My dad doesn’t take that approach, and doesn’t plan to when getting a new TV. I told him that he should check out other brands like Vizio, LG, and Samsung because he might be able to get more bang for his buck; Sony can be over priced sometimes. While trying to explain why he should shop around, he seemed very skeptical about the idea, so I simply posed the question “why are you so stuck on Sony?”. His response was not only eye-opening, but made me [again] realize the important thing about a good brand is.

My dad, in just a couple sentences, explained just what a brand should be, based on how his experience has been with Sony products. Many words came out of his response along the lines of: reliable, comfortable, long lasting, makes me happy, and so on. I immediately stopped trying to convince him on other brands, because isn’t this what we look for in a brand? We want something that has a great track record, and makes us feel comfortable.

There are advantages and disadvantages of sticking with just one brand, however, if that brand has been reliable for you, then you’re not exactly seeing the disadvantages of not trying something new. As a business owner, this is what you strive to be for your customers. It’s a package deal. It’s not just about your logo, or how your brochure looks. It’s about how good your products are, and how you connect with your customer base. You always want to know that your brand has been reliable and comfortable to your customers.

So my advice for shopping brands…. it doesn’t hurt to do some research, however, go with what you’re comfortable with. Be selfish. Don’t always worry what others think of a brand that you feel comfortable with. In the long run, nothing beats a reliable brand.

Well, my Tridea partner and avid Twitter user, John, recently had an interesting interaction that is relevant to that discussion. Yesterday afternoon John posted this: “I think threadless tee’s designs are going down in quality”.

Threadless is an apparel company that mainly produces T-shirts that are designed and voted on by people who are not part of their company. They offer incentives for participation like a cut in sales and some credit toward merchandise, as well as a coolness factor of having a design successfully chosen. And it works; there is a large community of designers and a strong and loyal customer base. In any case, it’s a company who’s product, at least design-wise, is made by customers/people-not-on-salary.

So minutes after John openly complained that he thought their quality was declining, their CTO direct messaged him to ask him what he thought they could do to improve their product. And that right there is why business usage of Twitter is increasing. People in all areas of a company, all the way up to the CTO/CIO/CEO positions are using Twitter to monitor their brand perception. Twitter allows them to plug in to the pulse of their customers in an unobtrusive way.

In this case, asking John for feedback on what could improve was not terribly intrusive to him. They exchanged some thoughts. The CTO walked away with some direct feedback from a loyal customer. John walked away knowing that his voice was being heard and that Threadless was actively seeking to improve their company by soliciting direct feedback via Twitter.

I think Twitter usage is evolving and will continue to do so bringing value to it’s diverse users. Stay tuned and I will keep posting on new and interesting developments!

I use it to keep up on the lives of friends I made at SXSW, industry folks, associates/coworkers, and people who I generally enjoy hearing about. It’s a nice tool to keep up with casual and close friends alike while not requiring me to engage in an actual phone conversation (I’m not a phone person.)

However, companies are starting to use Twitter. I’ve been “followed” (when someone subscribes to your twitter feed) by a few Zappos.com employees recently and though I thought it was odd, it didn’t prompt me to lock down my Twitter feed. You see, I’m a fan of Zappos…their mantra is to have the best customer service of any website, and when customer service is your #1 priority, you rarely tick people off.

Comcast, on the other hand, has started using Twitter as a way to try and control damage to their brand. Michael Arrington posted a few weeks ago about an unpleasant experience with Comcast and how they picked up on his anger via Twitter and stepped up to solve his issue. Arrington astutely points out that while they were able to solve his problem shortly after he made his complaints public, consumers who don’t use Twitter still have to deal with their crappy customer service hotlines.

I think business usage of Twitter will continue to evolve. Companies with poor customer service will use it to try and put out bad brand-experience fires while smarter companies will use it to monitor how their brand is perceived and what kind of trends they can capitalize on. Used wisely, companies can really hone in to a casual-yet-public display of the likes/dislikes/wishes/wants of trend setting customers.

If Tridea ever decides to launch a business twitter account it will be not to extinguish bad-experience fires, but to connect more directly with our clients and to further build on the communication principle that we hold as one of our tenets!

The considerations I wanted to take in making this piece were:

1. Presentation style: This entry, like my GT-R advert, are intended to be used as promotional desktops for fans.
2. Graphic components: The core logo in the center, I nabbed from the website, so I cannot take credit for that. However, it was my intention that the logo be clearly identifiable and easy to see.
3. Aesthetic feel: Velvet Acid Christ’s music has a feel all to its own, so I tried to interpret and capture that here.

Hopefully, you can see these reflected in this piece! That’s all for this time, but keep checking back, as Saulter and JP will be submitting their own sandbox projects soon.

I designed a logo some months ago for a new progressive magazine, Amplifx, that just had their launch party here in East Lansing, Michigan. After knocking around in Photoshop one day, I decided to put the logo to use and create something that they might find useful as promotional material or just a graphic. I tried to really capture themes of growth and positive progress.

Until next time!

In any case, the box itself was standard length rectangle; a bland exterior. I think my purchasing motivation when I bought it was least expensive. On a separate occasion, I bought a box from Target that had a really great design on the outside…but I could write a whole post about great design found at Target…

So the 7th Generation brand didn’t leave much of an impression on me, and to be fair, that’s not the companies goal. Their thing is being environmentally friendly and to worry about dying their packaging or tissues would be against their motto.

However, at work, we have these square boxes of actual Kleenex brand kleenex and that is what gave me the inspiration to write this blog. You see, I had gone though the box in rapid fashion while I was ill, and as I got within striking distance of finishing the box, the tissues changed from white to beige.

At first, it didn’t register with me; I was sick, and all I cared about was having something handy. But then when the box went empty shortly after a light bulb went off in my head: The color change signified the nearing exhaustion of the tissue supply! So I paused and considered the fact that the manufacturers had needed to specifically dye a portion of their supply in order to place it at the bottom of the package in order to alert the user of the nearing scarcity.

It is the attention to detail, to good design, in this unlikely place that really made me appreciate their brand and left an impression on me. The moral? Good design, even the simplest of tweaks, sets itself apart from the rest and resonates with the user.

Well, let’s look at it another way. If you are a small business, and you decide to take up web design, what would be the costs? Well first off, you will need an application that will let you produce code. So that would run you about $250 at least. Not so bad right? But now that you have this program, you need to learn it. So you decide to buy a book, whereas the very intuitive books cost between $40-$50. So far, you have spent $300 roughly, and might know a little about how to put your new website together.

Well you have taken a bunch of pictures with that new digital camera, and you want some of those images on your website, but some aren’t sized right! That means, you need to take that checkbook back out, and spend more money on an application that let’s you manipulate images, like Adobe Photoshop. Did I mention that it costs $650? I didn’t? Well, it costs $650. And trust me, buying a book for Photoshop is a very good idea, if you have another $50 to spend.

So after about 10-15 hours of both staring at these programs and reading this book, you have gotten your first “Hello World” page to work. Congrats, but there is more. You still need a build a whole website. That means you will need to go over all of the content that goes into a site, figure out where this site will be hosted, how you will market this site, and so forth. Ok, that’s doable, but let’s not forget that you still have a business to run, and probably a personal life, so you learning about building this website, is not only costing you money, but now time. And the things mentioned above is the easy stuff. Here is where things get tricky…..

How will you choose your color scheme? How do you plan on representing your brand through design on your website? How will you decide the width of your site? Will it be two columns, or one? How accessible will your site be to people who are blind, have text-only browsers, or other devices outside your normal computer? Is your site optimized for search engines? Things are starting to sound a little more complicated now.

Well that’s because they are. The process of building a web site, especially for a company, is no easy feat. With you deciding to take on this project, the costs for both your time and money get to be very high. What if a potential client is turned away from the lack of professionalism in your site design or because they couldn’t access information? Now, it’s opportunity costs. Aside from that, there is a very good chance of ruining your brand and name by thinking that, with no design experience, you could be capable of building a website.

This is one of the cases where it is best to let professionals handle things. All of the applications mentioned above, we already have, and are seasoned pro’s at using them for design work, as well as being able to make the design decisions that are questioned above. It is apart of our normal process. What’s even better, is that we love doing this stuff.

By hiring professionals, think what other work you could accomplish with your company with that 20+ hours you spent learning how to build an [at best] average site. Then when your site doesn’t work the way you want it, you realize that you need to hire a pro, which doubles the bill of what you’ve already spent on applications and books. Now think what that extra $1000+ could do for your company.

The better idea, is just to hire professionals from the start. I completely understand wanting to learn new things and have the power to do them on your own. But a website for a company just is not one of them. At the end of the day, it ends up costing you so much more. Is it worth it, when you could have just hired a pro from the start? Doesn’t seem worth it to me.

So why this particular one?

Well, we knew we wanted something clean and crisp. As a result we decided to eliminate usage of serif fonts, due to their inherent complexities. We also shied away from using ornate backgrounds to our logo, opting in most of our drafts to not use one at all. We also agreed that our logo had to incorporate the concept of “three”, a core idea here at Tridea Design.

From the start, I wanted to incorporate a lightbulb somehow, as it is the most widely-understood metaphor for “idea”. The highly-stylized “I” offers a visual explanation of our name: the “I” forms the filament of a lightbulb, with three strokes at the bottom forming the base, and a clean arc at the top, suggesting the glass portion of the bulb.

The really nice thing about this logo is its versatility. The “I” portion can serve as an abbreviated logo on its own, and the two-toned nature of the color scheme makes it highly adaptable. We’ve managed to create a simple, understandable, and flexible logo!

Hopefully you appreciate it as much as we do!

The muscle is marketing. Getting the name out is turning out to be a lot more difficult than I expected; the three of us have enjoyed relative authority in the circles we run in regarding our interest areas (such as graphic design or PHP coding, for example). Many of my freelance clients come from other clients I’ve worked with in the past or through university contacts I’ve made. Among the three of us, we have a nice-sized client list.

However, websites are not like groceries that need to be bought every week, which brings in regular customers and regular revenue for a store. For a design firm, we will have to constantly reach out to new clients and maintain relationships with past and current clients.

This process of reaching out as it relates to our endeavor is rooted deeply in the visual. First and foremost, a logo. John has written about brand identity and ways it has been done very well. Designing our logo has been a long process and is still underway. The rationale we’ve tried to carry into all our mockups is simple: the concept of three. In the initial stages of formation, we kept returning to this concept, and identified with it strongly. Now we want our logo to reflect that.

We also want our logo to be indicative of who we want to be as a company. This lead to one of our first decisions, to use a san serif font. The serif font of Times New Roman or Georgia are classic and traditional, counter to what we want to be. We are innovative and fresh!

Integrating these two concepts has proven a challenge; the marriage between “three” and “fresh”. Once we’ve approved a logo and implemented it, expect to hear from me again, with an analysis of the decisions and logic behind our choice!

Your brand represents your company as a whole. That means, the way that you do business, how your product works, the way you interact with your customers, your logo, website, brochure, etc. Your brand is the whole package deal, which makes it the most important aspect of your company. What your client will remember about your company, is not simply the logo, but how you are portrayed from all of the things listed above.

Some good examples of this are Apple and Best Buy. When you see their commercials, or ads, and then go into the corporate store, you feel their brand. They do a very good job of maintaining their brand across multiple platforms. The minute you walk into an Apple store, there is a certain feeling that you get. You may not pay attention to it every single time, but if you pay attention, you will notice the Apple brand influencing your every thought about their store, products, and employees.

It is very important for a company to be their brand. If you want your business to have a laid back type of brand, then be laid back. Let it be known in the way that you handle your customers, in the wording of your brochure, all the way down to the look and feel of your store. What your client walks away with is a sense of your brand, not that you just had a cool store.

If your company wants to thrive on simplicity, then make it sure that when dealing with clients, it is a simple process for them, and hopefully you.

We, at Tridea, are in the midst of branding ourselves. It is no easy task, and sometimes takes years to establish a memorable brand, but since we like challenges, we are up for the task. When we meet potential clients, we don’t want to make an impression with only one aspect of our business (that we have a cool website or stylish letterhead,) we want them to leave with a good impression of the whole package deal……our brand.

Design is not the only part of your brand, but it plays a major roll, and that’s where we come in.