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Our annual edition of the modern8 T-shirt is a compilation of staff meeting doodles by our office manager Tara Smith. Her business card doesn’t say designer and she didn’t like the idea, but the design staff decided to override her objections. Printed in white on a gold (let's call it "modern8 yellow") American Apparel tee, we distributed them to our clients last week. If you didn't get one, let us know. For every other aspiring doodler, you can buy your own at the new modern8 Gallery Shop.
Typically we look back at this time of year and recap our greatest hits. Here's our take.
A typographic die cut conveys the theme of innovation on the cover of the sixth annual report we've created for NIC.
The history of the family-owned Young Electric Sign Company is told in a graphically rich Flash-based timeline that we added to the YESCO Web site.
We re-branded Guru Labs, following a strategic consultation that resulted in a new identity, nomenclature and marketing materials.
For the fourth year in a row, we were engaged to create the viewbook for Neumont University, the Salt Lake computer science school.
The modern8 Gallery has a new exhibit opening January 18th, featuring photographer/artist Josh Winegar and modern8 designer and landscape painter Russ Gray. / Wish to comment on what you read in the
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We have been engaged by a local architectural firm for brand strategy and identity development. While we were strategizing with the marketing director on factors that drive business development for architects, he explained to us the importance of experience and relationships. We asked which was more important in the minds of their clients. Is the accumulated experience of the firm, or are personal relationships more important?
The marketing director answered by diagramming the classic four squares with experience along one axis and relationships on the other. The best option is when you have project experience in addition to a client relationship. But lacking one or the other, relationships trump experience.
We like the diagrammatic approach, because it lets you visualize what you already know. You can literally map out perceptions. Whether it be the relative value of relationships vs. experience, or Stephen Covey's Urgency vs. Importance matrix, you can take a great deal of information and look at it all at once. It lets you position brands and brand attributes relative to others with the dimensions that customers use to distinguish them.
Take simple attributes like innovative vs. traditional, and younger vs. older. Treat each of these as an endpoint of an axis on a map. Now consider well-known brand categories, like automobiles or soft drinks, for example. Position the relative importance of each attribute for different brands. Where would Coke be positioned vs. Red Bull? What about Volvo vs. Honda?
Choose the axes and quadrants appropriate for insights in your own industry and map your own brand against your competitors. Are there ways to position your company differently from others? Consider mapping different attributes, benefits and values that can be compared and contrasted. Small/large, local/national, expensive/inexpensive and many other attributes can be used to distinguish one brand against another.
Having successfully completed a new identity for ARSgroup we were engaged to create logos for two ARSgroup divisions—ARSgreen and ARSentertainment. These divisions were created to target two very distinct markets. ARSgreen was created to help clients understand consumer demand for green alternative products, like sellers of compact florescent bulbs, while ARSentertainment was created to focus on consumer demand for movies and games. The logos are unique enough to appeal to the individual audiences while retaining enough of the parent brand's equity to fit into a unified identity system.
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