Jonathan Moore
I am a designer who lives in code, entrepreneur, and an idea incubator driven to make our world a better place.
I am a designer who lives in code, entrepreneur, and an idea incubator driven to make our world a better place.
This week I started the process out by coming up with a fresh new concept for a personal logo mark, visual styles and design elements.
I have only begun to make changes to my site by applying our latest theme Jetty and updating the visuals, but over the next few weeks I will relaunch my portfolio of the last decade’s work and announce new projects that the Style Hatch team is working on.
Also, starting next week I am launching a weekly email newsletter where I send out original articles, stories and insights designed to help you take action on your ideas, spark creativity, and brave the unknown. Subscribe to the newsletter now to make sure you get the first one that goes out Monday morning.
The photographs that appear in the animated GIF are from Folkert Gorter available under a CC Attribution 3.0 license.
Stellar branding, interior and graphic design work by Singapore based Bravo Company for the new Mexout eatery.
Mexout is a fresh-mex eatery in Singapore. We imagine Mexout to be a young eccentric Mexican food expert, or “Mex’pert” as we’ve coined it, who is living in his parents’ basement. … We’ve came up with about 20 hand-drawn logos for them to use in rotation. For the rest of their collaterals, everything is handwritten or hand-drawn. No computer was used for the creation of the graphics.
“Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.”
— Walter Landor
As an experiment Ben Pieratt, founder of Svpply went through the exercise of creating Hessian as visual brand without a product. For $18,000 the name, identity, Tumblr blog, and assets can be yours for your new restaurant, mobile app, teeshirt line, organic blueberry syrups or game development studio.
The idea, product and real branding work is all up to you, after all a brand is an experience living at the intersection of an expectation and a promise.
Early this week Wolff Olins revealed a complete multi-platform rebranding and design of USA Today. The simplified and dynamic logo works well as you transition between the sections of the newspaper.
The new site that goes along with the refresh, beta.usatoday.com, feels both fresh and modern. They took some huge risks by trying out unique UX design approaches, but I imagine it will encourage people to spend more time ‘browsing’ through the news.
Follow Wolff Olins on Tumblr
Art direction and design for Hawthorn & Wren’s new identity, packaging, tags, embroidery and more by Kevin Cantrell Design.
It’s amazing how much more interesting these branding projects are with a bit of time spent on the presentation. The wood, arrangement, flowers and camera angles help the project come to live.
Visual direction, branding and product design for the Brazilian cycling brand Kirschener created by Made By Six.
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.
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.
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.
Beautiful branding suite from Mike McQuade for Tom, Dick & Harry. Click the link for the rest of the amazing suite.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
