Every aspect of a brand needs a little TLC here and there to keep it feeling fresh. Even huge brands with tons of equity in their logo will update it now and then. Expect to devote resources for maintaining your brand! Don’t send it out alone and without the support and love it deserves.

Logos are the Primary Touch Point of Every Brand

A successful logo should have lasting power. It should communicate the goals and values of a company or organization. This isn’t always the case, though. Sometimes goals and values change, sometimes mergers happen, and sometimes color schemes become iconic of an era you’d rather forget. Don’t get me wrong either, you can convey the ideas of history and trust and not feel dated.

A logo change does not need to be ground-breaking to be successful. Don’t feel like you have to re-design it completely. Many times, brands will make subtle changes to their logos as the years pass. Take the Firefox icon for example:

Old Firefox icon at left and redesigned version at right (image via Brand New). You can read the creative brief for the redesign here. Basically, they were looking to modernize some of the textures and the shape of the tail and play down the level of detail.

On the other hand, sometimes a complete logo overhaul is necessary:

Old Memorex logo at left and redesigned version at right (image via Brand New).  Memorex was finding that their old logo was dated and did not appeal to their actual target market. Read more about the redesign here.

What Makes a Logo Last?

Some things, like the little black dress, never go out of fashion. Good logo design is like that, too. Go with what works, not what is in vogue. Don’t rely on design fads or current aesthetic trends for your logo if you need something with some staying power. Great concepts and strong execution are ultimately what keep on ticking.

Of course, we can’t live in a bubble. It’s important to be aware of the current state of design. Check out Logo Lounge for the awesome recaps of logo trends they put out each year.  2009 is all about bright color, dots, hidden images and doilies (no, really!). read the whole trend report here. If nothing else, you’ll be aware of what is popular right now and can stay clear unless it absolutely works with your concept.

A Website is like a Box of Chocolates

Chocolates can go stale! Your visitors will quickly recognize if your online presence is outdated, or if your content is not up-to-date. It’s not often that someone can launch a site and then just be done with it. More often than not, maintaining a website is an iterative process. It goes through a life-cycle.  It can take a lot of work, so make sure that you have the resources available to keep your little bundle of joy updated from a technical, graphic and content standpoint.

How do you know what to change?

The best way to know if your website needs help is by setting goals and determining if the site meets those goals. What do you want your site to acheive? Are newsletter sign-ups your primary concern? Product sales? What about visits to a “contact us” page? Figure out what you want your users to be doing, and find a way to track those actions. Keep in mind overarching brand ideals like positioning, personality and promise during any changes you make.

What parts of your website can be updated on a regular basis? Can you add new photos, testimonials, resources or projects? Have you recently gotten a good write up in a magazine or blog? Has your product been featured in a new shop or list? Talk about it! If you’re finding that certain sections of your site are too difficult to maintain, maybe it is time to reevaluate them and simplify. Promotional areas that are left untouched for too long can especially give your customers the wrong impression.

Time to get to it!

Get out there and evaluate your logo. Is it dated? Does it communicate the current state of your brand? Maybe it needs a little love to bring it to where it needs to be. How about your website? Is it getting the attention it deserves?

Do you have tips to share about keeping a brand up-to-date?

(images: Daily Drop Cap by Jessica Hische. Found Via Apartment Therapy)

Outlook features 25 artists that graduated from Portland State University’s art department between 2005 and 2009. The show is being guest curated by Chicago art critic and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago James Yood.

Yood is also giving a free lecture (open to the public) “The Persistence of Place” Monday,  November 16, at 7:30 p.m. Learn more here.

Opening Reception:
Saturday, November 7th, 2009 6-9pm

Exhibition:
Thursday November 5, 2009-Friday, November 27th, 2009
Monday-Saturday 10-5

Where:
Autzen Gallery, Portland State University
2nd Floor, Neuberger Hall Room 205
724 SW Harrison ST, Portland, OR 97201

Date:
October 24th, 09′

Time:
6pm-11pm

Where:
North Coast Seed Building
2127 N. Albina Ave.
Portland, OR 97227

I’ll let the visual aids do the rest…

He will also be celebrating the launch of his two new websites www.zenvironments.com & zachjohnsen.com so make sure to check it out!

To start, I must say that the people I am about to write about are very close friends and loved ones, and this may give me a biased journalistic angle. I am confident, however, that you will agree with me that they are noteworthy creative people, doing progressive and cool things.  I hope that this insight into their world inspires readers to subscribe to their blog, buy some of their wares, attend their event, go make something themselves, or better yet, all of the above.  I give you How We Develop and Content 09.

How We Develop is a collective of creatives based in Portland centered around their passion for fashion, Art, Design and creative exploration as a whole.  Clothing designer and seamstress Gretchen Jones, Jewelry designer Anna Korte, and graphic designer and illustrator Ada Mayer met through mutual friends, and began working together immediately in 2008.  Gretchen and Anna both enlisted Ada’s help with their respective identities, marketing efforts and web presence, and the alignment of their tastes and creative aspirations led to the birth of their blog, How We Develop in the summer of 2009.

How We Develop’s mission was simple – To share the things that inspire a group of creative people to create things. Finding “inspiration in the extraordinary, the simple, the distant, and the timeless”, How We Develop takes on a format familiar to the blogosphere, while bringing a fresh perspective, background and voice to the canon of multi-authored creative blogs.  They all come from different geographic, creative, professional and educational backgrounds, but seem to share a collective set of goals and ideals, which creates interestingly varied content.

In starting the blog, and venturing across states together to sell and promote their wares and services at trade shows and vendor meetings, the authors soon realized something important – That the fashion / creative game they were playing hinged on meeting and interacting with countless other like-minded players; that building on inspiration from others, and sharing the fruits of ones’ own labors was equally as important as personal professional perseverance.  This is the thinking behind their upcoming event at Portland’s Ace Hotel, Content.

Content will occupy the entire 2nd floor of The Ace, allowing designers to take over each hotel room and transform it to their liking to convey the unique identity and vision of their individual brands. The event “is designed, in its curation of talent and selection of venue, to harness and highlight the individuality stemming from the independent fashion community”.  Although How We Develop will collectively occupy one of these rooms, creating the environmental translation of their brand identities and visions together, this event will by no means be all about them. Designers of all types will be involved, from clothing to accessories, 35 in total, will be given a chance for exposure, under the Context of their choosing. Brand offering range from frilly dresses to carved wooden sunglasses to feathered hats, so the experience of drifting through the 28 rooms will truly be a unique and hyper-sensory one.

In addition to the fashion element, HWD has invited multiple fine artists to realize installations in the Cleaners reception space adjacent to the hotel, and has booked a diverse bill of musicians and DJs to play in the Cleaners and hotel lobby and mezzanine. There will be cash bars and refreshment tables scattered throughout the space as well, so those of age can enjoy a glass of wine as the stroll around and soak in the creative energy (although the event is all ages over all) It has all of the ingredients of an inspiring creative whirlwind of an evening, and I for one am quite excited to see it unfold.

For more information on the event visit the official website.  Hope to see you there!

I love seeing how some of the covers are really similar to the original while some are totally different. The typography is often a gem in itself.

Original The Thing cover by Steve Ditko from 1954 at left.
Anders Végh Blidlöv’s version at right

via The World’s Best Ever

First, it is all about the research. Do your research. It is very important to understand all the limitations that go along with designing and developing for mobile devices. There are plenty of online resources out there that can aid you in your journey. We have found a couple great tutorials such as Engage Interactive “Tutorial: Building A Website For An iPhone,” to be quite helpful for our internal team, and you can see a great post about some of our design inspiration right on this blog, “Menagerie of Mobile Madness.” It is always nice to learn the rules before you break them.

Second, I strongly recommend a fairly in-depth wire-framing session. I typically do mine through OmniGraffle, and here is a great iPhone wire-framing stencil from Graffletopia. It is incredibly important that the right content is being pushed forward into the mobile realm. There is no way you are going to be able to squeeze a fairly robust site into a mobile website. You have to carefully pick what your audience needs. Show your user quickly and efficiently exactly what information they want. It is here that it is easy to over do it. Keeping it simple and light will make the user experience much easier. Like we always say around here… content is key to the success of any site. With mobile, this concept is twice as important. Make sure you are delivering what users are seeking.

Third, enter the design phase at the same time you or your developer is building your interactive wireframes. This should be a very close relationship where ideas, functionality and possibilities get thrown around constantly. Allow your wireframes to evolve when unexpected snags hit. It is easy to skip over this step in the process, but if you value a library of mobile code, this is where most of that content can be created. There is really only a select amount of functionality a mobile site can have. From sliders to swipes it is a good idea to save and re-purpose anything you create to make your development in the future much easier.

Fourth, I will touch on a few quick design points. Design for fat, clumsy fingers. Small buttons and text links are usability killers on the mobile device. Keep them large, legible and understandable, but keep in mind that short, sweet and engaging are also important. Another trick I have discovered when designing for an iPhone is starting with the horizontal layout (Width = 480px). This way you set up your max width for any of your images or text. Adapting to the vertical layout is much easier than up-scaling to horizontal.

And finally, make sure you set up enough time to test test test. Whether it be internal QA on multiple mobile devices or setting up analytics for tracking, it is important for your growth as a mobile site designer/developer to learn from anything and everything you can. We stress this a lot around eROI so that we never make the same mistake twice.

Now, go forth, and become mobile Rock-stars!

Mobile Awesomeness: An all-around awesome mobile gallery. It is really handy for design inspiration because they include screenshots of the different sites, so you can quickly peruse without opening it in your iPhone or an emulator. Be sure to check out the mobile web resources section they’ve put together, too.

Cameron Moll’s Mobile Web Design:  This is a book from industry expert Cameron Moll. The digital version of this book is only $10 (you can download a free preview, too which includes the table of contents). You should also go visit his Mobile Web Design series on Authentic Boredom.

MobiForge: “The world’s largest independent mobile development community”  This site has a wealth of information, and it is free to register as a member.  Check out their Mobile Web Developer’s Guide. There are also forums, a community, and multiple blogs.

More articles and Blogs:

Engage Interactive Blog:  This site offers a bundle download of html, css, and js files. These templates allow you to build a mobile site that displays different content, depending on the orientation of the phone (vertical, left turn horizontal, right turn horizontal).

TapFancy: This is specifically an iPhone and iPod Touch application gallery.

Live View for iPhone: This is a cool iPhone prototyping tool that allows you to send a portion of your screen to your iphone. You can even click through. It’s great for prototyping iPhone-centric stuff without having to host the files or compile an iphone app.

Doctyper: This blog from Richard Herrara is a great resource for code samples. One especially helpful example we found was a bundle of files to create a section of your site that would anchor to the bottom of a viewport.

SEOptimise Blog: This site is just a great reference point. It has links to sites/articles on a bunch of mobile topics. SEO and Analytics, Design, etc.

Mobilize, Don’t Miniaturize: This is an interesting article from Little Springs Design which explores the problems with “miniaturizing” web sites and applications.

Don’t forget the emulators!

dotMobi Emulator

Opera Mini Simulator

Mimic

DeviceAnywhere

Nokia Mobile Browser Simulator

Openwave Phone Simulator

SmartPhone Emulator Developer Edition -

iPhoney

Do you have resources to share? What about your favorite mobile sites; which ones have really impressed you, and why? We just launched a sweet project with Wacom that included a mobile site, that we’re really stoked about. See touch.wacom.com and stay tuned for more info about that little beauty.

LittleSnapper from RealMac software

The other super convenient feature is the ability to mark up captures within the program with their easy set of tools, which makes this a great tool for designers that need to communicate something visual to others on their team.

LittleSnapper's markup tools are a big help

Recently I’ve gone back and forth between Evernote and LittleSnapper for a few reasons. Evernote, as you may know, is a KILLER app that uses OCR type technology to automatically make things you capture searchable. This can be used for web and email captures as well, but Evernotes ability in this realm is really lacking from my experience, because it can’t keep all the CSS styles and such to keep it looking beautiful. Web and email captures look disabled at best and massacred at worst. Although LittleSnapper isn’t as powerful with searching with OCR, it keeps the capture in it’s pristine state by turning it into an image. This is perfect for a designer, since I need to reference all the little details.

Ember web client for LittleSnapper

RealMac software also just released Ember, the web-based partner to Little Snapper, which allows you to view galleries of your snapshots and share them with others in yet another beautiful interface. Although there is certainly room for improvement here, the combo proves to be pretty powerful, and a good addition to your toolbox. How about you all? What solution do you use for referencing visual inspiration?