May 2, 2012
Architectural Signage
AN OBSESSIVE COMMENT ON TYPOGRAPHIC HISTORY
Each day as I drive home, I pass a corporate business office complex named the Old Mill and most every day I think about the same thing as I pass. Now, I’m the first to admit that designers can obsess about innocuous things that the general public could care less about, however I’ve got to get this off my chest—but first a little history in typography.
April 25, 2012
AIGA 100 Show
The Salt Lake Chapter of the AIGA, the professional association for design, asked modern8 to create the branding and design for the annual design competition, the AIGA 100. Starting with the call for entries and Web site, we’re now working on the poster, environmental graphics, award certificates and ingots. We’ve spent a lot of hours and had a lot of fun working with our design peers, but we were told it wouldn’t help us win in the design competition.
March 30, 2012
Human Emotions Connect People, Things & Brands
FUNCTION AND FORM ARE NOT ENOUGH
I’ve been a designer my entire career, but only in the last 10 years have I mixed strategic consulting together with creative services. It started in 2001 when I read the book, Emotional Branding by Marc Gobe. Subtitled “The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People”, the book was groundbreaking for the industry, and to me personally. I was particularly intrigued to learn that the author was a designer. I had somehow thought that designers didn’t write books on theoretical subjects like branding, instead, that they stuck to creating things.
February 29, 2012
The Chairs Architects Design
The meaning lies somewhere between status and utilitarian
Historically, some of the most coveted modern chairs have been designed by architects, not furniture designers. The reason may have something to do with the simple accessibility of creating a chair. “You’re much freer designing furniture than a building,” said a contemporary architect. “You don’t have to worry about public safety issues, or keeping the rain out. It doesn’t demand a huge team, and lots of meetings.”
January 13, 2012
Branded Environments
Up the emotional response by creating a brand space in 3D
A couple years ago our traditional biggest client, YESCO, asked us if we had any suggestions for them about new lines of business that they might logically pursue. YESCO stands for Young Electric Sign Company and as their name suggests, their primary business is custom electric outdoor signs. After some thought, I went back and said, “Branded Environments”. All right, maybe my answer wasn’t quite as succinct or elegant, but that’s what I meant.
December 6, 2011
Cars Are Little More than Brands on Wheels
The customer experience in the purchase of a new ride
I bought a new car a few weeks ago. Making purchasing decisions about vehicle brands is an interesting mix of personal and marketing forces. You consider, consciously or subconsciously, much more than just what car will get you from point A to B.
October 17, 2011
Caught-up in our own Web
Modern8 launches new website
Today marks the public launch of our new Website. It’s a complete overhaul and a dramatically different design strategy. With the recognition that we are living in a mobile, always-connected world, we created the site in a grid-based layout that changes automatically to fit different monitor sizes, whether on a smartphone, tablet or desktop.
September 13, 2011
Authenticity in Design
If you change perceptions are you being authentic?
Authenticity in design is an interesting concept. All design, by its very nature, is an exercise in persuasion. As someone once said, asking a designer not to persuade is like asking a fisherman not to fish, it’s what we’re trained to do. According to David Berman, author of Do Good Design, “Designers tend to underestimate how much power they have. They’re culpable.”
October 14, 2010
That Typeface Just Spoke to Me
The language of the designed world and what it says.
I’m reading a new book. Only through the first chapter, but when I was driving past the mall on Friday and looking at their sign, I immediately connected with something I had just read.
The book is The Language of Things by Deyan Sudjic, a treatise on the meaning of man-made things. In the intriguing first 40 pages the author connects such diverse design luminaries as William Morris, Jonathan Ive, Raymond Lowey, Dieter Rams and Philippe Starck. (more…)
April 21, 2010
An Ideation Session and Design Thinking
A day-long immersion in small group innovation thinking
A few weeks ago I was invited to participate in an ideation session by a Park City-based strategy and innovation-consulting group. The purpose of the all day session was to develop innovative ideas for a major manufacturer of ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. Together with nine other individuals, some in marketing-related businesses, some not, we gathered in small groups of three or four and brainstormed ideas about improving the product or packaging, promotional and merchandising ideas and new product possibilities. (more…)
February 17, 2010
What’s Up with Designers’ Personalities?
We all think of ourselves as different, but most people think artists and designers are categorically different. If it’s not appearance issues, such as clothes or hair, then it’s a designer’s outlook, personality or the way they think.
So what are the personality traits of a designer? Michael Roller looked into that. He administered the well-known Myers Briggs personality test to a group of designers and published the result. The test compares things like introversion vs. extraversion and feeling vs. thinking. Two big trends are clear: Nearly 70% of the respondents were “judging” types and 85% were “intuiting” types. That’s exactly the opposite of the general public, who skew towards “sensing” and “perceiving”. (more…)
September 1, 2009
Design Thinking: A New Way To Develop Innovation
Innovation has been recognized as survival strategy in today’s business climate. In the newest issue of Business Week magazine, an excerpt from a book by the CEO of the design firm IDEO, points out that the need to innovate is nothing new—but how to accomplish it, is new—design thinking. When I started my design business nearly 30 years ago we didn’t talk about design thinking. (In fact, we didn’t talk about much of anything outside of the arcane methods that were required to get something created and printed at the time.) Since then, the influence of design in the business world has grown dramatically.
The methodologies of the designer: brainstorming, mock-ups, user observations, storytelling and scenario building are all useful in building innovation. Tim Brown of IDEO says it is time for this type of thinking—design thinking—to migrate outward and upward into the highest levels of corporate leadership. Business leaders seeking innovation need to adopt the methods of the designer, just as designers are broadening their scope from just creating “things”, to the shaping of services, experiences and organizations.
Designers typically approach problem-solving somewhat differently. They’re more intuitive and emotional, and less logical and analytical. Instead of going A > B > C > D, designers may start at Q > D > K and end up at P. The logical thinker hires market researchers to describe how the world is; design thinking describes how the world could be.
David Butler, Coca-Cola’s vice president of global design, applies design thinking way beyond the design of Coke’s brand. “I love big, giant, enormous systems, no matter what they are,” he says. “In the past, design had been focused on straight forward problems: Come up with a drinking vessel, say. But now it was being asked so solve multipronged problems: How do we get clean drinking water? We’re moving from linear problems to wicked problems.”
Brown concludes by saying, “The design thinkers I have described here are not minimalist, esoteric members of an elite priesthood. They are creative innovators who can bridge the chasm between thinking and doing because they are passionately committed.”
July 1, 2009
My City is Better Than Your City
I was reading tweets in modern8′s new twitter account, when a link caught my attention regarding the city of Melbourne’s adoption of a new brand identity. The article indicated that the Melbourne brand suffered compared to Sydney’s, the better-recognized Australian city. The effort to raise public perception of Melbourne was reflected in a new logo for the city.
Of course, the whole of idea of cities branding themselves would have seemed preposterous 10 or 15 years ago. Not that cities haven’t always had a brand–because brands exist whether you manage them or not–but now we’ve got cities applying the principles of brand strategy, once reserved for commercial products and services, to the very neighborhood in which you live.
It may seem odd at first, yet cities are competitive just like that brand of cereal you had for breakfast. Cities compete for residents, tourist dollars and corporate location decisions. It only makes sense to manage municipal perception so you can affect the behavior of your target audience.
Salt Lake City’s new mayor, Ralph Becker, dumped the logo his predecessor, Rocky Anderson, had used on everything from business cards to meter maid vehicles. Becker returned to a previous seal-like identity featuring an image of the historic City and County building–in my mind, a vast improvement over the amateurish skyline logo used by Rocky.
I suspect neither Rocky’s or Becker’s identity was implemented with any strategy behind it–that is, asking what kind of message the city wants to send with its identity. Clearly Melbourne was striving for progressive modernity in its mark, rather than traditional, homespun values. For Salt Lake, it would be an interesting exercise to do the research and strategy and reflect it in a new city identity. It might be a challenge though, because the city is often divided along cultural and religious lines.
Other local municipalities have sought to improve their brand. South Salt Lake has recently engaged a firm to help the image of their city and distinguish it from their neighbor to the north. The shared name in fact, led to discussion on whether South Salt Lake should consider a name change. I’ve always liked the look of Murray City’s logo, created a few years ago, though it references smoke stacks that are now gone and I can’t help but wonder about the appropriateness of the reference.
While we have yet to be asked to brand a city, we’re confident we can.
March 16, 2009
Good Design is Always Good Business
When I graduated with my degree in graphic design, it was a different world. And I’m not talking about the digital divide. Working with computers or without them has nothing to do with creating ideas — the essential element of design. I’m talking about the change in the world’s acknowledgement and acceptance of good design as something valuable.
It’s been 35 years since IBM legend Thomas Watson, Jr. uttered the words “Good design design is good business” in a lecture at Wharton School of Business. The forward-thinking Watson, who hired designers like Paul Rand, Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarenin, though, was ahead of his time.
When I furnished my new house in 1985, I had to buy expensive European fixtures to find anything I liked. However, I recently replaced two bathroom faucets — and I bought them at Home Depot. (OK, I did have to special order them; they didn’t stock them on the floor.) And I can now find frames I like for the artwork I want to hang in the house, (and the few family pictures), at Target, whereas I used to have to get them custom made.
When I graduated, Newseek magazine didn’t publish issues entitled “Design Gets Real: How It’s Changing the Way We Work and Live”, or business magazines like Fast Company’s annual “Masters of Design” issue or Business Week’s article on “The Man Behind Apple’s Design Magic”. The Harvard Business Review claims “the MFA is the new MBA.”
Design is hot. And valuable as a strategic perception-changing tool — or at least it was. During a recession it’s not surprising to hear designers talking about the value of what they do. Companies right now may be less likely to invest in non-mission-critical activities like design. And yet there is likely no better way to look more successful than you really are. Branding guru Marc Gobé said, “I believe design is the most potent expression of a brand and that ultimately bringing powerful ideas to life through design is the best way to create a lasting link [with] the customer.”
February 14, 2009
Brand Architecture
The term “brand architecture” may sound like a mixture of widely divergent disciplines. Actually, establishing a strong firm identity and position is often related to successful brand architecture.
There are two different types of brand architecture: corporate-dominant, and product-dominant. Some companies successfully mix the two using corporate endorsement of different product brands. Corporate-dominant architecture is found more often in business-to-business companies, with fewer numbers of products and clear target markets. Product-dominant architecture is more consumer-based.
We have recently been engaged by a local company that designs and manufactures a wide consumer product line, with different target audiences–from Nordstrom’s to Sam’s Club. In our Perception Branding d5 Process we identified the differences in the products, the buying motivation and retail experience. Not surprisingly, the company maintains a distinctive brand differentiation between their three retail divisions. The products that sell at Nordstrom are physically different and separately branded from those which sell at Rite-Aid. For this client we will maintain a product-dominant architecture to maintain the physical and perceptual differences between different retailers.
Last year we created a new identity for Albion, an international company based in Clearfield, Utah. Albion has three distinct markets that are so independent that customers in each are best left unaware of the other two. Our brand audit revealed disparate and struggling product brands fighting for attention, while the corporate brand became lost in the mix. The direction for our strategy became clear: we created a corporate-dominant structure, even though the target markets are widely individual.
As indicated by Phillip Kotler in B2B Brand Management, “A key element of success is the framing of a harmonious and consistent brand architecture across countries and product lines, defining the number of levels and brands at each level. Of particular importance is the relative emphasis placed on corporate brands as opposed to product level brands.”
December 12, 2008
(B)2B or not 2B
Some of the world’s strongest brands are B2B. Companies like IBM, FedEx, Boeing, General Electric and Oracle are all primarily business-to-business brands as opposed to business-to-consumer. Despite these well-known names, brand management in typical B2B companies is rarely as well executed as it is in the typical B2C company. Business-to-business organizations rely more often on functional descriptions of their capabilities whereas business-to-consumer companies are more likely to emphasize emotional experiences that lead to brand preference.
Making a sale in a B2B company is a more complex interaction than in a B2C company and yet purchasing departments are run by people who make choices based on symbolic as well as pragmatic attributes. After all, your brand is nothing more than a person’s gut feeling about your company. As Waldemar Pfoertsch, professor of business at Pforzheim (Germany) University said, “Successful B2B brand communication requires sales strategies that incorporate brand values that appeal to the social and psychological as well as the rational concerns of the different organizational buyers involved.”
B2B companies often assume their prospects are inherently interested in the products or services they offer, when in fact most prospects are really only interested in a solution to their problems. A B2B brand strategy must address the specific needs of the customer, learned through customer interaction and research.
Fortunately it is usually much less expensive to implement a defined brand strategy in the B2B space than in B2C, because the message is directed toward a more specific audience. Most of modern8′s clients are B2B. Our core competencies are brand strategy and design, which fit perfectly with the needs of B2B.
November 30, 2008
You Have More Than One Identity
We are a brand design agency. The value of our company’s services–in fact for our whole industry–is based upon this single truth: image is a perception, not necessarily a fact. Buyers cannot know in a factual sense all there is to know about your company. What they don’t know, they might assume with or without any real evidence. These so-formed perceptions are influential to a buyer, just as real factors based on hard evidence are, and may well determine the buying decision.
Phillip Kotler of the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University tells us that usually a company has several different identities: the communicated, actual, conceived, desired and ideal identity. First, you need to know where you are—your actual identity (1), in order to find a way to your desired identity (2). Preferably, the desired identity is also the ideal identity (3). However, what you’re communicating (4) and how people conceive it (5) can be two very different things.
Your identity is made visible in your brand image: your company name, logo, tagline and brand story. Your brand identity is, of course, much more. It is a long-lasting strategic asset that represents the timeless values of your brand and exists in the minds of your customer. Your brand image (names, logos, taglines) is a tactical asset that can change from time to time.
Potential customers, who have never had any contact with your company, may still possess a strong image of you. Without a purchasing experience, image may decide whether they use you at all. That’s why one of the most important goals in brand management is to reduce complexity. Inasmuch as buyers cannot know all there is about your company, and you can’t be all things to all people, it is essential to concentrate your brand message to what is critically important.
October 25, 2008
Vuja de: Seeing With Fresh Eyes
Last week I attended “Gain” in NYC, the business and design conference sponsored by the AIGA. Tom Kelley, general manager of IDEO, a global design consultancy, served masterfully as moderator of the event. Kelley introduced a speaker commenting on the idea of how we stop seeing things; how we often overlook the obvious. We go though life screening out things we see as distractions to our immediate objective.
The art of anthropology teaches that observation is the key to understanding and an important part of innovation and design. Simple observation may not be enough, however.
Marcel Proust, the celebrated French novelist said “the real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.” Kelley names this idea by turning around the more familiar word and calling it “Vuja de”, meaning, “the sense of seeing something for the first time, even if you have actually witnessed it many times before.” When you go out to observe in anthropologist mode, you should aspire to Vuja de, the opposite of Deja vu.
As noted in the Fast Company magazine blog, “If you want to find untapped innovation opportunities, watch the world around you with “fresh eyes.” Go for a sense of vuja de, and then ask yourself why things are the way they are. Why do people wear a watch when their cell phone keeps perfect time? Why don’t movie theaters sell soundtracks as you exit the film? Why do we all have answering machines to record messages from telephone callers, but nothing to record a message from someone who stops by our home or office?”
August 8, 2008
Marketing-Driven or Design-Driven
Years ago we were working with a marketing executive who managed to repeat the same phrase in every single meeting we attended. She would always work in the phrase “marketing-driven solution”, often in the form of a question. Was our proposal a marketing driven solution? What about the headline? It got to be a joke around the office. Does this color look marketing-driven? This paper stock? What about that typeface?
That was fifteen years ago. Today, design-driven companies are the topics of conversation. I.D. (International Design) magazine published a list of the 40 most “design-driven companies in America”. Obvious selections were on the list: Apple, Gillette, IBM, Patgonia, 3M. But as business management guru Tom Peters says, “More interesting to me, fully half the companies were service companies. Amazon.com made the list. So did Bloomberg. Also: Federal Express. CNN. Disney. Martha Stewart…even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” (Note to local readers: that’s the actual quote.)
Coca-Cola’s Vice-President for Design, David Butler, avoids using the word “design” as much as possible. Though he has written up a 30-page manifesto laying out a design strategy for the company, when he is meeting with manufacturing people, he’ll say, “How can we make the can feel colder, longer?” Or “How can we make the cup easier to hold?” He talks about the benefits of smart design in a language to which those he’s talking to can relate. According to Business Week magazine, this surreptitious approach seems to be working. The new Coke identity work won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions awards program in June.
Mohamed Samah, a design socio-psychologist said, “The design discipline itself is expanding beyond ‘form and look’ to include processes and business strategy in general. Organizations are using design as a tool to stimulate creativity and to foster innovation in the market”.
Successful marketing-driven companies are in fact design-driven companies, attested by the success of such divergent companies as Harley-Davidson, Target and Nike.
June 30, 2008
I’m a Designer
We just moved into a new building we share with other design professionals, specifically landscape architects on the floor above us and architectural planners below. We have clients who are architects and engineers, who by definition are also designers. Of course we’re graphic designers. Then there’s fashion, product and interior designers. In addition, those who create structured services and activities and the integrated systems of computers and other forms of technology, also call themselves designers. With the vast array of products and services in the contemporary world, one might wonder if there really is a discipline of design shared by all who conceive and plan such things. As Richard Buchanan, a design theorist said, “The scope of design appears to be so great, and the range of styles and other qualities of individual products within even one category so diverse, that the prospect for identifying a common discipline seem dim.”
There is a wide range of beliefs about what design is, how it should be practiced, for what purpose, and what we accomplish through it. Every year for the past 20, I have taught the history of graphic design at the University of Utah. The subject matter of the class is essentially a history of graphic design objects, the careers of the important designers and the development of the technologies used. We don’t really discuss what design is. It’s similar for all design histories.
Unlike other scientific pursuits, designers don’t discover things like natural laws or a natural process (excepting occasional unintentional discoveries). Generally a designer invents something: an object, a new use, a possible application. Discovery and invention are essentially different. As Richard Buchanan says, “Designers deal with matters of choice, with things that may be different than they are… Any authority for the designer comes from recognized experience and practical wisdom in dealing with such matters, but the designer’s judgment and the results of his or her decisions are open to questioning by the general public, as are all matters of public policy and personal action, where things may be other than they are.”
The use of techniques and processes that systematize the discipline of design help to explain and understand how designers achieve their results. Such thinking is the basis behind the modern8 Perception Branding 5d process. We use it to explain and systemize how our design solutions come to be, in a discipline that isn’t easily defined.
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