Category Archives: Design

#Reverb10 Day 27: Ordinary Joy

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Note: This is the twenty-seventh in a month-long exercise called Reverb10, where bloggers reflect on the year before and think towards the year ahead. The idea is to post daily, based on the day’s prompts; let’s see how well I do.

Prompt: Ordinary joy. Our most profound joy is often experienced during ordinary moments. What was one of your most joyful ordinary moments this year?

Most of my moments of greatest joy come from either learning something new, or from recognizing the answer to a problem that’s been sticking me. Examples:

  • The moment I finally finished my first notebook prototype and realized that I’d not only solved a problem that I’d been having for years (wanting one notebook for both personal and work notes), but I had something that could be turned into a side business;
  • Learning LessCSS this year, and knowing that it would change how I design websites – for the better – forever.
  • Seeing a particularly sexy bit of code, and knowing exactly what it does.
  • Helping a client discover what it is they’re really doing, who would benefit most from it, and helping them develop a positioning strategy and brand that connects the two.

Sometimes it takes some work to find the joy, but it’s always there. It’s part of what I do, and one of the many reasons why I love what I do.

The difference between a logo and a brand; or, why design is like dating

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Recently, I got an e-mail from a fellow designer asking me (and a few other friends in the design community) to answer three seemingly simple questions:

  • What is the logo?
  • What is the identity?
  • What is the brand?

One would think that, as a designer who has built her career on knowing the difference among these three, that there would be an easy answer to this. Interestingly, even among seasoned designers, this is a tricky question to answer in a soundbite-sized format, neatly organized into bullet points.

Logo and identity are often used interchangeably, but the key distinction is that a company’s logo is just that: a logo. It is a specific combination of color, type and symbol that, when done well, has been carefully chosen to accomplish the specific goal of getting the attention of the audience that your company is looking to reach.

Your business’s identity is the visual extension of that logo into every piece of collateral that your prospects touch. A well-thought-out identity system carries the intention behind the design of the company logo and transfers it into colors, fonts, photo and logo treatments that give the company an opportunity for visual variety while maintaining consistency across every prospect touchpoint.

The brand, however, is something much deeper than that. Whether you’re a solopreneur or a Fortune-500 company, your brand is the combined perception of every experience your customers have with your business. It’s the look of your ads, the copy on your website, it’s the service that your customers receive and the morale of your staff. It’s how easy, or how difficult, it is to work with you. It’s what makes some people stick by you for decades, while others walk away after the first experience and never come back.

But here’s the thing that often gets missed: all three are equally important.

Say you hire a design firm to do an amazing logo for you. You pay top dollar for something that’s truly astounding and speaks perfectly to the true value that you bring to your customers. But rather than continuing that investment into a cohesive identity system, you decide to take this amazing logo and throw it into your collateral without any sense of consistency. Or you pop it into a cheap template to make your website, or brochure. You may have a great logo, but there’s no sense of a consistent identity, and no sense of why the customer should trust your product.

Or maybe you do have a great logo and identity system. Everything looks slick, and beautiful, and makes sense to the audience it needs to reach. But when the customer actually takes the leap and buys what you’re selling, the experience doesn’t match up to the gloss. FedExKinko’s has a great identity – it’s simple, clean, and speaks well to the business customers and college students that they cater to. However, the stores (at least in New England) are notorious for being dirty and understaffed to the point where it’s hard to tell some days if anyone actually works there.

Contrast that with a brand like Starbucks. Say what you will about them, but every experience I’ve had with them the baristas have been friendly and efficient, and they’ve made the process of getting my morning coffee exactly what it should be – a quick cup of really good coffee so that I can be ready for whatever I’m on my way to. That, plus their relentless commitment to various social programs, makes them my coffee of choice when I can’t find my favorite independent coffeehouse.

Looking at it another way, the logo-identity-brand triangle is like dating. You see a product on the shelf, or visit a website, and you’re intrigued. It’s well dressed, adorable, friendly. You get curious to know what it would be like in your house. Or what it would taste like. So you pick it up, you bring it home – and it’s not at all as advertised. The “fine Belgian Chocolate” in the elegant packaging tastes like fake vanilla and pain. The gorgeous organic cotton blouse gets stained and stretched out beyond recognition the first time you wash it. You’re sad, disappointed, and never buy from the company again. But still, you think: “it just looked so promising!”

Your identity is what makes people buy. It’s how they get to know you, and how they make the decision to feel you out. But it’s up to the brand to create the relationship, and convince them to stick around. Have a miracle face cream that will revolutionize the industry? Pay attention to the packaging. This is something that needs to stay on someone’s bathroom counter, and it’s much harder to make the case that you’re selling a high-end, luxury product if the packaging doesn’t match the promise. But once they get it home, it’s up to the product to convince the customer to buy it again.

This situation is especially true for what I like to call “spur of the moment” foods: desserts, chocolate, alcohol, sauces, snacks. While there are situations where the customer is going to the store with a specific intention to pick up a particular brand, most of these purchases are made without a sense of what brand they’re looking for, or even that they’re looking for the product. The average shopper doesn’t go to a store looking for a specific brand of chocolate unless they’re baking with it. They buy the chocolate because they saw the packaging on a display and said, “wow, that looks really tasty. I need to try that!” It’s the experience they have when they get it home that tells them whether they want to buy that chocolate again.

The lesson: No amount of pretty packaging can make up for a lousy product or service. But having the right packaging up front gets you in the door – from there, it’s up to you to convince your customers to keep you around.

On Making

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This week, as I was sitting down for a chat with Jeff Freedman, founder of Small Army, he asked me one of the most interesting questions I’ve heard in a while. We had been talking about the agency’s unique approach to advertising, and the challenges inherent in getting clients and designers to think beyond features, benefits and pictures and into the story behind what we’re doing. I shared my experience as a theatre major in high school and college, and how that shaped my approach to design and collaboration – and the ways I used that experience to help clients make that shift in thinking.

Then he asked, “What do you like more – the art, or working with clients?”

My instant answer was, “Depends on the day, really.” I followed up with a couple of clarifying thoughts, but I don’t know that any of them really pinned down what I love about what I do. What I really love is the act of making. How I make depends on the day, and what I’m making.

Some days, I’m taking a deep dive into code, or working with a client to evolve their web strategy. Other days, I’m playing with colored pencils and bookmaking supplies. Still others, I’m helping a client think through their business’s vision so we can figure out how to communicate it. It all feeds the same thing – helping someone make something that’s worth making.

What’s been interesting to observe, particularly in the last few months, is how often the methods I use for making shift – and how important it is to let them shift.

Right now, I’m on a letterpress and bookmaking kick; the sheer physicality of it appeals to me, as does the notion of taking raw/found materials (metal type, paper, etc.) and turning them into something beautiful. But I’m also thinking through a strategy for upgrading the zen kitchen’s site to Drupal 7, and restructuring the content to make up for 6 years of throwing way too much into it.

Both of these things require a very different set of skills, but there are certain commonalities. Both need a certain amount of careful planning up front, but they also need room for things to “just happen.” There’s also a heavy amount of craft in both. While bookmaking is much closer to what you’d commonly think of as “crafting,” working with Drupal, and the web in general, requires an intense level of craftsmanship to do it well. With the push towards HTML5, and the increasing prevalence of the mobile web, the need for craft in web design will only intensify.

So yes. Short answer: what I love depends on the day. Slightly longer answer: what I love is the act of making – how I make depends on what I’m making, but it all feeds the love.

By the way, I’ve been uploading some of my letterpress and bookmaking fun on Flickr. You should check it out if you’re interested.

Crowdsourcing vs. Cheap Logo Sites

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This afternoon, I got into a bit of a heated Twitter debate with logo guru (and online buddy) Jeff Fisher. The debate centered around the idea of “crowdsourcing,” which Jeff uses to refer to sites like 99designs, LogoWorks, etc. Jeff believes, quite rightly, that these sites result in ineffective work that does a serious disservice to the client. To quote him,

“Too often [the] process fails to effectively include participation of end-user | client | organization | cause.”

“Crowdsourcing is so often about simply voting for ‘prettiest’ without considering concepts, [i.e.] client’s real needs, desires and goals.”

All of these points make perfect sense when talking about sites like LogoWorks. There, and on other sites like it, companies pay a small amount of money (usually less than $500) and a multitude of designers provide a bunch of different “concepts” for your logo. The problems with this are multiple, and many were listed by Jeff in his arguments:

  • Most of the “designers” are inexperienced. The vast majority of design professionals would never participate in a site like this, for various reasons.
  • Too many options leads to a lack of clear focus, which isn’t good for the foundation of your brand.
  • The process doesn’t leave room to understand the real needs of the client, or its audience. Effective design is significantly more than just “slapping a logo together.” It involves significant effort to uncover the real needs of your audience, and to find the most effective way to reach them. When the client/designer relationship works best, the designer is there just as much for insight into strategy and the motivations of the client’s audience as they are for visual communication. In many cases, I’ve even helped my clients figure out their long-term business vision and solve operational and marketing issues as part of the design process. You don’t get that from LogoWorks.

So really, there’s no argument from me that cheap logo sites are negative. The issue I have is quite simple, and largely semantic: I don’t consider them “crowdsourcing.” I consider them spec work.

There’s a subtle, but important, distinction here. Spec work is where a designer’s talent, ideas and skills are put to work for a client that often doesn’t understand what really goes into good design. The idea is that you, the designer, put your time and effort into something with an unclear objective, and if the client “likes it,” you might get paid. This is not only bad, it’s *stupid.*

Crowdsourcing, increasingly, involves people who want to make a difference – and they do that by sharing and voting on ideas that might solve a specific problem. Examples of this type of crowdsourcing include Good Magazine’s Pepsi Refresh Project, and the recently launched openIDEO, which I’ve been happily participating in. This type of crowdsourcing, often organized more around philanthropy and the spread of good ideas, differs from cheap logo sites in several important ways:

  • It has a set of specific guidelines that govern entries. The Pepsi Refresh project collects ideas in specific categories. openIDEO posts specific challenges, geared towards a social issue, that are sponsored by a specific organization or person who is invested in a solution.
  • There’s a specific process that’s overseen by an experienced panel of curators. These curators filter through the discussion and pick out the most common elements of a challenge, to distill it into ideas that will actually work.
  • In some cases, it supplements work that the entrants are already doing. For example, my buddies at Re-Nourish submitted themselves to Pepsi’s Refresh project to get funding for their mostly volunteer operation. Although they didn’t win (they came in at #28, which was still mighty impressive), it didn’t actually prevent them from seeing the benefits of their work. Additionally, my participation in openIDEO is completely volunteer, and my concepts were born from over a decade of thought and activism about the subject they were dealing with (getting more kids to eat and appreciate fresh food). While it would be amazing to get paid to work with IDEO, the thoughts I have shared are ones that I had anyway, and not getting paid won’t stop me from working on these issues in my own way.

In all of these cases, crowdsourcing is providing an incredibly beneficial service. And my worry is, as more of these types of innovative social-innovation-through-social-media projects surface, how many be dismissed because of the negative stigma given to “crowdsourcing” by designers complaining about cheap logo sites?

Why recipe sites shouldn’t be in Flash

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It is, officially, canning and pickling season. Every year for the last four, I’ve spent most weekends in August canning a variety of pickles, salsas and other nummies to preserve the massive amount of produce that comes out of New England in late summer. One of my favorite recipes is from Hubert Keller’s terrific show on PBS, and it’s a sweet pickle with a bunch of different summer veggies. I discovered this one last year and made about a half dozen pints with the last of my farm share. I have yet to bring it somewhere where it doesn’t disappear five minutes after it’s opened.

Recently, a friend of mine had an abundance of zucchini (like you do) and wondered what to do with it – so I wanted to send her the recipe for Hubert’s excellent mixed pickle. I always make it with zucchini, as well as small carrots, radishes, white turnips, pearl onions and cauliflower. Should be easy enough, right?

Unfortunately, Hubert Keller’s website is done entirely in Flash.

There are several reasons why this is a phenomenally bad idea. For all the benefits that Flash can bring when well executed, on its best day Flash brings with it three important and tragic flaws:

  1. It forces all of your content into a specific height on the screen, which forces you to use scrollable boxes for any content that is longer than your screen height;
  2. Scrollable boxes in Flash don’t behave the way that we’re used to online. Rather than being able to use our fingers on the trackpad (for Mac) or the little roller thing on our mouse, you have to actually click on the scrollbar and manually drag it down – a process that is almost always unreliable.
  3. The entire site exists as a single movie – which means (and this is the most important issue) you can’t bookmark a single page for later reference.

In practical terms, this meant that, in order to get the recipe for my friend, I had to send her to his site, and tell her to navigate to the PBS show, then Recipes, then scroll down to the episode on Charcuterie, so that she could then download a PDF of the actual recipe.
And, I had to apologize to her for the fact that music would be playing the entire time she was doing this. And the fact that, because it was Flash, there was no way to actually just search for the recipe.

This experience brings me back to a fundamental point – and one that I rant about often. The first questions that should be answered before starting a web project should always be these three:

  1. Who are the people coming to your site?
  2. What are they coming there for?
  3. How are they used to finding that information?

If you don’t answer those three questions before you even touch things like what it should look like or what types of functionality you want, this is the kind of thing that happens. And you don’t want that to happen.

By the way, should you actually want the recipe, I’ve shared my adaptation on the recipe blog.