Quick Tip for Designing your Website

Last post I talked about redesigning a logo and used some popular examples on how complicated it can be. Well designing a website is much harder as you need to get the person viewing the website to do something for you. This isn’t a post for building a website but rather for designing one.

Every website has a “purpose role” be it to purchase something or to learn information or even to click on the ads.

When you’re designing a website you must always make sure that every page, every click and all content is driven towards one thing, to get the viewer to achieve your purpose role. If even one of these elements fail then the entire website fails.

Not only that but these elements must also work in a way where it’s seamless, where the viewer doesn’t have to do menial tasks or make too many clicks to get to your purpose. Below is a disturbing image where placement, color, and content go very wrong.

Placement is an incredibly important aspect to any website, where do your images, text, description, prices, links and everything else go? If you don't carefully layout an easy to comprehend website you'll be left with nothing more than a jumbled mess like gates'n'fences (http://www.gatesnfences.com/).

Fling Design (http://flingdesign.com/) is a great example of presenting plenty of information on a single screen. Everything is broken up and separated by subject, images are clean and are not intrusive and the overall style is modern, minimalist while also full of relevant content and you can easily tell what the website is about. 

Content is the basic foundation for all websites but without a clear presentation of that content you could lose your potential visitors. Of course be careful when trying to be bold or exciting, Enritec, a technology company does just that.

Enritec (http://www.enritec.com/) has a…”unique” design to say the least. Everything is extremely high tech, with flashy sounds and is so minimalist it makes Apple websites look cluttered and yet you don’t really understand what it’s about at all.

All of their information is presented in floating cubes that cannot be read until your mouse hovers over them, not to mention the website itself takes a while loading up. It’s great to try a different design method to wow consumers but if they have no idea what’s going on or where to go then what’s the point?

A good website can take you from the home page to your purpose page in 30 seconds or less and the best way to learn about good website design is to just take a look at some bad websites and try to figure out its purpose role and achieve that role in less than 30 seconds. 

Company Makeover – Why Companies Change their Logos

So we all heard by now that Yahoo is set to unveil a new logo this September 4^th. Companies do this all the time for multiple reasons, usually to stay modern or represent a change. Does it change public perception on the company then and now?

I listed a few notable companies that underwent massive logo changes in an effort to revitalize their look and for what reasons why.

Microsoft

Microsoft turned heads in 2012 when they unveiled a fresh new logo, the first in 25 years.

The goal of the new look was to reflect their metro (now known as modern) interface that was going to be their universal design language for all their products (from Windows to phones to even the Xbox).

How did it fare though? Unfortunately for Microsoft Windows 8, Windows Surface and Windows Phone all turned out to be duds with only the Xbox being successful (and the Xbox One announcement garnered a lot of criticism). Now their sleek, clean logo is a reflection upon those failures.

It was a good logo that got across that they are committed to the Modern UI language but now it’s a painful reminder of Microsoft’s shortcomings.

BP Oil

Early in 2001 BP changed their logo followed by a $200 Million marketing campaign to represent their ability to give us something “beyond petroleum”. 

For an oil company choosing bright green and yellow colors in the form of a sunflower was an ingenious way of suggesting they would have a smaller footprint.

Ironically the bright and pretty sunflower has been “tainted” (pun fully intended) with the infamous BP Oil Spill in 2010. The very logo that represented a more eco-friendly company was swiftly attacked by the internet after the spill and the new image of BP is this:

Hundreds of variations of this logo can be found by a quick Google search, there was even a movement in the UK called Rebrand (trash) BP's Logo.

Pepsi-Cola

In 2008 Pespi updated their new logo because…well…no one really knows why.

Unlike Microsoft which laid all their eggs on the Modern Interface and BP which gave the illusion of a smaller carbon footprint, Pepsi spent a whopping 1 million USD on the new logo and millions more (some numbers claiming an upwards of 1 billion) in updating all their products to their new logo.

The design of the new logo was to be asymmetrical for a simple, playful and edgy look all rolled into one but was it really necessary? Especially at that price it seems like a logo update wasn't really needed nor will really have a lasting appeal with customers.

It’s not an image that really has an impactful meaning and the company was in no way a slouch in the previous year’s either, it’s one of those cases where it doesn’t really do anything.

Gap

Pepsi’s logo might have been uninteresting and unnecessary but at least it remained true to form. Gap took an extremely iconic and popular logo and chose uninspired, boring Sans Serif font and put a tiny blue box behind the P.

Why isn’t this logo on stores? That’s because it had a short lifespan. 1 week to be exact.

The logo was so despised and caused such backlash from customers that after 1 week of announcing the change Gap revealed that it cancelled this new logo and decided to stay with the old one.

Not only was it unnecessary (like Pepsi’s) but it actually gave a negative perception of the company, the opposite of what re-branding tries to do.

Conclusion

Logos change all the time, some of them are hardly noticeable (Apple and Google) and others are a complete change (BP). When your re-branding something especially for a large, multi-billion dollar corporation with decades of history and millions of customers a re-branding has to make sense.

If your company is in good health, has good public perception and has no change in management then a radical re-branding of your image can only hurt you in the end. I’m not one to bring up tired and old examples but Coca-Colas “Coke II” re-branding is still being taught in marketing classes today.

So where does that leave Yahoo? All we know is that it will retain its iconic purple font, exclamation point and yodel which is a great start but it remains to be seen what the final design will look like.

Considering the company has been through rough times and has recently acquired a new CEO that plans on shaking things up, a rebranding may be the perfect start to change public perception. 

The 3 Ingredients to a Memorable Brand

In the span of less than a second our brain takes an image, splits it up into 3 core parts and then shoots back information that either passes one of two checks “like it” or “disregard it”.

Sometimes people can instantly tell how they feel about an image the moment they see it and other times it takes hours to come up with a proper response. All the same our brain still deconstructs an image into 3 core parts.

These core parts are color, image (logo) and text (name).

Colors

Our brains are hardwired to react to color. We stop at red lights and go at green, we know flashing red and blue lights mean the police and even assign emotions to color. It’s no surprise that color has a huge impact on a brand.

It’s hard to get a color that not only stands out but resonates well with as many people as possible.

There’s a good brand test that focuses on color here  but I modified the image (shown below) to show the true importance of colors. Can you guess all the brands correctly? (Answers and colored version in the link)

For more on the power of color and branding see here and here.

Image

This is where you let the creative juices run wild. Some brands choose to not have images, not every brand needs it. 

To make it easier you can break down what the image will be like a mascot, a logo that describes the business or something completely abstract.

An image needs to grab attention, be bold and interesting and most importantly be memorable. If a person walking on a busy New York street who sees thousands of images a day specifically recalls your image after just seeing it once then congratulations you have a very successful brand image.

Some shapes already carry a meaning and changing them even slightly can truly alter a meaning.

AT&T is a good example of how slightly changing an image dramatically alters the meaning behind it. Taking the classic globe image with blue bars and shading it slightly gave it the illusion that it is a sphere and not a circle. One interpretation of the new logo is cellphone signals wrapping itself around the globe, a meaning that was not present in their previous flat logo.

Text and Name

The last thing that people absorb is the text and name. If your brand has an image than it doesn’t need text, in some cases even if you put text next to the image it can be just as memorable without it (the above AT&T image is again a good example of this). In most cases the brand image is the name itself.

Did you know that Google over the years has slightly changed its font bit by bit in order to keep a modern appearance?

Text is something that a lot of companies think doesn’t matter as much but it does.  Just like everything else text is another way of conveying the personality of your company. What if Google had used the Comic Sans font instead of its current font?

Google

The text of an image is often overlooked and is just as important in representing the brand as all the other components.

Although some brands get away with never changing their text, it all depends on what type of text represents your brand.

A good test is the image below which swaps to extremely popular brands. Why not tell me what you see at first glance. 

It proves the point that a memorable brand has a personality and a story to tell and swapping it with another brand makes it lose all of that relevance. If you did glance your brain would immediately tell you that Yahoo is left and Google is right.

Stay tuned for more posts and comments are always appreciated! Also take the brand test (both in monotone then color) posted above, see how good you are in recognizing brands!

Repairing a brand – How Microsoft and Sony made the Fatal Mistake of Over-Relying on Their Brand

Repairing a brand – How Microsoft and Sony made the Fatal Mistake of Over-Relying on Their Brand

A company has many tools in their arsenal but none are quite as powerful or as delicate as what can only be described as a glass cannon, their brand. A company’s brand is their image, their perception, their success (or failures). A name alone is strong enough to do away with most competition.

A brand is not constant, it is always improving or decaying but never remains neutral. Even the biggest of brands can fall into irrelevancy with just a few wrong moves. Research in Motion for example used to be a household name, with Blackberry being THE phone to have. This once great brand is now grasping for life, already forgotten by the people who loyally used them for years.

Today’s post is about two behemoths in the tech industry, Sony and Microsoft. Both have been influential, creating new technologies and revolutionizing how we go about our day to day business. Both have brands that can be recognized across the globe and both made the mistake of assuming their brands were untouchable.

This begs the question, can a withered brand fight its way back to relevancy?

Sony’s Arrogance and the Road to Humility

When Kaz Hirai took over as CEO of Sony Corp, the company was already victim of brand decay. Caused by their own arrogance, the company poured countless money into new technology almost recklessly. Many were failures (UMD discs) but a few were successful (blu-ray).

Their television brand was swallowing profits as Samsung and others started to get more aggressive in the quality of their TV’s. Their mobile lines were becoming irrelevant in favor of Apple and Google phones. Even their PlayStation brand was suffering severely due to the high price, lack of games and lack of proper advertisement.

Sony was sure that their high priced (in some cases) lower quality products could send consumers in droves to buy them only to be met with the cold shoulder. Kaz Hirai was tasked with saving a troubled company.

His plan was “One Sony” a plan that would downsize the company in order to shift focus on 3 core competencies (phones, images & gaming). Was he successful?

In 2012 Sony reported their first net profit for the fiscal year in over 4 years after taking consistent losses. Their phone brand the Xperia with its unique design and durability proved to be a success. The PlayStation brand became the leading HD console globally thanks to aggressive price cuts and a healthy stream of exclusive games and services.

You can just tell how humbled the company has become through recent conferences and press releases where it’s all about the customers and developers and not investors and shareholders.

Microsofts 8 Debacles

Whereas Sony was at risk of going under a few years ago, Microsoft was thriving like never before.Windows 7 was setting the world on fire as the company’s fastest selling product to date. A year later they announced a reinvigorated mobile line called WP7 (Windows Phone 7) which seemed poised to take a chunk of the market in the Apple and Google-centric smartphone environment.

Even their videogame market was making strides as the Xbox brand grew ever more influential in becoming the living room product in every household.  

Unfortunately everything started unraveling as the following generation of products failed to catch on. Windows 8 was met with heavy criticism due to the difference in aesthetics and removal of some features such as the iconic start button and became the slowest selling product to date.  WP7 was abandoned after a year in favor of the upgraded line WP8 angering early adopters.

It didn't help that the reveal of the Xbox One was so mishandled that it can be considered one of their most botched products pre-release in the company’s history. With negative rumors that was damaging the Xbox brand that painted the yet to be revealed console in a bad light the reveal of confusing, even anti-consumer policies where met with harsh criticism. It even lowered their stock and raised Sonys due to how tremendously mishandled the entire conference was. 

Product after product the company seems to be spiraling out of control. Their lack of communication mixed with an over-reliance on their brands led to these failures. Recently the company had a huge shift in management so it remains to be seen if Microsoft can learn from these mistakes. 

A Long Road Ahead for Both

Both companies made the grave mistake assuming that these products would sell themselves based on the strength of their name.

By radically changing the design, policy even functions of these products they ended up breaking their brand. Although Sony is currently hitting all the sweet spots they still have a long road ahead of them to match to the success the company had years ago. Microsoft’s major shift in management looks hopeful as it's in the same vein as Sony, so much so that their plan is called One Microsoft (sound familiar?).

These two contrasts in strategy show the importance of maintaining a brand and the limits of relying on past successes.