Make a website that people visit every day of the year? Easier said than done.
Exposing your brand is the easy part – but making it memorable is a task that corporations spend millions of dollars on. The beauty of the internet age is that we can build websites that visitors themselves make the content for. Think of the competitions where you win a holiday – ‘Just write in your craziest holiday story to enter’ – by doing so you are contributing, creating and remembering. Often it’s remembering the crazy story that you made up to try win a trip to Fiji, but maybe, just maybe, it was remembering the brand running the promotion.
New Balance 365 is a website essentially promoting, well, New Balance. There’s no fancy new product. No new ‘climate  change awareness’ message. Not even a sale. Just a brand and a concept. This website encourages users to submit a short film and the best of every day gets a spot on the New Balance 365 calendar. All the film needs to do is portray a sense of balance. There are some quite creative films, so be sure to check it out!
When we see, feel or hear only half of an instant we use our other senses to fill in the blanks. Sometimes we can help fill in and manipulate those blanks with special effects. Check out this prime example of changing the scene by using only sound.
What a topic to cover in the first StudioTalk post … corporate branding standards at their best.
Corporations only too often spend gazillions of dollars on their logo and branding styles, and usually you can see where that money went. However, occasionally you see a high-profile company decide not to bother with those big branding bills and instead let the CEO’s 3-year-old son have a go at it. Enter Telecom’s new logo.
The epitome of an already poor design is when you cannot justify your design decisions. I quite like this quote from a Telecom spokeswoman: “[The new Telecom logo] did not allude to anything and that customers could interpret as they liked”. Plain and simple. They might as well have said “so we ran out of ideas, decided to drop the budget and it was the school holidays – my son had nothing better to do anyway!” Solid.
I do quite enjoy the amount of grief that Telecom is receiving from this branding blunder, only because it is a wake up call to designers (not to mention CEOs and head decision-makers) that when you’re doing a branding project, you are in the limelight (which is the whole point really). And lets face it, everyone is a critic, especially when the blunder is on our home turf. Come on New Zealand – we can do better than this!
