92 year old Mr. Harman, of hi-fi equipment Harman/Kardon fame, recently purchased Newsweek for $1. Well and the $50 million in liabilities that come with it. Most of us have heard the story over past weeks. Last weekend, the New York Times released an interview with Mr. Harman that gives an insight on what he is planning to change about Newsweek as the new owner of the money-losing magazine. The first thing on Mr. Harman’s list, quoting the New York Times, is a change in its graphic design:

He thinks the magazine is “dull to behold, dull, dull” and wants its graphic design to be “as meaningful, as imperative, as the written expression.”

To us, this is a very significant statement showcasing the understanding of the importance graphic and brand design has gained with corporate veterans over the past years. It also signals that the marriage of design and content is seen to indeed create a more successful message delivery. While changes in staff and editorial views would be on top of the list for most newly appointed owners at this significant turning point, for Mr. Harman it seems to be the creation of a distinct and harmonious Brand Atmosphere in order to compete and win in an industry that is on the verge of collapse.

A smart move. In this day and age of content source overload, a news publication needs to create a product that differentiates and convinces through its design. We can’t wait to see the changes come around, maybe on Mr. Harman’s 93rd birthday?

March 15th I was attending a concert of the amazing jazz pianist Keith Jarrett at the equally stunning Walt Disney Concert Hall. I went by myself, since my wife was not interested in seeing him again and going solo for this experience felt like the right thing to do. That day I received the book ‘Rework’ by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 signals in the mail, so I had a great companion.

Glued to the book, I intuitively used the ticket stub as my bookmark and as Mr. Jarrett started playing, I thought of the emotional connection that bookmarks have with the time, the space, the moment in ones life when a specific book was being read. But once the book is put to sleep on the book shelf, that memory is buried, indefinitely. Quite different to a piece of music which can reach your ears unsuspectedly at a gas station, a bar, a restaurant, the car radio, yet it has the same power of almost instantly catapulting you back to a particular scene of your life. The book on the other hand is simply ‘filed away’. I thought it would be great to create a simple web site for anyone to upload their otherwise ‘bookshelved’ bookmarks. Great to have them archived, fun to share and even more fun to peruse other people’s books with their unique or fun bookmarks. Who knows, if a good number of people start using it, we might want to add social components to the site in the future.

The book I was reading, ‘Rework’, has a chapter in it that talks about not trying to produce a finished product, but rather launch it in a bare bones state. If people like it then change the good product to a perfect one (‘Launch now’, Pg 93). Good is good enough. It also declares death to procrastination (‘Start Making Something’, Pg 38). Funny as I run my company in many of the ways described in the book, and many of the others are big aspirations for this year. So here I was at an inspirational concert, an inspirational setting, reading an inspirational book and I had a quick idea.

Read the rest »

It took me a while to get here, and it has only been a week since I can say that besides 3 weekly Production Meetings, and the necessary face time between employees as well as clients, I fulfilled my goal of running Geyrhalter Design by simply opening my browser. I used to rely on lots of programs to handle the different operational tasks at hand, but now I just have tabs in my browser and I can start conducting all aspects of my business from virtually anywhere. As finding the right way of working did not come overnight for us, and I am very happy with the results, I want to share the way I run my company via a browser with you. Maybe you can benefit from some pieces, or the entire workflow.

1. E-Mail & Calendar

We use Zimbra, an open source  E-Mail and Calendar solution that let’s us easily sync to our iPhones, which allows me to stay up to date on meetings and e-mails, even while being on the road. I can make appointments and write e-mails from wherever I am and my calendar and Inbox will always look identical, may it be on my phone or my laptop, saving plenty of time in itself.

2. Project Management

Geyrhalter Design relies on Basecamp to be the hub for all our projects, internal as well as client projects. We create timelines, keep deadlines (‘Milestones’) and exchange project specific information as well as files. We even use it to house internal company information such as a contact database, printer trouble shooting tips and log in information that might otherwise be a big pain to search through your inbox once needed. Read the rest »

We are excited to share details on our just launched re-design for California based Evolution Fresh, the independent and family owned juice company, run by chefs and master juice makers. The 98 labels for the popular, all-natural, Evolution brand, and its mirrored private label ‘Harvest’ juice line, is being sold in over 500 stores along the West Coast including Whole Foods, Pavilions and Gelsons. Celebrated as the freshest juice available, Geyrhalter Design, together with the owner and marketing director of Evolution Fresh, took on the challenge of giving the brand a fresh and clean new look while staying true to its independent and free spirited roots. We focused our effort on creating a consistent brand image. By introducing a revised red identity to go along with all-red caps it enabled the brand to stand out from direct competitors such as Naked and Odwalla. The label stock was changed to matte laminated finish, which created a semi-metallic effect when refrigerated and added to the fresh feel that was sought after. While creating a uniform look, a unique color was picked to compliment each juice, giving it a visual flavor and making it easier for the customer to identify a specific juice on the crowded market shelves. The whimsical illustrations were carried over from the original design to make it easy for customers to recognize their product and keep the home-made feel that is so important to the product.Besides illustrating around 50 vegetables and fruits for the back label, the biggest challenge was to find appropriate colors for each flavor that work with the brand mark red as well as differentiate enough from the other SKU’s. It started as a clean-up initiative of the former labels, and it really opened a whole slew of layout concerns, leading up to this re-design. We are now working on strengthening the brand further through social media initiatives, shelf talkers and a new web site. It feels great keeping this wonderful brand ‘fresh’ for nearly a decade now. For us it was a unique labor of love, Evolution being one of the companys’ first clients, who enabled Fabian Geyrhalter to move the operations from a garage setting into an office space, which in its beginning was shared with Evolution’s marketing team, 9 years ago.

This is an update to an entry that got erased during a server problem. We added images and a link to a full write up to the post:

 A while back, I shared a project I was about to undertake for Art Center College Of Design’s designmatters department with you. Time has passed, and about a month ago we travelled to Mexico City to launch this student effort during the 62nd Annual United Nations DPI/NGO Conference.The Vato Verde campaign is a design intervention for civic disarmament that includes environmental, print and multimedia components, which provoke us to take a close look at the complex problem of gun violence in mega cities such as Los Angeles and Mexico City.Vato Verde aims to reach a generation of children and tweens who are at risk for gun violence and often over-exposed to the glamorization of guns in mainstream media. My students decided to work with Claymation for the first time and the campaign has received great interest from educational leaders to be included into curriculums in Puebla, and maybe other states within Mexico.

You can now read an updated essay about this campaign as well as view the videos on Art Center’s designmatters site.

A while back Geyrhalter Design started re-using every single piece of paper used at the office, unless of confidential nature of course. It was a past GD Designer’s fetish, and soon we all caught on to it, and now it became a company policy. It started with creating company note pads made out of 8 1/2 x 11 sheets cut in half. One side was the note pad and the other was the pre-printed side. A great thing to use something twice, of course. But it also started a trend of re-feeding used paper into all company printers and going through junk mail to grab all US Letter sized material that was re-usable on one side, before waving it good-bye to the recycling bin. So we are saving the world, or at least are feeling absolutely amazing about what we do, but this practice also has a nice added benefit. Each backside tells a story of our company’s past. Failed design ideas, funny internal feedback notes, long forgotten projects, colors that could be used for a current project, people we have been out of touch with for too long, or just the pathetic junk mail mixed right in. Now we live by it, and I believe that most of my team is as excited about peeking at the back side of each page, as they are about taking notes and sketching new ideas on the front side of their pads.  Try it – good karma that’s (paper-)tons of fun to do! And hey – it helps team building as well.  

Of course we are delayed, but we are still having fun and hope that you will join in the fun. Just a little sample below…

Most people I know want to find a way to give back to society, to be a positive force for change. Some are able to contribute financially to causes they support, some donate time as volunteers, and a select lucky few can use their professional skills for philanthropy. I have been fortunate over the past months to engage with ‘one of the best philanthropy programs in design education‘ (Print Magazine), Art Center College Of Design’s Designmatters program. I was conducting an Independent Study with one student where our task was to create an Identity System for a United Nations sub division in Bangkok counteracting gender-based violence in the Asia-Pacific region. The project will come to a successful close this week with another 3-way skype call to the client in Bangkok presenting him with the full style guide for the new Identity. An experience that combined strategic design thinking, branding, academics and philanthropy, all on a global level and with the finest of institutions.This week I will embark on the next journey. Again with Designmatters and the United Nations. I will teach a trans-disciplinary class with the goal of creating public awareness and subsequently media attention through provocative and successful campaigns catered to the future generation of small gun owners. The intervention will launch and/or take place in Mexico City during the 62nd Annual DPI/NGO Conference in September this year and should live on thereafter as a campaign, via media coverage and in the minds of 10-13 year olds that find themselves at a pre-puberty turning point where they are the most likely to put a gun in their hands for the first time. The effort will be a collaboration with Mexico’s leading design school, CENTRO, through video conferencing and in-person sessions as the students will travel north to participate in some classes on Pasadena’s campus. It will take 14 weeks in which I will host many guest panelists on interventions as well as the subject matter of disarmament, all brought in through Designmatters amazing network. I will make sure to check in with you on this blog about this great adventure, the challenging task ahead as well as the important results.

I fully understand that we are all bored hearing about the Tropicana branding fiasco, but Geyrhalter Design has been in the juice label design world for a while now with our client Evolution, so we just can not help but keep thinking about it. The fact that the new – now old – Tropicana package hinted at the same design sensibilities that attract clients to Geyrhalter Design (clean and simple ‘Swiss Design‘), does not help get our minds off the subject matter. It is challenging to deal with an existing brand, an existing image that might seem like it is outdated to designers, but there is an emotional connection to that image, even though it goes against all experts’ opinions. As Alex Kuczynski noted in the Design Spring ‘09 Edition of TMagazine, customers of brands that evoke childhood memories, such as OJ or snicker bars, don’t think in terms of good versus bad design and outdated versus current. Sometimes the new needs to be massaged into the old, creating a transitional phase in a re-branding effort. That way it can be seen as a nice update, an upgrade even, but still look familiar to let the consumer know that they still get ‘the same good stuff’, just in a more professional package. Below you can see a project we approached the same way for Evolution Juice a couple of months ago. When I was at Whole Foods last week I spotted our revised label next to a ‘No Pulp’, original, label and it very nicely reinforced this point. 

Time is money and both are scarce in corporations these days. Pressure is up to connect to customers in untraditional ways and marketing companies and consultants push their clients into places they have never been to before, places they often don’t understand clearly and that they don’t have resources to manage well. I am talking about company blogs, twitter pages, flickr accounts et cetera. Each come with responsibilities – responsibilities first and foremost to your brand and the consumers that are exposed to it.

Today I read an article in the online edition of Forbes about the importance of the right, aspiring, positioning of luxury brands, especially during hard economic times like these. I read the article because the individual who wrote it is an Executive at one of the world’s leading branding agencies, so a brand I trust. I also lend Forbes my trust. The problem is that I spotted a typo half way through. Instead of ‘They’, it said ‘The’, which changed the meaning and made me pause for a second. It changed my trust in the article, my brand perception of the agency as well as my trust in Forbes. Could it be that editorials, even just short columns, are being written at the speed of blog entries, or maybe even faster? As I am typing this entry I clearly understand that it comes with the responsibility of representing the brand of Geyrhalter Design to everyone and anyone, a brand that I built over years through intense work, a brand that many individuals are nourishing 24/7 to remain in tact to aspiring and current clientele alike.

Consumers want brands they aspire to to consistently show that extra attention to detail. In your customer’s mind there is no difference to the way your brand gets communicated, may it be a 20 second tweet or a 30 second campaign, it is all about how it makes them feel afterwards.

When we received our edition of the latest hardcover ‘bible’ on Graphic Design, from the publishing brand Creatives have trusted and aspired to over decades, Graphis, I was greeted by a horrific mistake in the second intro paragraph, followed by a slightly amusing typo, if it only was not in our very own company name, as shown below. After thousands of brand interactions over decades, it only took seconds for us to decide that the brand has lost its appeal to us.

To further make my point I was greeted by the below ad in the online edition of the New York Times, one of the world’s most important and highly regarded papers, just minutes before writing this entry.

Do we really not take the time to evaluate how much these little mistakes or decisions harm our brand? Maybe the advertiser does NOT suit our brand. Maybe the – already much delayed – book should yet NOT be rushed off to China without proper proof-reading and maybe a leading branding agency should watch out for their own affluent brand while advising others on what to do with theirs.

The times are changing, we do a thousand things at once, but none of them to perfection.

Maybe we should strive for perfection again (even if we do not reach it), because emotional connections to brands are still being built on the foundation of excellence that leads to trust and last but not least to sales.