea as an input to the creative process, I just question a non-expert's ability to solve intricate communication problems in an elegant fashion.