Kirschener Brazil
Visual direction, branding and product design for the Brazilian cycling brand Kirschener created by Made By Six.
Style Hatch Refresh
Just a few hours ago we debuted our fresh, new branding for Style Hatch along with a taste of our full site launching in April. After over a decade of creating sites, campaigns and brand strategies for large brands from Activision to Microsoft, we have shifted out entire studio to create fresh designs for individuals with the goal of helping you show off your inner genius.
We can’t wait to show off everything we have lined up! Now for a few fun facts, since our first theme Backburner we have launched 15 themes, pushed live 109 updates to the themes, and answered 27,697 support emails as of yesterday morning.
A part of the refresh we even had fancy new letterpress cards created just in time for SXSW. Check out a shot of the cards on Dribbble.
Dr No Effects
Dutch illustrator specializing custom lettering, Eric van der Boom was recently commissioned by the vintage-sound guitar pedal manufacturer Dr. No Effects to create a new logo, packaging and product styling for all their pedals. The visual styles for each of the pedals pair amazing well with the rich tone and sounds (demo the sounds on the Dr. No site).
Other projects by Eric van der Boom worth checking out - Ray Ban Rare Prints, Baetulona, and Def P & Beatbusters.
Follow along with this week’s curated posts featuring some of my favorites from the Behance Network - tagged: behance.
RAY LEMON - Branding & Invitation Concept
To help launch the new restaurant and bar RAY LEMON, design studio LSDK created a suite of branding and invite elements. The entire vibrant identity set feels both fresh and unique down to the origami invitations filled with spices and ingredients featured in their current menu.
In addition to the usual posts this week, I will be curating daily posts featuring projects recently posted to the creative network Behance. You can follow along on my blog with the Behance tag.
Tom, Dick & Harry Creative Co
Beautiful branding suite from Mike McQuade for Tom, Dick & Harry. Click the link for the rest of the amazing suite.
C.O. Biglow
C.O. Bigelow is America’s oldest apothecary. The 170-year old brand, owned by The Limited, was in need of an outside marketing partner to provide brand development services for their nine stores.
Identity, branding, strategy, and design created by Tractorbeam for the heritage brand C.O. Biglow.
Found on Graphic Exchange
space150 v27
Every 150 days the innovative mid-west agency space150 updates their entire corporate identity from business cards to website to environmental design on the agency’s doors. The futuristic branding for v27 was created in collaboration with designer and entrepreneur Taylor Pemberton. If you visit space150’s site now you’ll see they recently moved on from v27 to v28.
Additional credits on the project from the space150 team:
Design - Andrew Ridgeway, Michael Seitz, and Matt Kuglitsch
UX - Shawn Kardell
Created by - Courtney Davis, and Heather Chau
Written by - Jon Resheske
Video production - ThreeVolts
Creative Direction - Billy Jurewicz, and Ned Wright
Thanks Ned for the additional credits over email!
Branding and Multipliers
Most companies see brand building as a process of addition, where every touch point adds to the overall experience. They summarize that each point of contact adds to their brand’s overall equity. Yet, branding is not based on the process of addition. It’s based on multiplication. The greatest return doesn’t come from improving the variables with the most value but rather from improving those with the least. In fact, a single point of failure can negate everything.
Excellent post by Mark Gallagher and Laura Savard at Blackcoffee on the nature of a well rounded brand and how a single point of failure can kill the viability of a brand. The position of brand’s promises or expectations does not equal Customer Support + Quality + Functionality, but rather the equation is better represented as Customer Support x Quality x Functionality. Score a zero in any of the category and your brand is at risk of loosing all crediblity with consumers.
To be effective, your brand must not only be the best at what it does, it must also improve upon its weakest traits or remove those variables from the equation all together.
Happiness Report
37signals recently added three simple links at the bottom of each customer support email—“it was great :)”, “it was ok :|” and “it wasn’t good :(”. The Happiness Report is then used to measure customer happiness not satisfaction, study the ratings to improve and provide full public transparency through their happiness site.
We strive for happiness — not satisfaction.
The customer service industry is obsessed with “customer satisfaction”. We believe that’s too low a bar. Satisfaction is not a measure of success — it’s just enough to get by. We want our customers to be happy. Happiness is success. Happiness is our goal.
Over the past few weeks I have been actively working to improve the support process for Style Hatch. Between email, the theme feedback pages, Twitter and people tracking me down and messaging me on my personal Facebook page I average close to 50 customer support requests a day. Rather than seeing the daily process as a chore I love surprising people with a fast—typically same day or less than 24 hours—and personal response. Even when you have to let someone know that “the theme/Tumblr doesn’t support/work with _______” giving them a prompt and personal response often turns them into brand evangelists.
Customer support is one of the most powerful tools in your company’s branding tool belt.
Chalk Typography
Custom chalk typography by Brooklyn, New York graphic designer Dana Tanamachi. During the day she helps create amazing work at Louise Fili Ltd specializing in packaging, branding and design for food and restaurants.
Fonts In Use
Much of design critique is focused on photography and other graphics. It’s time to shed light on the most basic element of communication: the type. At Fonts In Use we’ll catalog and examine real-world typography wherever it appears — branding, advertising, signage, packaging, publications, in print and online — with an emphasis on the typefaces used.
An independent project from Sam Berlow, Stephen Coles, and Nick Sherman that I plan on visiting quite often. Well done.
Bota Bota, SPA SUR L’EAU
Well executed branding for Bota Bota spa in Montreal by Gabriel Lefebvre created at Sid Lee. In addition to the branding work Sid Lee is also behind the architecture and design of Bota Bota. If you’re not familiar with Sid Lee’s work spend a few minutes browsing through their stellar portfolio.
Found on Behance.
Minimal Branding in a Maximum Market
Multi-disciplinary design consultancy Antrepo took on the challenge of stripping down various brands to a minimalistic state to strengthen the brand by removing the noise. For each product they took it through two steps to simplify and then simplify more. This fun challenge is more or less the reverse of the Microsoft iPod packaging spoof video. See the entire project on Antrepo’s blog A2591.
Found on The Fox Is Black
URSA MAJOR of Vermont
“We are Ursa Major, The Great Bear. We make stellar skincare products for men who live.” Austin based design studio PTARMAK created this fantastic identity package for the new men’s skin care line URSA MAJOR. I’m always a sucker for natural textures and simple overlays.
Found on Graphic Exchange
