I guess I assumed these notes were limited to office and roommate situations. But apparently, passive-aggressive has made its way into the grocery store.

The If You Care line of environmentally-friendly products come in a sedate, unbleached box, setting a good example for their more colorful shelf-mates. Not that you’d notice.

Sure, you could choose the flashier competitor, if you don’t care about the planet. Apparently you don’t. If you did, you’d probably buy If You Care brand coffee filters. But that’s cool. Shade-grown, fair trade coffee is probably not your thing. You’re probably more of a Folgers drinker, huh? Whatever makes you happy. This is America!

No skin off our back if corporate coffee tastes better to you when it’s watered with the sweat of third-world workers, harvesting your morning beverage for near slave wages.

It’s nice to see pre-ground coffee, set against a snow-white filter backdrop. It’s just too bad that all the bleach used to make it white is polluting the groundwater. No matter – nothing like a nice cup of coffee to wake you up while you watch the acid rain. It’s your choice. If you care.

When I say branding consistency, I mean consistency in your message and presence. A great example of this was a recent rebranding that we did for Instructional Technologies, Inc. Their message was safe, trusted, and clear. However, their logo communicated a presence of static, archaic, and cluttered.

By understanding their message and how that is presented to their audience, we developed a logo that is truer to what they are trying to say to their customers.

In today’s economy, that 20 second impression means a lot more than it did a year ago.

I was completely blown away by the product. My baby loved it and I could tell that she was being entertained in an educational way, allowing me a few moments to get stuff done. Immediately I went online to find the web site for the company.

Like most of my peers, I spend a lot of time on the internet. A company’s web site tends to have a lot of influence over how I view that brand. A decent site impresses me, and will get a lot more of my time (and money, if applicable), while those that don’t get put on my blacklist. I tend to judge based on the following criteria:

1. Is it visually appealing?

2. Is it easy to navigate? (Could my mother figure it out?)

3. Is it interesting/engaging? (Can I waste away an hour and not even realize it?)

4. Does it improve my life?

The Baby Einstein site got high marks in all four categories.

Is this site visually appealing? Absolutely. It’s a very attractive site. I love the soft colors. I love the way the site moves and being able to click and drag and search to my heart’s content. There is a really nice interactive feeling to the site, which I enjoy.

Is this site easy to navigate? Not only is it easy, it’s a downright breeze. I am confident that any of my baby’s grandparents could feel right at home on this site. I was drawn in right away. On my initial visit, I clicked on “Our Products” and was given the choice to view by Category, Age or Theme. Nice! I clicked on ”Age” and was brought to a bar I could click and slide, making all the products beneath it scroll by. I liked being able to see everything so clearly. I hovered in between zero and three months and immediately found several products I wanted to learn more about. Clicking on any of these led me to a page where I could read a description, preview the product, purchase the product or read customer stories about the product.

Once I decided that I especially liked the DVDs, I wanted to preview them so I could figure out which to buy. This was as simple as clicking on “Explore by Category”, at which point it was easy to drag the bar to “DVDs.” Baby Mozart, Baby Beethoven, Baby’s First Sounds…they were all there, and I could even watch them with my baby to see how she liked them. (She chose Baby Mozart.)

Is this site engaging? You bet. There are so many cool features on this web site. Use the handy Gift Finder to figure out what Baby Einstein product to get for that baby in your life (it recommended the Musical Motion Activity Jumper for my baby, in case anyone out there was wondering). Read about the history of the company, view their latest awards, learn the best age-appropriate ways to expose your baby to art, music, nature and more, or read the blog of the company founder. Read questions from real parents and answers from a child development expert on the advice page, or check out the featured family and learn about how they use Baby Einstein products.

Did this site make my life easier? Definitely. I loved my first Baby Einstein product and how helpful it was to me as a new mom. This site made it easy for me to figure out what else I wanted to buy for my baby, as well as helped me figure out what I will need in the future. I found an easy way to both entertain and educate my baby, and that is really valuable.

Baby Einstein is a site I visit often, and I recommend it to any other new moms I know. New mothers often feel isolated, clueless, overwhelmed and freaked out. Baby Einstein offers community, advice, shopping and fun all in one place. Their site gives me nothing but a very positive impression of their brand, and they have secured me as a customer for life.

Download the PDF version.

What’s New in Lingo Bingo: Creative Edition?

• Edgy, retro graphics ripped from the pages of Craphound
• Giant Pop Art logo rotated at an illegiby hip 90-degree angle and bleeding off 3 sides of the page, margins be damned!
• Caution! Diagonal yellow lines as a background pattern!
• Toner-sucking full-color graphics, carefully, intentionally mis-registered!
• Skull and crossbones!
• Funky, hipper-than-thou Emigre fonts!
• Overprints!
• Trade Gothic!

* And by win, I mean “achieve a level of self-satisfaction marginally higher than you had before completing the fifth square in the sequence.”

Yesterday, I was eager to take advantage of post-Christmas sales to create the beginning of my 2009 wardrobe. (Those of you that know me know about my fashion expertise!)

After reviewing the dozens of direct mail fliers that arrive at my house each month, I decided to check out the sale prices at Nordstroms.com and Macy’s.com. Both web sites were similar, decent functionality and tons of stuff on sale. But it is very hard to evaluate a shirt’s texture and feel online, so I decided to take the brave step of going real-world shopping.  After all, the Pop Art office is 1 block from Nordstom’s and 3 blocks from Macy’s! Moreover, most major e-commerce merchants have yet to incorporate good “people watching” technologies and food courts into their web sites.

So, I loaded my wallet with plastic, and headed to Macy’s. I love Macy’s product catalog – tons of great products from beds and linens to clothing. I was prepared to lay down a couple G’s … maybe take advantage of the sales to even start on the 2010 wardrobe!

My experience at Macy’s yesterday:

1. Macy’s had some customers, but wasn’t overly busy given the holiday sale.
2. Greeted promptly by nice perfume ladies passing out samples.
3. Hung out in clothing department for 30 minutes, not offered help by a single sales rep. (What, you don’t like my perfume?)
4. Sale prices were confusing. You could get 50% off + 10% if you have a Macy’s card + 10% if you have a coupon? I asked one cashier about this, but I think she said you only get the 10% discount once, I didn’t quite understand her answer, and I couldn’t remember if I had a Macy’s charge card or not.
5. Shopped in linen’s department for 15 minutes, not offered any help. Picked out some bath towels to purchase, but then left (without buying them) because the cashier was too slow.
6. Total amount I spent = $0.

My experience at Nordstom’s today:

1. Half-yearly Men’s sale + post-holiday sale. Store had moderate traffic, similar to Macy’s the day before.
2. Sales rep greeted me & offered to help me within 30 seconds of me entering Men’s department. Other sales reps were also on the prowl for customers. (I learned they have a policy that customers should be greeted within 60 seconds).
3. I said that I wanted to look around first, but once I was ready for help, the sale’s rep gave me her undivided attention until I had completed my purchase. This included everything from her offering to hold stuff for me, looking up inventory, product suggestions, an offer to give me free shipping on anything out-of-stock.
4. I spent $500.

So, here are the take-away lessons:

• You can heavily discount your products, but keep pricing and sales terms easy to understand.
• All the discounting in the world won’t help you if your service is lousy.
• Provide your customers with friendly, personalized service and they will spend more money with you!

If for some reason, you don’t have enough sales reps, use computer technology to supplement the human touch. Interactive computer kiosks could have helped Macy’s as follows:

• They could have had kiosk allowing me to request help from a store employee.
• They could have had a kiosk to allow me to check myself out given that the cashier line was slow.

The best companies use both human touch and computer technology to synthesize the ideal customer experience.

Hopefully, Macy’s was just having a bad day. I’ll give them another chance in about six months.

Well, its finaly here. Election day has come again and its time for you to go out and cast your vote. I thought it would be fun to take a look at how design has influenced the political arena over the years.

Some of these are real classics. Bonus points if you can find the Goldwater sticker.

I think the realization that the candidates are a “brand” is more evident this election. The Obama people figured this out and really created a great look, with historic,feel good images and colors.

One of your biggest problems is earning mindshare from your customers. As I like to remind salespeople, “Billions of potential customers don’t even know that your company and its products exist!” And those that know about you, aren’t necessarily thinking about you, or thinking the right things about your brand.

And the deck is stacked against you:

1. Broadcast advertising (online, print, TV) is too expensive.
2. Your customers have more control than ever — you can guide the conversation about your brand, you can’t control it.
3. Brand-touch points have proliferated. People are suffering from information bombardment and overload. (Just like you, their inboxes are overflowing!)

We are going through a cultural sea change due to globalism, the Internet and the proliferation of on-demand content.

It seems that all of society has ADHD! People filter out advertising. Nobody return sales calls. Even worse, they can’t always get the important things done. Time management seems impossible.

The good news is that your competition has the same problem!

A great interactive agency can help you to take a professional and complete approach to the problem:

1. Messaging: Create messages that are memorable and on-strategy.
2. Visual Design: Reduce the clutter and look great.
3. Interactive Development: Create platforms that let you push a few messages; but above all, let customers pull the content they want on-demand and then interact with you and your brand.

The great news is that amidst market chaos and change, there is huge opportunity for your company to leapfrog the competition and dominate your industry.

It is times like these that empires rise and fall.

It’s not rocket science, but it ain’t a cakewalk. You need trusted advisors that take the time to understand your business and the markets you serve. You need partners with the passion, talent, time and discipline to lead you with an integrated approach and quickly deliver upon it.

Brands, like humans, face a similar existential challenge. We want to be remembered!

I think Simple Minds said it best:

As you walk on by
Will you call my name?
As you walk on by
Will you call my name?
When you walk away
Or will you walk away?
Will you walk on by?
Come on – call my name
Will you call my name?

The song is all about branding.

Photo Credits as per Creative Commons licensing: Augmented Reality Mobile Phone by Leonard Low, and Shanghai at Night by http2007.

On the way back, we had to cross the border back into the U.S., and on Sundays, the line can be pretty long. We waited almost two hours, which was annoying, but gave me time to fixate on a particularly odd element of the experience and think far too deeply on it. I give you: America’s First Brand Touchpoint.

The first thing that struck me was how ugly it is. The red, white and blue color palette seems self-evident, but the type? Yuck. I mean, was “Brush Script” really the best font the designer could come up with? Don’t get me wrong … plenty of good fonts (Helvetica and Futura, to name a few) come with a computer when you buy one, but Brush Script is not one of them. Here’s what this sign says to me:

The second thing I fixated on was the illustrations. They definitely represent some of America’s top tourist attractions, and are probably the icons most strongly associated with these 50 nifty united states (although I had to think about what the Capitol was for a minute). The sign is missing one of my favorites, South Dakota’s Corn Palace, which would be someplace between the Arch and Mt. Rushmore.

More puzzling than the choice of landmarks is their order. Considering maps’ typical orientation formula, where “north=up,” the order of the illustrations is backwards. The west coast should be on the left, and the easternmost icons on the right.

But then, I thought maybe this designer is smarter than I am giving him credit for. Maybe he is orienting the sign to the northern visitor’s perspective. Facing south towards the U.S., you’d head left (or east) to reach the Statue of Liberty, and keep on going straight to hit Seattle’s iconic tower.

When I considered the adjoining timber supports, I decided the designer hadn’t given it much thought at all, from the type to the material choices. We’re rolling out the welcome wagon for the huddled masses, and the “designer” chooses pressure treated lumber cut in a faux-pioneer style? No wonder people hate us. They come looking for freedom, and we give them bad taste incarnate: copper-impregnated, third-string lumber and a default font. Welcome to America, land of lazy designers.

If you’ve never flown Southwest, try it sometime. It takes a bit of getting used to, what with the un-assigned seating, friendly, sometimes comedic employees and general low-key atmosphere, but I think you’ll find it a welcome relief from the cut-rate, commodity service most airlines today provide.

While in the midst of a recent multi-city trip, some personal events came up required me to change travel plans at the last minute. I needed to cancel the Southwest leg of my trip, and buy a ticket on a different airline (Southwest doesn’t service the city I needed to reach). Concerned I would lose my ticket, I called Southwest, planning on a long, difficult phone call that would likely end in disappointment. After all, that’s what years of dealing with other airlines has conditioned me for.

Instead, on the third or fourth ring, I reached an actual human being, one who spoke clearly and professionally, and one who was extremely sympathetic to my predicament. Not that it mattered – Southwest has an anytime cancellation process. They simply release your ticket so someone else can use it, and you are free to use the money towards any trip in the next year. No fees, no arguing, no special exceptions. Everyone gets this treatment.

Today, I decided to cash in my ticket for another trip (to see the Iowa Hawkeyes play Penn State in Iowa City with my dad). I looked up tickets, found what I was looking for easily (their web site has exhibits exceptional usability), and started the checkout process. I applied the funds from my cancelled trip by entering the old confirmation code in a highly-visible form field, and the price was reduced then and there. No customer service call required. Another airline would probably have wanted a phone call at the least, and might have required an in-person chat at the airport.

After the voucher was applied, there was still a balance remaining, and I reached for my wallet, prepared to get my credit card out. No need! Southwest takes PayPal! I simply entered my e-mail address and PayPal password, and I was done! A confirmation e-mail appeared in my inbox before you could say “tabbed browsing.” I have never seen another airline offer this payment option,* and I applaud Southwest for adopting it – PayPal is designed for online payments, unlike Visa or Mastercard (whose cards seem to get stolen with appalling frequency).

So kudos to you, Southwest. You understand that today’s influential brands are more than a logo and a catchy jingle. Today’s best brands focus on top-notch usability, excellent customer service, and focus on the customer’s needs. Done right, you get people like me blogging about you. Done wrong, you have your customers price-shopping on ticket auction sites (Kayak.com is my new favorite).

* I do have one question: what does the TSA think about PayPal? I know paying cash for a plane ticket is a red flag … I wonder what they think of digital cash?

The new logo reflects our passion, creativity, style, and attitude as we carry out the principles of the Pop Art movement with a unique brand of explosive creativity.

The first pass was just throwing some ideas at the wall. My goal was to create something cleaner than the existing logo, something that would work better across media, at small sizes, and in different uses (the old one was tough to use on dark backgrounds). Additionally, our new location gave us the opportunity to have a large vertical sign, which the old logo wasn’t well-suited for. I wrote down a bunch of words, but the one that seemed to stick was this idea of “expansion” and that of the logo literally popping from being over-inflated. A personal favorite from this round was logo D. I thought it was clever to use the ® mark as part of the logo as a comment on the commercial nature of our work. Clever, but a little obvious.

In round 2, I refined the exploding/expansion idea further and ended up with logo A. Yes, I know the font is Bank Gothic, and yes, I know what a cliche font it is. The intention was to get an idea across and work on refining things like the font a little later. Ben created logo E, which I thought was a lot of fun, playing on the expansion idea in more of an entropy/Big Bang sense, with concentric rings that could represent sound or percussion waves. The use of Helvetica seems very appropriate to the commercial use of this logo. Intern Tom Solitt threw out something that we all thought was a great idea – a bottle cap logo (C). I liked the idea of opening something to release the good stuff – a pretty good metaphor for what we do. Web projects are often all about getting information from behind the corporate firewall and into the eager public’s hands. Steve’s personal idea (and an interesting one, at that) was to appropriate another company’s logo in a different context as Warhol did in the transition from soup to fine art. Logo B is inspired by Toys R Us’ logo. The old logo (F, if you’re playing at home) was inspired by the Tide detergent logo.

After this round, we sent the contenders out to Pop Art’s entire staff for their thoughts. Each team member was asked to pick their 3 favorites in order of importance. My logo was chosen, with a lot of support coming from our development team (who liked the “high tech” look of Bank Gothic).

For further evaluation, we placed the bake-off winner among some local and national companies in the same mind-space, to use some jargon, and the team felt we were headed in the right direction visually, since the new logo could easily compete visually.

Still, Steve was unsure this version was exactly right, and he asked me to go back to the drawing board for some more exploration. I spent an afternoon at home with pen and sketchpad, and did quite a bit of doodling. Here were a few favorites (or if you’re really crazy, download a PDF of my sketches to the tune of 6.1MB).

Steve, Justin and I all got together to review the sketches I’d done, and selected a few to elaborate further on. All of us were pretty much in agreement on the below sketches and felt we were getting really close.

We selected logos A and E for final polish and elected to view them in context. This seems like a no-brainer, but none of us had really gone through this step in a logo process before and I feel it’s worth repeating. I was initially drawn to logo E, but after seeing it in context on business cards (below) and in other venues (Here’s a PDF of the PA web site and our forthcoming media kit, 884KB), I was sold on logo A. And so was the rest of the team.

With a little more tweaking, a little more kerning, and developing a full range of logo uses, we were finally there. Er … here. Interestingly, Chank’s Adrianna font from round 1 is used in the final logo (a great compromise between business and fun), and I incorporated Ben’s early CMYK idea in some of the identity materials we developed (hence the logo on those background colors.