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Helping people talk to people
Our work for HunterMaclean, a large law firm headquartered in Savannah, has recently been recognized with a Silver Addy, a Communicator Award AND it was a Webby Honoree too. Needless to say, we’re thrilled.
It’s really gratifying, not the statue part (although no-one around here is going to knock shiny), but the part where the work is recognized for achieving what we set out to do for our client – take a complicated message with a large number of moving parts and deliver it in a clear, user-friendly format.
We began the process with HunterMaclean in 2011 when they chose to work with us to refresh their brand and re-imagine their online presence. We got down to the basics with them in order to really understand the story they needed to tell, and then focused on delivering that message as clearly and engagingly as possible. Usability from the client’s perspective was the bottom line.
The website, which launched in Spring last year, speaks both to the diverse experience of the firm’s attorneys and their clients’ successes while also highlighting their long history of community involvement.
This site is deep. Content matters, and it really mattered here.
There is a tremendous amount of valuable and relevant information to be shared with clients, and it is constantly being updated. We needed to develop a way to access existing and updated information and present it in a way that made sense to visitors to the site.
The attorney bios were the most complex component of the build, and are dynamically generated using a significant amount of content parsed from various sections of the site. Additionally, there is a high-level of site-wide interlinked content highlighting the accomplishments of the firm and its attorneys.
As always, thanks for working with us, this is one we’re really proud of. Even though we love ALL our children JUST the same.
Perc Up!
St. Patrick’s Day was smelling particularly good around here a few days ago – SEDA’s 2013 St. Paddy’s Day mailer featured close to 200 bags of freshly roasted and ground coffee from local craft roaster PERC Coffee.
What better Post-Celebratory pick up could there be than a hand-roasted brew fresh from the hostess city? Exactly – that’s what we thought. And this year’s little extra something something was that the coffee would be mailed in a pop top can. Nice.
So, some background. Every year SEDA sends a St Patrick’s gift out to clients and prospects. Savannah hosts the second biggest celebration of this March happening, you know. And every year, we find a locally made product to feature. This year we worked with local coffee brewer Perc and they were great! So knowledgable. So delicious (the coffee). Did you know freshly roasted coffee releases carbon dioxide? No. Neither did we, but Roast Master Philip Brown did, and it was good to know, because if we’d canned them too soon we would have had exploding coffee cans. Which would surely have displeased the postal service.
The can label promoted Savannah while the coffee bag label was specific to SEDA and the programs and resources they offer.
Text you’d traditionally find on coffee cans was reworked – wait – I’ll show you:
And now the bags:
Never one to shy away from a challenge, we bought ourselves a canner (and a lot of cans in order to fully master our craft). The model that arrived was surely the very one used by canning enthusiasts at the turn of the century, and I mean 20th, people. And we have the instructions to prove it.
We’re seriously considering whether or not a future project should involve translating the instructions into something a lay person could understand. You know, sort of like a service to the community.
Once this antique torture device (Truth! It has thumb screws. Two. I’ll wait. Go read the instructions again, part # 13169) was assembled (no mean feat alone and we know about working in 3-D) we spent an unfortunate amount of time mangling can after can. It was grim. Then a mechanically-minded staffer (and heck no, I ain’t naming no names…ok, it was Phil) came to the rescue of those containers manufactured from earth’s third most abundant element (so it’s OK, plus we recycled the casualties anyway).
Canning debacle aside the final outcome was exactly as we envisioned! And more importantly SEDA was thrilled as were the lucky recipients.
Can’t wait to see what happens next year, and in the mean time, if you need any canning done, you know who’s got you covered. Call our amazing SCAD student helper Nikki (thank you Nikki! So much!!) She did a bang-up job.
Oh! And happy St Paddy’s!
Sometimes great UX is all in how you say it.
You’re probably already familiar with the practice of building a creative 404 page (no? well check some of these out, and if you’re adventurous try finding ours). That same philosophy of caring about every detail should transfer to other aspects of your business as well. We get so busy refining the big things about our core service offerings that we forget the little overlooked interactions. These seemingly insignificant encounters often get taken for granted, but provide great opportunities to surprise and delight your clients.
Through one of our partners CommerceV3, we get the chance to help store owners with the more obvious parts of the UX equation; Product pages, checkout sequences, etc. But I’ve recently noticed some savvy e-tailers making use of those less obvious communication points; the confirmation email, shipping status message etc.
I’ve already noted how NewEgg used their packaging to slip in some smiles. Zappos ,for example, does it in their Order Confirmation email…
Bargain site 6pm.com also gets personable with their confirmation email
even their shipping status emails are written as if by humans…
But maybe cheeky isn’t necessarily in line with your brand, there’s always the informative route. Here New Egg again, shows us how it’s done with a little infographic to help explain their shipping process.
Just something to think about the next time you’re about to use the default setting on anything your client will see. Every interaction counts and sometimes all it takes is a little unexpected humor to leave a smile on your client’s face.
Sentiment Analysis
I have previously commented on what some businesses were doing to use social media to their advantage, but I just came across an article about the science of tracking people’s mentions of your brand and coming up with your approval rating (yes people… approval ratings are not just for the president anymore).
Online reputation management is not new. I’m sure all of you know there are ways one can track mentions of a name, company name, word, etc. online. Some of these options are free, and this works perfectly for an individual or small business, but when you have millions of people talking about you and you want to know what they feel, there needs to be a system in place to interpret all of that data.
What WiseWindow is doing that is new and amazing, is that they have created a new way of doing market research that takes advantage of all the unsolicited, unbiased and spontaneous information that populates the internet. Their platform MOBI (Mass Opinion Business Intelligence) combines proprietary deep website crawling, relevance recognition and statistical natural language analysis to produce real-time data that can help businesses evaluate people’s opinions of their brand.
They can monitor responses to ads, news, product launches, events and can also monitor people’s responses to competitor’s actions as well, so they can track how they are doing in comparison.
Forget focus groups and polls that take a long time to produce usable data and only reflect the opinions of a few. Why wait when you can know what millions are thinking whenever you want. By the way, learning about these ancient market research tools in school is also a thing of the past, since WiseWindow has provided Harvard Business School students with a version of their platform so they can apply this new technology to their school projects! talk about state of the art!
Monday Report
Our Limited Edition Holiday Poster was featured in FPO: For Print Only – Special thanks to Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit and Under Consideration. Buy Your Poster Here.
Miles of yarn put Double Rainbows to shame
Everyones favorite one-man internet comic strip creator has finally gotten off his lazy behind and put together a collection of his work – 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth
Our Web Genius, Phil, has launched his first app – Field Trip – perfect for holiday travels or day trips to the zoo.
Make your own icebreaker tags!
Aside from being fun to scroll through, FONTS IN USE has a great article showcasing the various mastheads in the Egotist Network as well as a breakdown of the new branding for Comedy Central
LemonAid: Drinking Helps.
Speaking of Lemon, new 7-Up Brand … Discuss
If you are confused by THIS, you need to READ MORE COMICS
Frank Chimero breaks down his new digital arsenal to just 6lbs of power
How about this brilliant restoration of a 240-year-old map of New York? Check it out here.
I am loving the graphic experiments of Dan Mountford
From DEVOUR: Try not to listen to this cello cover of SMOOTH CRIMINAL. Just try. Rinse, Wash, Repeat.
From UPPERCASE: Call for Cereal Box Submissions – I have been loving the throwback designs, now you can take part.
Awesome packaging by Tyler Riewer – The Two Roads to Courage
Finally, how awesome are these money clips by JACK SPADE? (thanks @sarajaneroe )
Local Design: Leoci’s Trattoria
Downtown natives have probably already noticed the newest addition to our restaurant selections, Leoci’s just around the corner from us on Abercorn Street. We’re always glad to see existing buildings being rennovated and reused, especially when they serve up sumptuous Italian food. But what really excited me (after I got over the smell of basil in the air) was their logo. Anyone know who’s responsible?
Lee Hunt Lecture: The Paradox of Media Brands
This past Wednesday SCAD presented a lecture by expert brand strategist Lee Hunt. The event was well attended, and even though his talk focused on media brands, his insights were relevant for anyone dealing with the creation or maintenance of brands for any consumer product.
First the Basics
He did a great job of covering the basics of what a brand is and what it needs to do. Anyone unfamiliar with the idea of a brand being more than just a logo would’ve gotten a lot out of this part. In short, a brand is:
- the perception that exists in people’s mind
- a set of expectations – promises the product makes to the consumer
- a shortcut – an easy way to understand why the product you’ve chosen is superior to its competitors
But most importantly your brand isn’t what you say it is,
it’s what they say it is.
With that in mind, any successful brand needs to do 3 things:
- Define the asset – this is the easy part, basically just communicate what it is you’re selling.
- Differentiate – now it gets a bit trickier, you need to set yourself apart from the competition.
- Establish relevance to the consumer – even more difficult, this means finding a way of convincing your target audience why you belong in their already media and product saturated lives.
Now the Meat
New Show Packaged: Cantore Stories
If you were watching the Weather Channel this past Sunday then you caught one of their latest programs, Cantore Stories. Putting aside our unhealthy fascination with Jim Cantore, we were pleased as punch to have been tapped by The Weather Channel to help brand and package another one of their HD shows.
After designing the logo for the show, we basically provided them with a kit of motion graphic parts from which they could assemble transitions, promos and other sequences to their hearts’ content. The particular challenge with this show was that each episode focuses on a different location and so would need its own customized end title treatment to correspond to that weather type. Now it wouldn’t have been efficient to have us produce every single one of the show’s necessary parts, so we ended up creating templates based on 4 major color schemes which would give their team of animators the ability to create future Show elements for any weather condition.
The New Face of Lexington
Known as the “Thoroughbred City” and the “Horse Capital of the World,” Lexington is the second largest city in Kentucky. Before moving to Savannah and joining the Paragon team I lived in a loft apartment in downtown Lexington, which gave me instant access to everything this beautiful bluegrass location had to offer. It also allowed me to see first-hand how excited the city was to host the first ever World Equestrian Games in 2010.
I first heard about the games coming to Lexington years ago, as a student of communications at Asbury College. I immediately began considering what the branding would look like, since I had just come back from the Olympics in Turin where I had been bombarded with the kind of branding world events seem to attract. So naturally my interest was peaked to discover that one of my favorite agencies had been tapped to design the look of Lexington for the 2010 games—the legendary Pentagram.
The Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau asked Pentagram to develop a visual identity that reflects Lexington’s “one of a kind personality.”
DJ Stout & Michael Bierut came up with the concept of “Big Lex,” a mythical character based on a portrait of the famous racehorce “Lexington” painted by renowned Kentucky artist Edward Troye in 1868. The idea is simple enough, Bluegrass + horses = One Giant Blue Horse. The interesting twist is how they weave the character into traditional oil paintings to give it an old school equestrian feel. The goal was to create a contemporary interpretation of a classic art genre that would stand out from many other cities.
“There really aren’t that many identities for cities in the U.S. that you can remember” says Stout. “What you are more likely to remember about a place are its distinctive buildings, towers, statues, and landmarks …”
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- Oil Painting updated by Pentagram
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- Rendering of the big Big Lex oil painting installed in downtown Lexington.
My initial reaction to the logo design was not a good one. A simple sans serif font and a big blue horse just doesn’t seem to give the sense of elegance that the horse community is traditionally identified with. I immediately took to twitter to see what others were saying and my thoughts were echoed by locals in the Lexington area:
“Their style doesn’t seem to line up with the horse world, which is much more frilly, classic, and old-school.”
-Will Sears
“I like the identity package ok, but those renderings are mad hokey looking.”
-Lauren Liggett
But after I had some time to think about the new brand for the city, I started to see the genius in the design. On one side you could say that it looks too simple or that the billboard looks like they were just trying to fit everything in. The horse looks a bit like clip art and the elements don’t necessarily look like they were meant to go together. But on the other hand, knowing Pentagram, it will be the application of simplicity that will make this concept really sing. The use of the oil painting tips its hat to traditionalism while bringing you into the new brand (tell me people won’t be buying posters of this). The generic looking horse outline actually has significant local history, and the idea of using it instead of the name of the city will indeed make it stand out. I would wear the I “Horse” Lex shirt, and looking at the letterhead more and more makes me wish for a moment that I worked for the City Council. Just a moment.
So what do you think? Is the logo too simple? Is it strong enough? Does it stand out or is it utterly forgettable?
–
References
Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau
Pentagram Article “A Horse of a Different Color”
Will Sears on Twitter – @willsears
Lauren Liggett on Twitter – @laurenmignon
All images from Pentagram
Guess this website
This isn’t a trick question. This is either an example of a company’s superb confidence in the public’s awareness of their brand, or a lil’ slip up due to arrogance. When I asked a few friends to guess the site, some guessed right away which lead me to think this company had a really good grasp of how to identify themselves, even without using their logo, tagline or colors. But others were confused by the lack of a clear mark. (Don’t get me started on some of the eCommerce usability problems I see here).
This screenshot hasn’t been retouched by the way. So see if you can guess.
(Click the image to see it up close)
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