Idiologie / branding & everything else

1. Remember that Abraham Lincoln spoke of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He left out the pursuit of profit.
2. Remember the old Scottish motto: “Be happy while you’re living, for you are a long time dead.”
3. If you have to reduce your company’s payroll, don’t fire your people until you have cut your compensation and the compensation of your big-shots.
4. Define your corporate culture and your principles of management in writing. Don’t delegate this to a committee. Search all the parks in all your cities. You’ll find no statues of committees.
5. Stop cutting the quality of your products in search of bigger margins. The consumer always notices — and punishes you.
6. Never spend money on advertising which does not sell.
7. Bear in mind that the consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Do not insult her intelligence.
[via: Patricia Sellers]

“For 75 percent of the eighteen million books in our libraries, the rule of the plaintiffs would have been a digital death sentence. For these works–presumptively under copyright but no longer in print–to require permission first is to guarantee invisibility. These works are, practically speaking, orphans. It is effectively impossible–at least at the wholesale level–to secure permission for any use that triggers copyright law.”
Lawrence Lessig’s, as always insightful essay on Google, copyright and our future.

1 You can only work for people that you like.
2 If you have a choice never have a job.
3 Some people are toxic avoid them.
4 Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.
5 Less is not necessarily more.
6 Style is not to be trusted.
7 How you live changes your brain.
8 Doubt is better than certainty.
9 On aging.
10 Tell the truth.
full post here & a short documentary.

“A key point of failure in today’s global design landscape lies precisely in the jargon — we need to invent new ways of writing, talking and thinking about concepts of “humanitarian design”; we need new language that doesn’t homogenize entire cultures, new vocabulary that better reflects the intricate lace of the world’s biocultural and psychosocial diversity as a drawing board for design.” Maria Popova on The Language of Design Imperialism. Insightful.

“Visual features that have no meaningful association with the product itself can actually make consumers like the product, provided that these features are something that the consumer can easily identify with.This means that critters on wine labels, however odd that may be, can be a good sales strategy. It allows a marketer to target a certain consumer by using images on labels that represent an important aspect of that customer’s life. Moreover, there are potentially many ways to make that label as unique as possible because a logo would be chosen based on who the target customers are and not on what that product is.” Building a Better Brand: How feelings shape product evaluation.

“I did not know Paul Rand. I did not work for him or study under him. My understanding of his importance, then, has been gained in the same way as students and practitioners in years to come will gain theirs: through books like Modernist Design. (…) So it’s with some trepidation that I wonder if I might lodge a few complaints about Mr. Rand as a model for graphic design practice. But here goes.” M. Bierut on Paul Rand.

“I never knew a designer that got hundreds of thousands of dollars to design a logo. Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace. This is a process that can take a year or more. Getting a large, diverse group of people to agree on a single new methodology for all of their corporate communications means the designer has to be a strategist, psychiatrist, diplomat, showman, and even a Svengali.
The complicated process is worth money. That’s what clients pay for. The process, usually a series of endless presentations and refinements, persuasions and proofs, results, hopefully, in an accepted identity design” What they don’t teach you about identity design by Paula Scher.

Briefly and to the point (& video): Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages.

“Lindstrom suggests that too much messaging on a product’s packaging can actually prevent a sale. Logos and words can engage the rational mind, causing people to actually think harder about making a purchase. It’s a counter-intuitive notion, but then think about the effectiveness of the quiet logos on a bottle of POM Wonderful pomegranate juice, or a Method product, or the entire Apple product line up.” The Myth of the Rational Buyer: How Too Much Thinking Can Hurt Your Brand

Not exactly on the main subject of this blog, but hey, branding actually IS about meetings. Meetings, the Google way:
1. Set a firm agenda. 2. Assign a note-taker. 3. Carve out micro-meetings. 4. Hold office hours.
5. Discourage politics, use data. 6. Stick to the clock. [via: supervolatile]

A Bain & Co. survey notes that 80 percent of CEOs believe that their product is differentiated, but only 8 percent of consumers agree. To truly stand out in the market, a product must embody the characteristics of its brand. (…) The first to market position is a market opportunity, not a brand strategy. A product is not a brand.

“Design beautiful experiences, not beautiful artifacts. Stop asking “what” and start asking “why”. Start with experience, end with experience. Genius will fail, wisdom will succeed. Become wise. Keep it simple. From design thinking to dynamic thinking. Let iteration direct your process: Work more rapidly, change more frequently. Have fun. Adapt your process to your design goals, not the other way around. Preserve the experience, not your own competency.” The Experience Imperative: A Manifesto for Industrial Designers by Ken Fry.
Plus: “Experience design is not a remedy that turns products into miracles that everybody likes. It will help you speaking more efficiently to your target group. To that end products needs to be simplified. The simpler the product the more character it has, the more likely it is to be rejected or accepted by a group of customers. To that end you need to know your customers and you need to test your designs with your customers.” iA: Can Expierience be designed?

“Designers care. This is not always a good thing, and can, in fact, be annoying. Designers obsess so much about their work that it’s a wonder they ever let any finished project out the door. And they’re just as tough on everyone else’s work.” I feel excused now;). For other equally accurate features read: Four Things I’ve Learned About Designers by Warren Berger.

“John Updike, who was so enamored of Janson and insisted that all his books be set in that font, would have been appalled to see all of his books set in Caelicia, the same font used in, say, Nora Roberts.” E-readers in authors eyes [NYTimes]

“As a client, your job isn’t to be innovative. Your job is to foster innovation. Big difference.” Seth Godin on how to be a great client. Worth taking into account;)

“The prescription is not to embrace abduction to the exclusion of deduction and induction, nor is it to bet the farm on loose abductive inferences.
Rather, it is to strive for balance. Proponents of design thinking in business recognize that abduction is almost entirely marginalized in the modern corporation and take it upon themselves to make their companies hospitable to it. They choose to embrace a form of logic that doesn’t generate proof and operates in the realm of what might be — a realm beyond the reach of data from the past.”
Roger Martin: What is Design Thinking Anyway?.

“The majority of environmental organisations and businesses are represented by a mass of visual clichés: A leaf, a water drop, a globe, a happy tree. Many can’t think beyond the obvious associations and it means they can’t stand out from the crowd. Their brand’s consistently use language and visuals that represent the ‘category’ of sustainability. By using common signifiers that belong to this ‘category’ they fail to differentiate their brand and/or engage a new, wider audience.” Tom Crabtree (Design Assembly): Not easy being green.

“Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think.” Autonomy, mastery, purpose: Dan Pink on new approach in motivation.

“Make it too complicated, people can’t — or won’t — read it. Too simple, and people won’t even come to over to see what you have to offer,” Porostocky said. “You inevitably piss off one side or the other, so in the end, I go with whatever direction makes me happy.” Behind the scenes of GOOD magazine infographics. [via: coudal]

“To know your content is to love it. (…) While choosing the right heuristics for your content analysis and synthesizing them properly takes practice and a bit of flair, the vision you gain makes your effort worthwhile.” Colleen Jones on Content Analysis.

Wiki companion site to the book by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone. (& an interesting view on never-ending discussion: “your vs. my”)

“We’ve recently finished a redesign of The Balvenie whisky, which involved working with a lot of great UK craftsmen to make sure the design embodied the respect that the company holds for it’s own craftsmen that make the whisky. Because the distillery was set up in 1892, we also wanted the design to be a true reflection of late 19th Century archival documents so it was important that each element of the design was limited by the printing processes of that period.”
I rarely post links on specific design projects, but this one is just exquisite: Balveline Whiskey by Here Design.

This revolution is not a movement against type foundries and type designers; it’s quite the opposite. The kind of revolution we want is a change in the way people think about doing business. We want type foundries and typographers to start thinking, “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with giving things away sometimes.” Collection of well-made, free & open-source, @font-face ready fonts: The League of Moveable Type.

“Japan’s cellphones are like the endemic species that Darwin encountered on the Galápagos Islands — fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins.”
Thought-provoking article on Japan’s Cellphone market: Why Japan’s Cellphones Haven’t Gone Global.

“The items composing “Waste Not” are all everyday objects that have been collected from his mother’s life, such as legless dolls, soap, bottles, pans, plates, tubs, and so on. “Waste Not” – or wu jin qi gong in Chinese – is philosophical concept from China’s past, and security by means of collecting everyday objects was a requisite guideline for survival.” See yourself: 1 / 2 / 3. (Love MoMA’s refreshed corporate identity and website details.)

Passionate Curiosity, Imagination, Objectivity & Self Awareness, Crisp Communication, Effective Storytelling, Flawless Execution, Business Acumen, Global Awareness, Context & Talent. Ken Musgrave’s top ten strengths that graduating designers–or any designers, for that matter–should bulk up on: 10 Skills Designers Need to Succeed Now .

Elegant ideas — products, services, performances, strategies, whatever — all have some degree of these four elements: symmetry, seduction, subtraction, and sustainability. Guy Kawasaki interviews Matthew E. May on his recent book: The Pursuit of Elegance. +.

NYT on typographical changes in American road signs: an article and slideshow. [via: notcot]

“When designing brands, I believe the identity should be as simple as possible, telegraphic and single-minded.” Debbie Millman on designing brands.

Sensing a deluge of font overexplotation, nonetheless introducing: DIN Next™ by Akira Kobayashi. Noteworthy alternative to FF DIN or a dozen other dins.