By Will McInnes

BBC iPlayer and Apple Inc. - brand frenemies or just enemies?

The BBC is a powerful brand with fantastic heritage and global distribution.  Fair enuff.

Even so, to take the name iPlayer for their incredibly important and well executed on demand service was a bold, BOLD move considering that Apple is the cult aspirational consumer technology brand [1] and has established the style of the i[insertproductname] in its brand architecture.

I just find that really interesting and wonder what the view was from Jobs' Cupertino HQ, a famously controlling organisation led by a famously controlling man, well willing to use the strong arm of the law in its dealings.

 

It would be wonderful to have been a fly on the wall as the naming discussions opened up. I can well imagine the smiles on the faces of the BBC people as they played with the idea of going head to head. Perhaps they even spoke with Apple - it's certainly not impossible, the Beeb having an incredible ecosystem of global partners in its various supply chains and dealings.

Just an interesting contrast, this: The Beeb, not for profit, generally loved in a kind of benign and slightly straightlaced way and held in high regard around the world, vs. Apple, intercosmic kings of branding and foaming consumer tech desire, and unofficial owners of the letter i...

[1] Yes, Superbrands says Google is the top brand but in my option it's not an aspirational brand - it's a brand I love and believe in (and trust is such a key word for Google going forward) but it's not aspirational like Apple is in that Californian, luxury big ticket way. Oh no. Different territory entirely.

Business cards, branding and design: in conversation...

Via email, Tom said:

Will and I had the best feedback yet about our new brand. The marketing director of XXXXXX in the uk (very big US telecoms company) said that our business cards were the very best he had seen for a long time – in his top 1% of all time. He loved the tick boxes and space to write on the back as it represents dialogue – that we came to meet him and had our say, and that he could have his say. He totally got the brand essence and it really backed up the message that we went to the meeting to deliver (social media goodness!)

In reply Josh said:

Does this come as a shock? This rebrand project has a been a success because it has been given the correct amount of time to breathe and develop.

It is also the ethos that underpins this company which has steered and inspired the visual language and art direction. A brand should always reflect the personality of the organisation.

Design should design itself.

Awesome flash sequence

http://www.andreaswannerstedt.se/session/

(Again, via StumbleUpon...!)

Neil Duerden, Another incredible illustrator

Love this guy's style: amazingly cool - http://www.neilduerden.co.uk/

Nice little agency website

http://www.captainsofindustry.com/

Things to like:

• Floating flyer guy that springs wings and floats around
• Team pages - (you know we recommend this!)
• Manifesto

Things to not like:

• Page load time
• Page LOAD TIME
• PAGE LOAD TIME grrrrrrrrr

Nice use of flash player on kindness' new website

When animations on websites took ages to load or interrupted us on our journey they were bad.

Now broadband is so prevalent and website design has matured to understand where and how to incorporate multimedia in an enhancing way there are some websites with cool use of multimedia.

Kindness, a creative agency based in Brighton, UK, has a website with zero content (bad), headings that look like navigation items but aren't (bad) and a wicked little showreel of their multimedia work, which you can play through an embedded Flash player (good!).

Kindness is part of the Lace Group, and so lots of their work involves movies and DVDs and stuff, which makes for a wicked showreel. Like it.

BE REAL - team bios, another superb find

YESS!!!!!!!

So love it, SO LOVE IT, when I find humanity on the web.

Starchy corporate management team bios - embarrassing self-conscious grins or hard-men looks, with a 'career history' that's been doctored to overblow days gone by - bin them!

This is a great team page.
It's real.
It's engaging.
It's cool.
I'd love to work with these people.

[You may huff and puff and say, yeah but agency types can do that. I know those of us in creative spheres are afforded more space to be ourselves, but why is that right and fair, and why wouldn't a bank or law firm with that approach be sought out?]

Illustration on the web

I think original illustration - in crude terms 'drawings' rather than 'photos' - can work fantastically well on the web.

The Internet and websites can be flat and quite cold, lacking real life fuzz and humanity. This is why we very often recommend our clients put their people at the heart of their websites and email communications (and they soon see the power of this in the analytics).

Similarly, illustrations and sketchy drawings can really humanise and bring warmth and proximity to websites. 

Examples:

TDG is a 'competitor' of ours, in the sense they do similar things in a similar part of the country (more on my view of competitors), and I absolutely love how they've used a 'handwriting' style for sub-headings, and the 'drawn' map for directions to their office.

Moving away from this kind of sketching type of illustration is super-club-brand Pacha's website, which uses really a nice embossed illustration design for background, enhanced with fluttery Flash butterflies (note: not to my taste, but a good example of the genre, I should point out.

For this reason I have been suggesting to my uncle, a caricaturist and professional illustrator all his life for people like The Radio Times, Guinness and innumerable others, that there is a market for pictures of people for their websites. 

The corporate bio with its head and shoulder pic is tired, cliched and often badly executed, with the team member looking uncomfortable or phoney. What about a caricature for the braver executive team looking to communicate their personalities via the web?

As an experiment I asked my uncle to provide an example by way of a caricature of me and have added it to the top left of my blog.

The question is: does it work? What do you think of this technique?

Web 2.0 logos parody

Web 2.0 is an expression for a new age of the web that causes a lot of debate and controversy amongst industry insiders and the digital / web community at large.

I wrote in brief about Web 2.0 here, but my views are evolving (I'm starting to hate the bubble-ness and dotcom dejavu of some of it).

However, whether you agree with Web 2.0 as a movement / expression or not, there is something substantial in the mix, which is the current design mode for 'Web 2.0 services'.

Matthew pointed me to these designs on Flickr (itself, a Web 2.0 service) which parody the Web 2.0 branding, applying them to existing brands.

What interests me is picking out the actual trends buried in these designs - the qualities that do make up a Web2 brand, and whether it's even a nice style or not. It's quite candy-ish - pastel shades and youthful, funky treatments of the designs (reflections, gradiated textures to give 3D-ness). I think it's fine for consumer services for younger people, but feel these lack substance and weight of a trustworthy brand - maybe that's the brainwashing of tradition  speaking, but it's my gut reaction to these sparkly (admittedly parodied) designs

Do you like this style?

Web design: in honour of BUTTONS!

Whenever I do usability testing where I ask real people to use real websites to watch how those websites REALLY PISS THOSE PEOPLE OFF, I am reminded of the incredible value of Buttons!!!

Check this mother of a button from Flickr out:

Sounds mad or overly simplistic to you, maybe. But users (e.g. 'real people like you and me') will say things like 'I just want to click a 'buy now' button' or 'where is the button to go ahead? I don't want to read all of this marketing crap!'.

Buttons matter, people. Really, they do. Users/real people/people with money WANT you to put it on a plate for them. They are lazy, they want it on a goddam friggidy plate! (And why not?).

So I love buttons.
I bang on about them all the time.
And I religiously bookmark good buttons when I see them on my web travels.

Here's some more from Garrett Dimon's website:

They want my cursor to caress them, good buttons - they just beg for some good wholesome clickable loving. That's why they exist. Harness the power of the button, for you cannot resist it!!!