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.

The current economic climate brings out the best, and worst, in marketing practices. A bold approach was taken by The Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, where the management team decided to give away 200 complimentary stays over weekends in March and April. With a night averaging $250 and the hotel being associated with one of the largest hospitality brands in the world, Starwood, this counts as quite a big step which most traditional marketers and hoteliers would have immediately strayed away from. What Bonaventure understands is brand value. Their business is down 20%. The hotel most likely feels empty, even on weekends. Of course this marketing stint will bring in 400 guests who will be exposed to the brand and spend money on the property’s bars and restaurants, but more importantly thousands will try to score that free night, thousands will read about the promotion, and at the end of the low-cost, yet highly viral, campaign tens of thousands will be reminded of the fact that there is a forward thinking hotel in downtown L.A.. Maybe to keep in mind when relatives come to town, or for an in-town (=economic) weekend get-away, or to just check out and grab a drink at the bar, either way the brand is on your mind. The recession has all of us rethinking traditional approaches to brand marketing, and many more great ideas will be born. And we will see lots of in-your-face, nearly pathetic, approaches of small businesses trying to hang on to that one more sale that will drive them into the ground and make the ones who understand brand-strategic thinking stand out.

Geyrhalter Design’ed web site and brand for Audiolife received a nice treatment on ‘Attack of the show’. Check it out on G4. 

Happy birthday dear Brand Atmospheres™ Blog! Exactly one year ago you were born. Since then you received 80 posts and even a Trademark symbol to call your very own. As a gift I will promise you to write posts more regularly to keep you edutained. I will also let you into more strategic thoughts about Geyrhalter Design and our exciting clients, because sharing is caring as they say. I hope you will continue to receive as much traffic as you have in this past year. Stay as you are! Happy Birthday!

Too bad that Pantone’s idea of spreading their color-love from shoes to t-shirts, again, in a lengthy co-branding spree is not one of the bright ideas we are getting excited about, even if The New York Times declares it as such. We have seen colored T-Shirts before, actually a whole lot of them at ailing American Apparel recently, and we have even seen colored sneekers, yes we have. Now why exactly would even I as a designer get excited about merchandise in a ‘Pantone’ color, especially via quality unconscious retailer Gap, I really do not know. There must be some smart strategy peeps over at Pantone capable of coming up with other ideas on how such a great brand can be leveraged in more thoughtful ways then just applying it to apparel.

Photo from The New York Times.