Branding

With TWTR launching their IPO yesterday lets discuss branding...

While it may seem cheap to mock my own creative failings, I do have a business that I want to develop and products that I want to sell.

The most interesting part of creating something is how to build what we now call a brand.

An interesting term because branding, usually by means of charring, comes from livestock.  The act of marking [by branding] livestock with fire-heated marks to identify ownership has origins in ancient times, with use dating back to the ancient Egyptians. Among the ancient Romans, the symbols used for brands were sometimes chosen as part of a magic spell aimed at protecting animals from harm.

So over the years branding has transitioned to other types of goods. The brand being a name, a logo, a slogan, and/or a design scheme, which becomes associated with a product or service. A good product with superior branding is something customers can identify with. The key is the ability to build a relationship with your consumer and drive that repeat and subliminal business.

A good example of superior branding is Kleenex. People by default in the United States of America ask for kleenex when they need a facial tissue. We are so deeply ingrained with the idea that we blow our nose with Kleenex that their brand is an almost subliminal choice.

The synonymous use of brands vs. products is from fantastic marketing.  Good marketing and good branding is the result of understanding people and how they think. If you can successfully build an image that becomes a long lasting and irreplaceable part of a cultures psyche, then you can establish product dominance. Some things are so iconic that they simply don't need marketing. For example,  Post-It Brand notes.  What to I need to say about these?

I want to create a great design for my company and myself, but how do you compete with multi-million dollar design firms?  How do you make a way for yourself in an industry that is saturated with brilliant marketing.?

Cyclical Evolution, Power Costs

Many things come into and fall out of fashion on a regular basis, some might say that there is a cyclical pattern to these trends. Daisy dukes, tie died, and bell bottoms, have come and gone and come and gone again, but trends in fashion are completely different from trends in technology. Bag Phones, 512k RAM and 800 Mb Hard Drives aren't on the list of things to make a come back.

Centralized computing however, is. In the pioneer days of computing everything was hosted on your organizations main frame. These computing behemoths, with massive processing and storage, were a centralized computer that would rival my 2007 Macbook.   Servers hosted terminals all over the infrastructure, allowing users to slice out parts of the power to do their work. As hardware became cheaper it was proliferated out to users more or less indiscriminately. This shift  can be seen from the movie TRON to the movie Hackers. As such terminal based computing all but vanished (hat tipped to Gates, Woz, Jobs and the like). 

Enter 1998: VM Ware, a virtually (yes, I did) unheard of company selling a great piece of tech. computing with in computing. Virtualizing platforms on anything from workstations to dedicated servers. This paradigm shift is making its way into organizations across the globe. It is becoming common place for organizations to restructure their infrastructure to only hold their computing on server and place Multi Layer Thin Clients (terminals) at each users desk.  

The other advantage to centralizing is power cost reduction, both with regard to servers and workstations. If you are able to reduce the power consumption of you server stack by say 10% you also reduce the load on your HVAC reducing over all power consumption in your facilities. If this is implemented infrastructure wide you can have massive gains both in resource management and utilities cost. In the long run everyone likes to save money.

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets

give me the ability to do wonderful things in HTML anytime all the time with so much possibility its a but crazy

there are all sorts of things that I can do with a css document

however its hard to explain these things

so i chose to show you instead

Cascading style as you can see is really just the ability to take formatting and place it n a readily available format for all of your pages instead of on each sheet, it reduces overhead and increases cohesion in a site.  Gone are the days of copy pasting your style on every sheet of your site, now all you have to do is link the style sheet to your page and bang presto you have instant style...  for some maybe.

For a clearer understanding of how powerful CSS is check out the CSS Zen Garden

The Body Tag

The <body> tag is used to hold the content of a web page. This tag is probably the most important and least talked about tag in all of web design. Without it you can not display any of your design.

<body>

all displayed design must fall with in these two tags

without them your site is useless

without your site they are useless

body can't do design with out it

</body>

Facebook ReOrginization

In the ever changing landscape of social media, people now have one more thing to mind. The scrutiny being paid to Facebook (fb) is something that should not be taken lightly. With media, law enforcement, and the corporate world taking a vested interest in the content of fb, users should be careful with whats in their profile.

Denver man fired for complaining about work on Facebook is just the first Google search result that I found when I searched: facebook fired profile. It probably wouldn't take much for me to find various specific examples relating to other corporate issues, crime, or media saturation when it comes to the fb arena.

I know that my fb is different than most because my wife and I share a page. She is the business end of our fb and I occasionally reconnect with old friend or whatnot. A redesign for us would not be required. Most of our content is boring parenting stuff. If I had to do anything it would be to de-friend a few people that are obnoxious, but besides that theres not much on our fb that I'm not proud of.

Photoshop Tool

The channel is probably the best tool in Photoshop, the ability to stack images on top of each other and use them to create your final piece is probably one of the stand out features of Photoshop.

From the Adobe web help portal:
About channels

Channels are grayscale images that store different types of information:

• Color information channels are created automatically when you open a new image. The image’s color mode determines the number of color channels created. For example, an RGB image has a channel for each color (red, green, and blue) plus a composite channel used for editing the image.
• Alpha channels store selections as grayscale images. You can add alpha channels to create and store masks, which let you manipulate or protect parts of an image. (See About masks and alpha channels.)
• Spot color channels specify additional plates for printing with spot color inks. (See About spot colors.)
  An image can have up to 56 channels. All new channels have the same dimensions and number of pixels as the original image.
  The file size required for a channel depends on the pixel information in the channel. Certain file formats, including TIFF and Photoshop formats, compress channel information and can save space. The size of an uncompressed file, including alpha channels and layers, appears as the right-most value in the status bar at the bottom of the window when you choose Document Sizes from the pop‑up menu.
  Note: As long as you save a file in a format supporting the image’s color mode, the color channels are preserved. Alpha channels are preserved only when you save a file in Photoshop, PDF, TIFF, PSB, or raw formats. DCS 2.0 format preserves only spot channels. Saving in other formats may cause channel information to be discarded.

Basically what this tells us is that you can break your image into 56 distinct parts and use them to create different effects with each subtle portion of your design. Which in turn opens a huge level of possible creativity.

Start layering your ideas to create something new.

Comic Corner - Trebuchet.

I have often found that its not the actual comic that makes me laugh but the hover text that is associated with the comic, today's "XKCD" is a prime example. The Comic is funny, but the below hover text is the meat of the joke.

If the flyers don't work, we'll switch to the LEAST subtle

method of informing a town of the existence of a trebuchet club.