April 15th, 2010
Not to be confused with the old practice of marking criminals with a hot iron, branding uses name, typography, image and colour to convey the identity of a company, product or service at a glance. Good brand design ensures that a company is not only noticed, but also remembered: the company’s brand becomes its badge, a point of reference for the company itself and customers alike.
Get it right, and you have an Apple Apple, a McDonald’s Golden Arches, a Nike Swoosh or a Ferarri Prancing Horse. Get it wrong and you might end up with something like the London 2012 Olympics disaster. Alleged to have cost £400,000, the logo is almost universally unpopular, and has even been accused of causing migraines and epileptic fits!
Branding has become a big deal in this day and age of global consumerism – and it’s not just big corporations who have one. We are bombarded by logos and brands every day, on everything from charities to cars to online applications. Good logos are adaptable, so that they work in any number of contexts, and even in abstract. Some logos fit into a suite of logos (think Macromedia’s Creative Suite), while some stand alone.
But getting a brand design or logo right doesn’t necessarily depend on having a huge marketing budget. After all, the Coca Cola brand – possibly the most famous brand in the world – was designed by the company’s bookkeeper. There are lots of companies offering very reasonably priced brand and logo designs which look great. A good brand should:
- Draw on the company’s identity and values
- Be instantly recognisable, even in abstract
- Confirm the company’s credibility
- Connect emotionally or intellectually with the target audience
- Foster customer loyalty
- Make good use of typography, colour, iconography or graphics, whitespace and even negative space to create a strong visual representation
- Be adaptable, for use in various contexts, as well as easily updatable to allow the logo to grow and change without altering it’s core recognisability.
Posted in Corporate Websites | No Comments »
February 10th, 2010
For most companies, a corporate intranet can be hugely beneficial. Whether you’re a huge multi-national or a small to medium business, there is proven benefit to having a secure internal business network which takes care of internal communications, information storage and retrieval, document management and so on and so forth.
A dedicated business productivity tool, benefits of an intranet range from information management through collaborative working up to and including community building. A well designed intranet, built to bespoke requirements with users needs in mind, can save a business thousands or more a year in lost time.
A corporate intranet can seem like a massive undertaking, though. There may be existing systems in place, which while inefficient, are just about doing the job. There may be resistance from those controlling the budgets, the feeling that an intranet is not required or will not be able to demonstrate sufficent cost benefit. Or it may be that the sheer amount of information which needs to be organised makes the whole thing seem totally daunting.
Designing and developing a corporate intranet can be time-consuming and tricky. Defining and prioritising which features are required, co-ordinating the requests of different departments, managing information architecture and so on can turn into a bit of an organisational nightmare – which is why a bespoke intranet design is often the way to go.
A company which offers bespoke internet design can help with every stage of the process, from providing examples of what’s possible to organising and structuring all the data, then creating and implementing an effective design, carrying out user acceptance testing and final rollout and training.
For more information on the potential of a corporate intranet feel free to give us a call.
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January 28th, 2010
Dammit. Why is it that just when we’d got to the stage when you could reasonably expect most of your viewing audience have monitors of a decent size (goodbye 800 x 600, so long, we shan’t miss you)… they go and release these pesky netbooks?
While they’re undoubtedly very nice portable bits of kit (I want one), they do have the disadvantage of causing the whole screen resolution/monitor size thing to raise its ugly head again. The situation was brought to my attention this week by a client viewing a new site build on his Asus Eee PC with a 10” screen. As far as he is concerned, the width is fine and the machine is so portable that you’ll put up with having to do a lot of scrolling. But with sales of netbooks estimated to have topped the 18 million mark last year – according to the Consumer Electronics Association – are we going to have to review the way we design?
Well, as with the case of my client, many of the netbooks have quite a decent screen width. Most have a 1024 by 600 resolution – and many of our corporate website designs sit around the 960px width mark, so no need to worry there. What we might need to consider, though, is what sits ‘above the fold’ (i.e. what is visible without scrolling).
Of course, the other problem with these little darlings is their more limited processing power and memory. Not being as bright as their big brothers, netbooks can struggle to run a lot of client side stuff, so loading websites with flash and other rich media presentations could start to be a problem, too.
As all designers know, you can’t please all of the people all of the time, in terms of screen resolution or anything else for that matter – but with smaller form-factor devices on the rise and rise we do need to keep them in mind when we roll out new site designs.
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August 11th, 2009
Google has announced a new turbo powered version of its market-dominating search engine, in the form of a ’secret project’ it has been working on – a ‘next-generation architecture’ for search.
The upgrade, which was announced on Monday, has been dubbed ‘caffeine’, and while you won’t notice any difference on the face of Google, some significant changes have been made where it counts. So far, caffeine is in testing, but it is intended as a full replacement for Google’s current search once development is completed.
Google reckons that the changes are not prompted by Microsoft’s rebranding and relaunch of its search engine as Bing, or its acquisition of Yahoo search. Instead the search giant claims that this is the first step in “a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions,” but as usual with search engines there are no real specifics on exactly what has changed. Whether this is because they’re not giving away trade secrets or because the algorithm is just too complex for mere mortals to understand, we’re not sure.
However, early trials show that results do differ noticably. A search for ‘corporate website design’ for example, yields 306,000,000 results in 0.24 seconds in Google traditional – and Freshleaf sit in second place. In Google Caffeine, the same search yields 649,000,000 results in 0.12 seconds, but places Freshleaf in sixth place.
If you want to try out Google Caffeine for yourself, head over to www2.sandbox.google.com
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July 8th, 2009
This week Freshleaf celebrates being awarded the Investors in People standard.
The Investors in People standard helps businesses to improve their performance by developing their people. It provides a framework for good practice in the training and development of individuals in the team in order to meet business goals.
Being awarded the Investors in People standard reflects Freshleaf’s commitment to ongoing training and development of its staff, in order to provide a good foundation for growth and success.
Throughout the process we received excellent feedback from the assessors, who were impressed with the levels of job satisfaction and the open, supportive work environment Freshleaf provides. The final report comments that the assessment found Freshleaf to be “a well run, well organised efficient business with a clear focus for the future and a strong commitment to training”.
Our MD, Michael Johnson, commented “I’m delighted to have passed the standard. The really nice thing was that we had an excellent starting point, so we didn’t have too far to go; and going through the process pushed us to that extra level. The resulting improvements in the business are clear to see.”
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June 2nd, 2009
It might sound like the sound a microwave makes when it finishes heating up your ready-meal (or whatever), but Bing is in fact a new search engine from Microsoft.
Well, I say ‘new’. Really they’ve sort of applied a spit’n'polish reworking to their uninspiring and largely unsuccessful Live Search. Launched this week, the new search engine is intended to compete with Google the (so far) undisputed king of search, and according to Microsoft, Bing will focus on four key areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, and finding a local business.
So why do we need a new search engine? Well, Microsoft reckon that Bing brings us new and shinier search results in the following ways:
- Bing was developed to help consumers make decisions, not just to catalogue content.
- Bing organizes results by searcher relevance, rather than by algorithm relevance.
- Bing filters out results that aren’t relevant
So you put in ‘where shall I go on holiday?’ and Bing will tell you? Right? Helping make decisions sounds fine in principle, and organising results based on what types of results have proven relevant to former searchers may or may not work, depending on who the former searchers were and whether they were looking for the same stuff you are. But filtering out results that aren’t relevant?? Surely that’s the whole POINT of a search engine? It’s not like Google goes “yes, I know you searched for ‘website design’ but here are some results on fishing”.
Still, natural scepticism about Microsoft products aside, early feedback seems to be pretty good. There’s an air of surprise about it, but there’s also a lot of people who are cautiously impressed. But, good or not, Bing will have a hell of a long way to go before it can think about competing with Google’s extremely dominant market share. You could argue that once the phrase ‘Googling’ became synonymous with searching, it was all over for everyone else.
Reading List
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May 8th, 2009
At the Future of Web Design conference last week we were lucky enough to hear the thoughts of a number of speakers, but no one – in my opinion – more interesting than American freelance web designer Sabrina Dent.
In her talk, entitled “Throwing Client Collaboration out of the Window: The Stalinist Web Design Model”, Sabrina suggested a whole different way of running web design projects.
Don’t give your clients choice. Don’t seek their opinions. And just say no.
It sounds like an unlikely way to achieve client satisfaction, but Ms Dent maintains that that’s exactly what it does. It’s not just about being draconian, though – taking a look at the philosophy behind these recommendations, it all starts to make perfect sense.
Read the rest of this entry »
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April 30th, 2009
Carsonified’s Future of Web Design 09 Conference in London today produced some interesting food for thought. Not entirely focussed on the ‘future’ of web design as such, it could perhaps have more accurately been titled “some people with some very interesting and some less interesting ideas on web design” – although I doubt that would have sold as well.
There were a total of twelve speakers throughout the day, on subjects as diverse as ‘the mobile web’, typography, and, bizarrely, the graphic novel (it’s not a comic, apparently) Watchmen. Interestingly, for me at least, some of the most useful and thought provoking ideas I took away from the whole thing were less about web design itself, and more about ways of managing web design projects and workflow. Not really cutting edge and fascinating, you might think, but 100% relevant to what we do.
Danny Somekh spoke about a new ‘rapid co-creation’ workflow methodology he’s been trialling, Brett Welch of GoodBarry talked about web design business methods in an increasingly competitive marketplace and in my favourite talk of the day, freelancer Sabrina Dent talked about saying no to clients a lot. (More on these in a later post).
Not all of the talks were quite as beneficial, though. Carsonified’s own designer Mike Kus filled us in on some of his thoughts on web design from a graphic design perspective; and his apparent implication that web design is a handy extra skill that graphic designers can learn in a lunch break (rather than a completely separate discipline), as well as his suggestion that we should all stop whinging about usability, accessibility and cross browser support and just get on with designing stuff will probably have raised many hackles in the room. Odd move, scheduling it after Robin Christopherson’s excellent piece on accessibility, too.
Overall, though, FOWD 2009 was interesting, engaging and has left us with a lot to talk about.
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April 9th, 2009
Always keen to keep up with the very latest on everything web related, last week we sent Richard to an eCommerce Legal Workshop, where he rubbed shoulders with representatives from Yahoo!
Perhaps surprisingly, we were the only web development company represented at the workshop, which whilst it was primarily run by lawyers for other lawyers, yielded a wealth of useful information about the dos and don’ts of online trading and data capture.
As well as having the chance to do some high-powered networking, Richard made copious notes on everything from best practice relating to privacy policies when taking user information, to opt ins and refund policies and the law relating to distance selling. While we’d probably have been heading in the right direction with most of these things just by using common sense and best practice, we now have our very own expert who is fully briefed on the latest information.
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March 27th, 2009
A great example of the possibilities of the internet & cloud computing was unveiled this week at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco – streamed video games.
Cloud computing is the name given to the trend which sees services being provided via the internet rather than run from the desktop, meaning that users don’t need to buy, install and run software, and don’t need to know as much about what it is and how it works.
This is already an established trend in much of computing, but thanks to a new service called OnLive, it could be set to change the face of gaming. The service, which had its first public outing at the GDC after seven years in stealth mode, offers “on demand” games straight to the PC, Mac or TV, with the company promising high quality gaming even if you’re running a five year old laptop with all the processing power of a microwave oven – because the whole thing is being run remotely.
There are those who have looked at the service and proclaimed it too good to be true, and others who have questioned what the pricing structure will be like when the service finally launches, but it seems likely that it will have given console manufacturers a bit of a nasty turn – if the whole thing really works as promised it could mark the end of expensive games consoles and the start of living in the cloud.
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