9/11/11 is past us, and I am sure we are all a bit relieved as it is not a joyful day in any means, and it comes with many hurtful memories atop of fears of repeat attacks. When flipping through the great New York Times memorial issue, I paused to reflect on the way brands chose to walk the very delicate line of mixing honest sympathy with a hint of marketing message – all the way to a blunt in-your-face sales message hidden inside the memorial post. Here is a selection of the ones that grabbed my attention the most:

Read the rest »

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?

I was thrilled to see a full page in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Edition being dedicated to depicting the world cup to date. Being spoiled by the beautiful trend of seeing not only useful, but also extremely creative and conceptual information graphics these days – a trend that was definitely fed by Good Magazine – I was ready to analyze. Too bad I did not get very far, as the designer of this page clearly designed in color, which then got translated into a greyscale chart, with a gradation from dark to light and right back to dark again, making the chart impossible to accurately decipher and quite hard on the eyes. It surely is an unfortunate mishap to happen on a full page within the New York Times on a Sunday, but lesson learned: Design according to the medium and the restrictions from the very start of the assignment, because, like in this case, the medium is the message.

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.

As a nice follow-up to yesterday’s music packaging entry, the New York Times today features a very interesting article confirming that the recently introduced new packaging design for Tropicana will be exchanged with…the old one.

Why? Consumers hate it.

How did PepsiCo find out? Via Twitter.

How will that change the job of brand-, advertising- and design agencies?

They will listen.

Again.

…maybe the newly launched Pepsi branding effort will be scrapped next? Surely everyone has been complaining. The money that could be saved by using 2.0 technologies prior, during and after major re-branding efforts and the idea of the resulting success is just imminent.

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.

could it be that no one at The New York Times realized that the type behind his featured image in today’s paper actually reads ‘ouch’? An example of what happens when the time spend paying attention to details gets cut…Ouch!