Neil Summerour’s recipe for his latest text family was to take “a little Dwiggins, throw in some Benton with a hint of Austin, wrap it up in a crisp, contemporary package and serve.” Magneta combines the proportions of a renaissance oldstyle with the vertical stress first seen in Baskerville’s type and the Scotch Romans. The designer’s aim was to “simplify, simplify, simplify.” Despite these efforts, the typeface is full of delicate details that will work best in large sizes, such as the terminals on a, c and r, the slightly cursive counter of the roman e, the lozenge-shaped dots, and much more. The family comes in two widths and has a lot of extras, including some fun majuscule ligatures and a smart set of Decorative Ornaments.

Ideefixe Designs is expanding it’s creative and marketing services in hopes of helping local businesses brand and market themselves with a new destination co-op initiative called “Town and City Shopping“.  For more than 10  years, Ideefixe Designs has created some of the most memorable and effective graphic design and marketing materials for corporate clients, non profits and special events, but the cry for a co-op marketing concept has been long awaited.  As we prepare for the next 10 years — we are always up for the challenge of thinking outside the box — we believe Town and City shopping now in beta mode will be the answer.

Take a look at the first project initiative at “Shop Historic Murrieta“.  The Shop Historic Murrieta project is in collaboration with the City of Murrieta, CA

Your comments, questions and concerns are welcome.

Ideefixe Designs: A Brand Communication Studio
www.ideefixedesigns.com

Social media is as much an evolutionary reality as walking upright, yet small businesses continue to find reasons not to participate.  A recent study of 500 small businesses found that the vast majority of owners are neither marketing their business nor getting business information through social media.  This is sadly reminiscent of the situation a little over a decade ago now when small business reluctantly came to the internet.

In a previous post I took aim at some of the most prevalent excuses among small businesses for staying on the social media sidelines.  From the fear of latent “employee tweeting” to anxiety about brand-bashing in the blogosphere, small businesses are to a large extent, psyching themselves out of social media.

Having said that, I do feel that there are a few legitimate (but still very surmountable) reasons for not diving headlong into social media.   Here are what I regard as being the top three.

1.  No Budget:  The early press on social media spawned a misconception that it was without cost.  Well, if time is worth nothing, then that’s correct.  But of course time isn’t free – whether it’s your own time or someone else’s.  While websites are like houses that are built and then perhaps added onto, a social media program is more like a garden that requires daily attention in order to grow and stay healthy.  In the early stages you may be able to handle the workload yourself, but as your social media garden grows, it may be wise to hire someone to manage it for you.  You should also budget for a range of ancillary costs.  You may need to “tweak” your website, adding feeds and links to and from social media channels as the need arises.

2.  No Plan:  The social media highway is becoming littered with companies that began without a plan and broke down shortly after setting out.  Without objectives and a clear sense of the steps required to succeed, social media can be highly ineffective and even detrimental. How you use social medial, the media channels you choose, and to whom you direct your messages are vitally important.  You need to ask yourself some questions before setting out.  Do you see social media as a customer service tool or a means of spreading information about products or promotions…or both?    Do you intend to write a full blog or just share bite-size pieces of information through micro-blogs like Twitter?  Which social media channels are your customers actively using or engaging in and how can you connect with them?  Will you measure success in terms of sales or simply the number of customer relationships you develop?  And what is a customer relationship worth to you?

3.  No Content:  If social media were a rocket, content would be the fuel that propels it.  And with the extraordinary growth of social media, quality content is rapidly becoming the primary differentiator between successful and unsuccessful Social Media programs.  Content can take a variety of forms including blogs, video, photos or podcasts.  Regardless of your choice, the only iron-clad requirement is that the content has real value to someone- hopefully the target audience.  If you don’t see yourself developing original content, then perhaps you can leverage some from your suppliers, manufacturers or even trade associations. Content doesn’t have to be home grown to be valuable.  There’s value in being an aggregator of information for your audience and creating an epicenter for what’s new and exciting in your product or service category.

So, while there are some very legitimate reasons for not rushing into social media, none of them are showstoppers.  They just require solid planning, management and ongoing attention and that’s really nothing new…is it?

This article was found on Retail Prophet Consultings blog site.

Ideefixe Designs: A Brand Communication Studio
www.ideefixedesigns.com

We are helping iExchange in communicating the need to help little Ben Zimmer by sharing the news about A Bike For Ben. Support A Bike For Ben today!

Ideefixe Designs: A Brand Communication Studio
www.ideefixedesigns.com

According to Buckingham, the way to achieve this is through brand engagement—ensuring the alignment of organizational policies, people and activities with brand values and gearing them toward meeting customer needs. A lack of clarity about values, behaviors, strengths and expertise within an organization, he says, results in significant problems.

The disconnect between personal and corporate values leads to employees trying to protect themselves by adopting on-brand masks, Buckingham says. Instead of delivering authenticity, they present the prevailing culture with what they believe it will find useful. Meanwhile, if the culture doesn’t resonate with their core values, they exhibit defensive behaviors.

Packaging
The problems facing service brands today bring to mind the role that product packaging played in the late 19th century in helping product brands gain the trust of consumers. Prior to the 1900s, most products were sold in bulk from bins at the point of sale. By the beginning of the 20th century, packages had established product boundaries (limiting the possibilities of product adulteration), even as they associated manufacturers’ names with guaranteed levels of product quality.

But, as historian Thomas Hine notes in The Total Package (1995), one element of early packaging design was also part of a larger social revolution. According to Hine, the practice of putting faces on packages in the early 1900s, for example, was characteristic of a social transition from judging people based on their personalities to judging them based on the masks they wore. These masks or personae allowed strangers displaced by the social dislocations of the late 19th century to interact with relative anonymity. Consumers could get information from package labels that they had previously relied on shopkeepers for.

But in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, package design increasingly reverted to being an expression of brand personality and, in the process, became nearly synonymous with branding. Driven by creative geniuses like graphic designer Walter Landor, package designs resonated strongly with consumers in post-WWII America, whose economy was mainly driven by product manufacturing.

By the early 1960s—as America’s economy was becoming more service-based—the restaurant chain McDonald’s had proved that services could be branded by successfully delivering on promises about service quality. The company’s staff was trained to be friendly, polite and courteous in a way that was completely in alignment with the brand’s promise. In the process, the restaurant chain demonstrated that the trademark, name and design were just elements of the brand that also included an experience.

As the number of service brands grew, expectations about what could be packaged began to shift. Hine said in 2005, “The people who are doing the design aspect of packaging have all in the last 15 years or so tried to cast themselves—recast themselves, as brand experts because they realized that an awful lot of what had to be packaged was in many cases not the physical product.” According to Hine, this included services.

Richard Westendorf, executive creative director at Landor Associates in Cincinnati, shared the following anecdote: “A few years ago, we had a local wireless company [as a client]. When you’re selling services with wireless, there is nothing to sell. All the switching is going on over the wire. But you have to have something tangible to scan. They literally sold it in a box on a peg in a store. It’s an opportunity to express some kind of brand promise in a structure of some kind. It feels like people have that innate desire for [that]—rather than simply enjoying the service. There are all kinds of different ways a package can manifest itself.”

Service Brand Promise
The financial crisis that erupted in the US raised lasting questions about our ability to trust financial service institutions. Buckingham explains, “Reflect on how many financial service brands project brand values like integrity, trust, heritage, customer service and professionalism. Employees understand that this is a marketing stance. Too many, however, also understand that the prevailing internal culture is increasingly characterized by winning, eliminating competition, survival of the fittest and short-termism.”

In his book, Buckingham draws on Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? to illustrate how people can successfully change outmoded behavior. Johnson’s book tells the story of four personable critters who have to navigate a maze to find a new supply of cheese when their old source vanishes. The tale underscores the notion that brand engagement is about changing behavior. According to Buckingham, the CEO and local line managers are responsible for teaching their employees these new behaviors.

Herb Meyers, co-founder of Gerstman+Meyers (now Interbrand) and the co-author of two books on package design, apparently agrees. “It’s really the leadership that sets the tone and thereby selects how their ‘brand’ is perceived by the public,” he says. “Employees follow only what they are instructed to do by the company leaders. If the leaders teach them to be honest and ethical, they will ‘fit into that box’ or they will be fired. If the leaders are not following an orthodox behavior pattern, the employees will not ‘fit into that box’ either.” Meyers, however, does not rule out outside help in getting people on-brand. “It could be a psychologist, or someone trained in behavioral counseling, who develops a ‘package’ to translate the corporate philosophy to the staff,” he adds.

Brand value, after all, begins at home.

This article was orginally posted on brandchannel.com and titled as “ Brand Engagement: Packaging Service Brands” by Randall Frost

Last weekend my niece was too insistent, asking me to accompany her to an exhibition at her Design School. She believed that I will be taken aback by the remarkable design projects of fresh grads and trust me I did not regret my approval. However, looking at the creative artpieces of those young chaps made a question tick in my mind, which we all don’t think of answering seriously.

Why was it that all the students from the same college, same badge with the same graphic design lessons did not come up with equally remarkable work? Today I want you all to help me clear this confusion… when so many people are going through the same educational process but why only few succeed to come up with extraordinary creations?

In my opinion it’s the gifted spark which is possessed by few people. I’ve heard the argument so many times that art can be learned, but I think people with the natural right artistic sense can only succeed. The vast information available on net has made it easy for people (without any sense of design and aesthetics) to claim themselves as graphic designers. A non artistic person can be taught about designing but I don’t honestly think they can truly create a good design.

I strongly believe that design lessons and degrees can “one” one’s skills to a certain level of perfection but if someone lacks the imaginative talent, he can’t be a successful designer. There are so many people who have successfully obtained their designer degrees from top universities who can become “good” designers, but will never be “great”. If there’s not at least some of that innate thing we call “talent” though, there is no way to get it.

However, many people strongly believe that an individual can be whatever he wants to be, no matter if he is not bestowed with any god-given talent, just practise and determination can fill in the space.

How many of you agree that hard work, determination and motivation are such crucial requirements to achieve success, which talent cannot do? Well, my vote goes for “Talent”…let’s see how you guys have valid points to prove your opinion.

Mainstream brands such as Godrej, Shoppers Stop, India Post and CEAT Tyres have undertaken rebranding initiatives to shed their old corporate images and position themselves in a new, more modern light. Some have simply upgraded their logos, while others dug much deeper. Which leads branding enthusiasts to wonder, just what is the difference between an identity refresher and a true rebranding—and when is one, and not the other, needed?

Is changing the logo enough?

In situations where firmly established brands become outdated, rebrands can be tricky, and often resemble identity makeovers rather than full-blown rebrands. For example, Godrej—a major engineering and consumer products brand—used its name as a logo in an uninspired font for more than a century. Rather than completely changing the image of the brand—and thus alienating their loyal customer base built over time—Godrej decided to change its logo to the vibrant colors green, blue and ruby. “We haven’t done away with the old logo, as it represents quality and trust, but given it a fresh contemporary look to reflect the new positioning of ‘Brighter Living’,” says Tanya Dubash, executive director of marketing for Godrej Industries.

“The older generation associated the Godrej brand with almirahs (cupboards) and locks. Today, the product portfolio has increased [appliances, furniture, foods, soaps and personal care, etc.] and the identity change helps conveys this message,” explains Siddhartha Bindra, creative director for Euro RSCG in Mumbai.

But is this logo change enough to bring Godrej’s brand into the modern marketplace—especially one that’s hypercompetitive?

According to Ashish Mishra, chief strategist and business head, Water Consulting, the answer is yes. “The new logo of Godrej helps address the issue of lack of innovation and signifies the new [product] developments taking place within the company,” he says. There is no reason to completely rebrand a brand that isn’t suffering from an internal identity complex. Sometimes creating an effective logo is enough to upgrade an identity and penetrate markets.

Abhijit Avasthi, executive creative director of Ogilvy & Mather, South Asia, states, “There are some brands where heritage is important and it is foolish to get rid of it, in order to stay relevant with the times.”

Brand identity in India

Anand Halve, co-founder of chlorophyll, a brand and communications consultancy, says, “The notion of brand identity as representative of something more than a recognizable symbol is relatively new in India…brand names and symbols in the past often did not represent something that the brand stands for.”

Today, however, brands in India are moving beyond a simplified view of the marketing and advertising world and see the need to comprehensively rebrand themselves. The proliferation of several international brands in recent years has caused several homegrown brands to undertake an all-embracing approach to their brands.

Mishra elaborates: “with the passing of time, the environment in which a brand operates changes…Higher disposable incomes, change in consumer demography and greater reach through media has put pressure on brands to resort to an identity makeover, to realign themselves in the new environment.”

“When undertaking a rebranding initiative, one must ensure that it is rooted in deeper thought and is not merely a superficial exercise,” says Mohit Jayal, managing director of Wieden & Kennedy, India.

Halve agrees, explaining, “It should not be like a trip to a hair salon, where after two weeks your hair goes back to normal. It should go beyond just a cosmetic change, where only the logo is altered, but should reflect a fundamental change in the company.”

Rebranding beyond logos

Shoppers Stop, a chain of retail stores in India, rebranded recently. The old logo was conceptualized at a time when Shoppers Stop was one of the few entrants in the organized retail market in India. The logo, however, was revamped to keep up with the new challenges in the marketplace.

“The old logo portrayed trust, warmth and confidence,” says Govind Shrikhande, CEO of Shoppers Stop. However, with the entry of many me-too department stores, trust could no longer be the key differentiator for the brand. So the new logo, along with the tagline composed to support the logo upgrade—“Start Something New”—conjured a fashionable, young and international image of the brand.

The logo change, however, was only a small part of the rebrand. “A 360-degree approach across customer touch-points was taken to convey the new identity,” Shrikhande says. From better merchandising and display exhibits at the stores to new uniforms for the customer care associates, the change was deep-rooted.

Meeta Malhotra, director of Ray+Keshavan/Brand Union, believes that tweaking a logo and leaving everything else unchanged is pointless. “A logo change raises expectations, both internally and externally,” she says. The branding exercise should not be isolated to the letterhead; it should be an experience for the customer. The moment one steps into the office, employees should be able to feel it just as they expect their customers to.

But change isn’t always easy.

Euro RSCG’s Bindra explains, “In organizations that are several decades old, employees are entrenched within the system and find it difficult to come to work one morning and adopt newer systems.” Change must be gradual in order to be effective.

The Union Bank of India is an example of an established brand that underwent a successful, though expensive, rebrand. “The makeover was an experiential makeover, and not an advertising makeover,” Water Consulting’s Mishra explains. “It involves integrated transition in systems, processes, employee orientation and customer experience.”

Dabur, a leading FMCG, is another excellent example of a brand that instituted a significant change without destroying the core values it was founded on. The banyan tree image was subtly transformed to retain the essence of the brand’s heritage, but it now projects a contemporary image in sync with today’s lifestyle.

Indeed, it is important for brands to connect with more than just consumers’ eyes—to brand beyond aesthetics.

“The product, communication as well [as] the way you interact with stakeholders should be in synergy with the brand identity change. Simply having an image overhaul with no concrete changes internally is a waste,” Avasthi concludes.

In the end, however, consumers decide what really works.

This article was orginally posted on brandchannel.com and titled as “Rebranding:Looking Beyond Logos in India”

Ideefixe Designs: A Brand Communication Studio

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The recommended resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch) provides a clear image.  Anything lower than 300 dpi will result in a fuzzy, jagged and blurry image in print.  What is key is the image must be 300 dpi at the final size in layout.  You see a dot per inch (dpi) is a measurement of printer resolution that defines how many dots of ink are placed on the page when the image is printed.  So, if you send photos with a lower resolution (web photos), the printer will not apply enough dots to cover the range of the image.

To calculate your image size, review the “Image Size Calculator.”

At the end of the day; always take the time to call your design company or printer to see if they can help with your photo issues.  Some companies will supply photo-scanning services to make your job a lot easier.

File Types To Know:

TIF: Tagged Image File

* Used with print output devices, and moves successfully across PC/Mac platforms.
* The files are large, which may slow down performance for web.

GIF: Graphics Interchange Format

* Good for flat color graphics for web applications, and does not produce compression artifacts.
* Limited color palette (256 colors). Files are small and do not print well.

JPG: Joint Photographic Experts Group

* Great for photographic images for web or onscreen use; handles smooth gradations of color.
* Can introduce undesirable artifacts in image.
* Must be translated for printing purposes.

EPS: Encapsulated PostScript

* Vector graphics, and sometimes helps move text and images from one application to another.
* Has the ability of resizing without falling apart.  Used often for print out put.

PDF: Portable Document Format

* Will print to almost any print output device, free downloadable “reader” enables any user to view a document exactly as it was intended to appear.
* Great for web file sharing.  Can be used for digital printing with correct file preparations.

Ideefixe Designs: A Brand Communication Studio
www.ideefixedesign.com

Graphic design and marketing are two fields unique on their own, but one compliments the other. Graphic designers must understand how to translate their work of art for printers, sign developers, packaging, etc., in reference to their niche market. So, why should they ignore the concept of marketing?

Marketing is the art of persuading one to part from the other and finding the right people to persuade in any industry. If a graphic designer understands the target audience and the tactics involved, they can better be suited to take on any design project with a greater success rate. A well-rounded graphic designer is beneficial to time, budget and getting that point across.