A logo is a point of entry into a brand.

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In the 70’s and 80’s branding was of a very different nature to what it is now – a company’s brand was its corporate identity. However, as time has progressed so has branding. The language used by companies has evolved to mean that readers gain a verbal experience as well as the obvious visuals. Users are now seeing, touching, holding watching and hearing a brand – it has evolved into a very complex matrix.

Phases

There are four main stages involved in designing brand identity:

1. Conducting research
2. Designing identity
3. Creating touch points
4. Managing assets – corporate identity control

1. Conducting Research

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1. Clarify Vision, strategy, goals and values
2. Research stake holder’s needs and perceptions
3. Conduct marketing, legal and language audits
4. Interview key management
5. Evaluate existing brands

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A great example of brand values and motives and how they can change is that of BP or British Petroleum. Up until recently, BP had very little incentive to be seen as a moral and caring company by the general public. Its main concern was to maximise profits to the detriment of its rivals whilst boosting production. Times have now changed and knowledge of renewable energy sources and carbon footprints have come to the forefront of public attention – BP has had to change its strategy.

There has been a massive effort made to become perceived as a “Green” company. How green an oil/petrol firm can be I think is debatable!!

Brand Loyalty Ladder

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Five Stages Of Communication:

• Unawareness
• Awareness
• Comprehension
• Conviction
• Action

At this point I feel it is appropriate to have a look at No Logo – a book by Naomi Klein. It digs deep into the world of fallen brands – Nike’s Swoosh now being associated with child labour in china and Apple becoming the new Microsoft.

No Logo, an incisive and insightful report from the frontlines of mounting backlash against multinational corporations, explains why some of the most revered brands in the world are finding themselves on the wrong end of a bottle of spray paint, a computer hack, or an international anti-corporate campaign.

No Logo

Values continued…

Values are very important for our major project and it will be important for our branding to promote appropriate values to improve customer relations. What are your company values? This was not a question you would have asked a few years ago.

Let’s take Innocent Smoothies as an example:

The website offers a number of features designed to promote their family orientated brand. With normal navigation of:

1. Products
2. About
3. Partners
4. Future

Replaced by enticing links such as:

1. Things we make
2. Us
3. Family
4. Bored

Immediately upon reading this we have an idea that there is a caring and personal agenda behind this firm and that they are not too formal in how they advertise to customers. The site also outlines Innocent’s ethical side. They do not kid their customers – each bottle is made out of 50% recycled products. Rather than trying to kid the customer, they are honest about trying to constantly improve this number.

We sure aren’t perfect, but we’re trying to do the right thing.

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2. Designing Identity

1. Visualise the future
2. Brainstorm the idea
3. Design the brand identity
4. Develop a tagline
5. Explore applications
6. Finalise brand architecture
7. Present visual strategy

Taglines

Taglines should be imperative, descriptive, superlative, provocative and specific. They need to be not only short, but differentiated from the competition as well as obviously being unique.

A great example of an extremely successful strap line is that of HSBC – the world’s local bank. This works well on so many levels. Customers are given a sense that HSBC actually cares about communities rather that world domination or unparalleled profits. Everyone can relate to the word “local,” so in using it as a crucial part of a corporate identity is a very shrewd move.

Brand Marks

There are a number of different brand marks out there. Having taken a look through some of Paul Rand’s work I feel I have developed a better understanding of the area. I find my self drawn more consistently towards word marks than forms such as abstract symbol marks.

Paul Rand was a well-known American graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs. He was one of the originators of the Swiss Style of graphic design. He designed many posters and corporate identities, including the logos for IBM, UPS and ABC. Rand died of cancer in 1996.

Paul Rand

3. Creating Touch Points

1. Finalise Identity design
2. Develop look and feel
3. Prioritise and design applications
4. Design programmer
5. Establish brand architecture

Touch points are something I hadn’t really considered for my brand until Chris and Nicklas mentioned it in last weeks lecture. After some discussions I have come to the conclusion that it is the small things I can do that will add the most significant touches to my branding experience for Golf NI.

Touch points can range from the simplest items like free pens and pencils (no need for a massive budget) to Multi million pound investments like the Hanso Foundation, part of the “Lost Experience.”

The fact that the producers of TV show Lost were so willing to fork out millions of dollars to create a fake organisation with the sole purpose of improving the viewer’s experience shows the level that top companies will go to with touch points. The advert outlined in the You Tube video mentioned above, went out several times during the advertising breaks of the show. There are a number of comical phone calls made by unsuspecting listeners available to listen to here.

4. Managing Assets

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1. Develop launch strategy and plan
2. Launch internally
3. Launch externally
4. Develop standards and guidelines
5. Nurture brand champions

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Asset management plays a huge role in any business never mind successful branding. Chris outlined the steps above as a strategy for implementing management of assets correctly. Developing a strategy for launching a brand is crucial to success, as everything carried out will revolve around this plan. It is important to have in house testing first with a number of selected users to iron out initial problems and bugs; however it will be nearly impossible to eliminate all of the problems before you hit the open market – there are always unforeseen circumstances.

Standards and guidelines will be important for continued success, allowing a consistent pattern to evolve around the branding. Finally, brand champions will need to be cared for carefully to reap great success in the market.

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MarkBoulton.co.uk is a great example of how to use both colour and typography very effectively. Mark uses colour on this site to indicate the importance of the content displayed. I think that this technique is slowly replacing the traditional uses of things like bold, italic, underline and larger text as a method of information emphasis.

His book – Web Standards Creativity – was recommended to us and after reading a few reviews on it, I have now purchased it from Amazon. let’s hope it doesn’t disappoint!!

Colour alone can be a very effective tool in web design. Other than what I have talked about above, it can be used effectively in a number of other ways:

• Categorise sections
• Compliment the sites layout
• Add emphasis – warnings and alerts
• Promote added bonuses and extras
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Sometimes colour doesn’t have to be used at all. There are a number of very effective Black and White sites out there as well as those that use colour very sparingly.

With all the talk of FlickR, delicious and twitter in last weeks lecture, I think it is about time I got on board with them. Having never used them before, I am going to concentrate on getting them up and running on this blog over the next few days.

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With the development of Golf Royalty Silverado move ever progressing, I decided to have a look at a number of content management systems this week. I feel I require one to produce a site capable of controlling the large amount of information the site will be hosting. Content management systems will enable me to embed a number of dynamic features to boost the sites functionality as well as adding some quirky features to try and promote repeat visitors.

Some of the key features of Golf NI will be:

• Easy creation of new web pages and articles by administrative users
• Ability to edit pages as results come in
• Manage dynamic content such as RSS Feeds
• Publish articles on courses, competitions and results in a well organised fashion

Golf Royalty will need to host a multitude of different media. I feel that using a content management system will allow any user to upload these as they are produced from any location without the need for special software. With golf being such a vast sport both in Ireland and worldwide, I want users to be able to submit image media, audio compilations, video and web content with ease. If this process becomes too complex or time consuming, they will simply move elsewhere.

There are a number of elements I will also need to allow for:

• Setting access rights to content to allow fellow administrators to have different roles
• Creating a set layout so that any submitted content will automatically follow pre designated outlines

I have decided to have a mini review of some appropriate Open Source systems available to me and I hope to decide on an appropriate system to select and begin design, development and implementation.

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Mambo

Simply managed content sites would be easily created with Mambo and would act as a great base to create Golf Royalty. One of the main advantages that I can see is that very little training will be required to configure the system to my needs.

I have discovered some good sites that have been built using Mambo and they look promising, although I am concerned that they have that “template” style appearance and the freedom to style the site may not be high enough to meet my needs.

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• Porshe Brazil: I like this sites clean and easy navigation. The design is kept very simple with allows the imagry, Porsche’s main selling point on the site, to stand out clearly.
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  : This is what I mean when I talk about the template appearance. This site is full of blocks and lines and for me it doesn’t hold any great design features of note.

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A great feature that is readily available is the “out of the box” PDF printing. This would be a nice touch to have as it would mean that all articles I or other administrators write will be downloadable in a print ready PDF format.

There are however a number of problems I can see with Mambo. The definition of user roles lacks the freedom of change that I think I will require for Golf Royalty setup. Versioning is something I hadn’t really considered but is a problem a number of people have found. Being able to return to an earlier version is chronic or irreversible if changes are made. The interface for administrators is also very complex and I think this could pose problems in the future if relatively inexperienced users want to become part of the Golf Royalty setup.

Something outlined in the two example sites above is the template like appearance and it seems difficult to alter this without a strong understanding of PHP. This doesn’t daunt me; however it may pose early problems if there are elements that I do not understand.

Joomla!

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I have had a bit of experience with Joomla! in the summer of 2008 when I completed a few demo sites for a Garden Centre. I like how the CMS works and the back end isn’t overly complex. There is freedom to include external elements from AJAX

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and mootools which has obvious benefits, like adding simple and clean animation. This is a major plus as it could make the normally limited CMS appearance stand out from the crowd.

There is also great scope to implement my good knowledge of CSS to “make the site my own.” There are freely available tutorials out there that take you through the CSS methods used in Joomla! and, knowing the benefits of CSS, this is a major plus.

The freedom to edit, position and style all the elements of a Joomla! site is appealing but the some of the everyday tasks like adding an article are overly complex in the back end administration side. To counteract this, there are a number of extentions available for download that allow users to edit content directly from their desktop, rather than through a web browser. This is another obvious plus.

One of the key aspects of my site will be the creation of an easy to use and glitch free forum, where golfers from around the country can meet to discuss the hot topics. There is a great add on for Joomla! called Simplest Forum which should allow me to seamlessly embed the forum on my site. This is also fully customisable with CSS.

A couple of Joomla! examples I have came across are:

• Senso Interiors: A very clean and sophisticated site with minimal design elements. I think it works well and promotes the unique furniture sold by the company.
• LA Weekly Shrink psp : Although there is far too much content available on the main index page, this goes to show what is capable for a news based site built in Joomla!. I like the content side of this site although the design is lacking in comparison.

WordPress

Wordpress is the most popular open source content management systems available. Originally set up as a blogging tool, it has expanded year on year to become a very powerful management solution and has an extremely deep content site supporting it. Having used WordPress before, I know there are masses of articles, tips and tutorials online with numerous extensions and add-ons. With current users like Playstation and eBay, the quality and content available using Wordpress is unquestionable.

An obvious but important advantage of Wordpress is that it conforms to all of the W3C standards, namely CSS and XHTML. This should make things less complex when preparing the site to be viewed across numerous browsers, from Firefox to Google Chrome.

RSS feeds are readily available, allowing the site readers to get regular updates directly to their RSS readers. Upon successful installation of Wordpress, standard configurations for aggregators (feed readers) are automatically readied.

Pingback (sometimes called Trackback) is a cool feature I came across during research for my Future and Emerging Technologies (COM522J1) module as part of my degree in Interactive Multimedia Design. A Pingback lets you know when another website has used your site/blog as a reference and also lets others know when you use them. This is not only a great way of boosting site traffic, but it can help prevent against plagiarism. Pingback is built into the Wordpress package.

I have came across some good Wordpress examples during my research:

• Matt Brett: A Canadian self employed web designer who uses Wordpress very effectivly.
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  : An American based fashion and lifestyle site that implements superb design as well as intuitive add-ons and extensions. Very well executed site and one I now find myself subscribing to their RSS feeds.

Other CMS’s

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I evaluated the pros and cons of a number of other Content Management Systems but was able to rule them out quite early in the selection process for various reasons. They were:

• DrupalLess used than those mentioned above, I had reservations over the communtity side where support could be found.
• Silver Stripe: Although quite commonly used, I had read of numerous extension failures and limited funcionality with regards add-ons. With the features I want to include in Golf Royalty, I was concerned that some wouldn’t be possible with Silver Stripe.
• Light CMS – Speak Light: I felt that this was too oriantated to designers rather than those with their own CSS knowledge. Speak Light promote users to design a site and submit it to them to then code up the CSS. A great idea for those with little experience. Although they do let you code your own XHTML and CSS, I would prefer a CMS that favour this method rather than offer it as an alternative.

Evaluation

After careful consideration and evaluation, I was initially torn between Joomla! And Wordpress to act as the underlying CMS for Golf Royalty. Both have obvious advantages and disadvantages. Joomla! appears in a more template orientated environment with less scope for personalisation but the actual content management side is second to none.

Wordpress on the other hand allows for great freedom of expression with many freely available add-ons and features to enhance the site. The behind the scenes CMS doesn’t seem as advanced as Joomla! 1.5 but I am not sure that this will matter too much for the task in hand.

In conclusion, I feel WordPress is the most suitable application for my brief.

I hope this has been a help to others who are in a similar Content Management dilema.

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