What or who is my audience?

September 9, 2011 under Design, Marketng, News

When delivering a design product of any type we often have to revisit the question about who this is aimed at. What is my audience. Often new businesses or ones that have been initially spontaneous have to come back to a point where they need to consider who their audience is. He greatest difficulty would be to understand that the question requires the viewpoint of the audience, and so begins the stages of hpothesis. Most fully functioned tradititional businesses would have developed a research package to get these answers, therefore making a sound business that should in theory be a reasonable sucess if this is what the research tells us.

The design, or business, process for those of us with less business accumin leaves us to ignore all this hard work. On this fine dreary, rainy, cloudy (i could keep going here) British morning, between my commute, I have Somehow been awoken to another way of thinking about how to understand our audience and how to market to them.

Lets face it, going to work can be boring and even if we love our jobs there is a though that pops into our heads. Why can we just live life with all of its simple things. The simple things are thigs we all go through at some point. We all have family, children, need food and drink and the ability to make our own. There is also the aspect of personal care and looking good to feel good. In all honesty there are many things other than this in our lives and they are onpy important because they relate to our workig lives. People really want to work, and have to work, for their basic survival and to enjoy the ‘finer things’.

Back to business. There are many businesses that sell b2b which is one area I wont cover, but there are many other areas where people either need the finer things or want an easy business life so that they can get an even better personal life. This is where the divide is.

When trying to understand your audience its clear that its no for everyone. I it is, then you are part of the first layer where your product is available to help people have a better quality of living.

The second layer is where you need to run our business and make it run smoothly so that i keeps you happy on a personal level and allows you to live a smooth personal life.

My thoughts on this area are essentially that we are all people, or human bei gs, and have feelings and emotions. If work is integrated in our life then we must take evey opportunity to make each other happy by providin the best we can offer in our personal and business/working lives.

The second layer may outline what seems to be a business to business layer but on looking back at trying to understand who our audience is, you may find that I have made it sound different, and heres how.

If its difficult to set a marketing strategy then its probably because you dont know how important your service is. If you can make someone happy in business then you are quite simply making them happy.

When considering who your audience is, I would suggest that we try our best to send out subliminal messages that imply the giving of a happier life in relation to to both a personal happiness.

comments: 1 »

get creative with web design

March 28, 2011 under Design, Social Media, Web

I seem to have started the thinking of this blog piece on a more tranquil note. The sun is out yet again now its spring (not sure if this is official yet) and the clocks have gone against me, loosing me time in bed. On this fine Monday I have been asked a question on twitter by @mazrred. What’s the best way to ‘get creative’ with website design? (www.soseriouslysocial.com Getting ready for the LAUNCH 01.04.11)

The overall format and structure is the same so that people understand what they are getting and how to get to the right information for them. Website are not about design any more, sure they have to look good to a degree, but understanding what you are offering and knowing how to lay this out is important. For example, your entrance and your shop window may need to be visual to catch everyone, or simple and detailed for the people who know what they want. The experience on your site must seem fairly straight forward and that the content you provide is interesting and relevant to the site. Usability is still hugely ignored as being part of the creative process.

Once everything seems to be in order, you can guarantee, its not. I am aware that so far I may have dodged the question about creative web design slightly. The reality is that you have now done all the hard work by getting an understanding of your values in written form. If you had to visualise the content of your site and symbolise the vibe or experience of the site, you have your design, or visual identity.

When people talk about brands and wanting the express themselves in the right way, they seem to always ask me about it because they struggle. When I sit down and talk to them about what they are doing and why, whilst poking them for the right info, I then repeat what they have said. Somehow, this magically changes everything and they can visualise their website and their brand. Making a visually creative website can be easy if you listen to what you want. If you are wanting a website and know what you may want then you have ll the answers. The reason for this is because you have built up an ideology of your brand already and by dismantling it into many pieces you can now use some of these bits and put together a new and slightly different vision that could be the creative version of your website you are looking for.

I promise this will be the final bit now. When Biz Stone and his mates founded Twitter they knew that they wanted something light and airy (blue sky) and that it had to be simple and almost natural (nature element) for people to use. The community online would hopefully become organic and flourish (yet more nature words) and some how people should be able to harp on about things that interest them. So why sis they avoid the name harp? Other than the fact that to twitter on at some one was an old fashioned term, why did they feel it was right. It was because they knew what they were doing and they knew what it had to do. It had to be natural, so the name and brand had to be sky blue, on cloud nine, bubble font and have a natural symbolic element.

Even if this was an oil company, the plan of what they were doing was already on a path that was in some ways pre-determined by their actions and thoughts, just like you when you are building your website.

New addition – audioboo on how it the twitter name was decided.

Listen!

comments: 0 »

The evolution of Starbucks

March 10, 2011 under Design, Graphic

Starbucks have been going string for years. Is it really that drastic of a change. We take you back in time slightly.

Apparently Starbucks have been around for 40 years. Their brand has managed to grab our attentions mainly because its in your face on the high streets. Over the years there seems to be a lot of changes to the structure of the organisation. Through the takeover and Howard Schultz joining the company in 1982, as Director of Retail Operations and Marketing, the brand used the first brown logo.

The company is named in part after Starbuck, Captain Ahab’s first mate in the novel Moby-Dick, as well as a turn-of-the-century mining camp (Starbo or Storbo) on Mount Rainier. According to Howard Schultz’s book Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, the name of the company was derived from Moby-Dick, although not in as direct a fashion as many assume. Gordon Bowker liked the name “Pequod” (the ship in the novel), but his then creative partner Terry Heckler responded, “No one’s going to drink a cup of Pee-quod!” Heckler suggested “Starbo”. Brainstorming with these two ideas resulted in the company being named for thePequod’s first mate, Starbuck.

In 1992 the large global company was gaining more trademarks and intellectual copyrights in many different companies. Due to past controversy and potential global capitalisation, Starbucks changed their logo and even covered up the navel to make it a sleeker and bolder visual. This change was already developed once but still resembled the original more. The one thing that seems more distinctive that most people forget is that over brown coffee stained brown was scrapped for what can only be assumed as being an ego-friendly and much greener green. This colour scheme change is what I believe is the key difference that allowed this brand to be noticed. From a designers point of view this opened the doors to many other possibilities as this logo can now be used on white, which is clearly a designers dream.

So I guess this brings us to the next stage where we visit the new logo for 2011 onwards. This logo simply develops and evolves the brand into another era by making things simpler. We all know the lady in the illustration. So why not just show that. After all, McDonald’s now only keep the golden arches as their logo, its the same principle that helps push global brands that bit further.

This article was spring boarded news from the Drum website.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

comments: 0 »

Eames Postage Stamps

February 28, 2011 under Design

In the 1950’s Charles & Ray Eames began a mission to create furniture for the masses, furniture that would be considered functional, elegant and affordable to common people. Their furniture has since proven longevity, but has become synonymous with high design at premium prices. With a new edition of commemorative stamps that honor their legacy, Eames has a real shot now at becoming the household name it has long deserved to be.

comments: 0 »

Real or Virtual knowledge?

February 23, 2011 under Design, Web

During making my audioboo’s I often find that they are quick, of the mark and always a good starting point. In this boo I have reached out to open pandora’s box around the real verses the digital world.

After looking at choreographer Luca Silvertrini talk about his open attitude to the online world, it made me think about the experiences we face online and how these may differ to a real world situation. It seems that many of us on-line forget that there is a clock ticking. The instant gratification and feel good factor for simply spending two minutes time online is enough to grab you for a week. Surely this is an unfair exchange rate.

If we compare this to the real world, where we can touch and see people move, well this is very different. If you pass someone on a rss feed nobody cares. If you pass someone on the street, I may be put off by their look, smell or simply because I may dislike something about them. Its an instant reaction based on your personality you can not hide.

So when we decide to hide things online and seclude our emotions, as opposed to revealing them to everyone suggestively, in the real world, does this then lead to a further deterioration in confidence and ability to achieve. In order to achieve and gain any level of success one must over come some barriers.

The on-line world allows us to remove these barriers, which is great, but its also not that good because its now stopping us from developing. This marvellous piece of art mentioned in the metro paper seems to be developed in a very fitting style that explores real work experiences. The only problem is that you have to go out and experience it for yourself to be able to view this little masterpiece called “lol (lots of love)”.

LOL (lots of love) Trailer

comments: 0 »

Text vs Flash

February 23, 2011 under Design, Web

I remember a time where everybody was developing flash sites. Even now there are markets that need to use flash as they are the industry standard. Since moving cities I have learnt that there was a new kid in town.

Before what I consider to be the Internet Mobile user boom, there was another boom in the web world. New class styles and more geek code work changed the face of the boring html and css became more and more popular. Not only that but the css code was actually beautiful and some people made some great looking sites.

So what happened to flash! Well its fairly simple,from my view point, the Macromedia Bunch sold out to adobe. Its here that problems began. Flash in particular did not really get pushed or developed at all. There was some work involved in implementing and weaving php, mysql and css into the flash file, however with some of these the question was, why use flash and still insert css?! So all in all there is no real point to it. As this goes on the w3c standards exploded and primed up more relevant new standards that meant css was a lot more robust and up to date.

If the story was not juicy enough, then Apple came on the scene. There was a visual use for flash however it was seen as not suitable for seo and was slightly too unstable to run. With these reasons in mind Apple banned it from the new itouch and iphone. But this left people wanting slight animations and flash looking sites. The current trend, with the help of sites like mootools and jquery, is to use javascript as it remains seo friends and makes swooshy sites.

On a slightly different note, many of us forget about disabled accessibility until the day where we heard it could become a legal requirement to cater for this. The reality is that websites were on a path to change so that they could be easily accessible to all people.

In a long story short, websites are built using css because flash is now seen as obsolete because Apple have helped kick it out. The fact that IE was no longer a viable secure and decent browser did not help much either.

The real way forward in today’s world seems to be to use systems that are user friendly, engaging and can communicate at different levels. The Internet has gone back to basics and has seems to be looking at the content and how its placed before the overall look. Well, on that high note, it seems that this is one good reason for designers to get back to designing and not worrying too much about the visual capabilities. Its the content that matters … sometimes!

comments: 0 »