And now, an IM conversation between Dave and myself.

Dave Selden: 10:11
very interesting article here:
http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html

Dave Selden: 10:11
I really like the “mind doesn’t know what the tongue wants” part
the fact that you can’t design a universal ketchup and please people
you have to design several ketchups that sub-groups can rally around

Thom Schoenborn: 10:14
reading:
“Try my ketchup!” Wigon said, over and over, to anyone who passed. “If you don’t try it, you’re doomed to eat Heinz the rest of your life.”

Dave Selden: 10:14
seriously
sarah and I don’t eat ketchup
I guess we would buy ketchup if it tasted better
not something I really ever thought about

Thom Schoenborn: 10:14
ketchup in australia is awesome.
no sugar.
just tomato and vinegar

Dave Selden: 10:15
wow

Thom Schoenborn: 10:15
with their bacon, which we call canadian bacon?
kick-ass.

Dave Selden: 10:15
ha
maybe I will make that next
british bacon is also awesome

Thom Schoenborn: 10:16
for sure:
“You know why you like it so much?” he would say, in his broad Boston accent, to the customers who seemed most impressed. “Because you’ve been eating bad ketchup.”

Dave Selden: 10:17
“If you are four—and I have a four-year-old—he doesn’t get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases,” Keller says. “But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It’s the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize.” As a result, Heinz came out with the so-called EZ Squirt bottle, made out of soft plastic with a conical nozzle. In homes where the EZ Squirt is used, ketchup consumption has grown by as much as twelve per cent.
Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived.”

Thom Schoenborn: 10:18
Interesting.
I like the concept of the multiple versions of perfection:
“Instead, working with the Campbell’s kitchens, he came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. [snip]  When Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like. If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people’s preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last was the most important. Why? Because at the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the supermarket.”

Dave Selden: 10:20
totally

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
You can’t please all the people all the time, basically.

Dave Selden: 10:21
yeah

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
“If I make one group happier, I piss off another group. We did this for coffee with General Foods, and we found that if you create only one product the best you can get across all the segments is a 60—if you’re lucky. That’s if you were to treat everybody as one big happy family. But if I do the sensory segmentation, I can get 70, 71, 72. Is that big? Ahhh. It’s a very big difference. In coffee, a 71 is something you’ll die for.”

Dave Selden: 10:21
totally

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
in college, my magazine prof was the founder and editor of Guitar magazine.
about 10% of their subscriber base were bass players
they had, like, two sections of each issue dedicated to bass players.
and when they cut one of those sections, ONE SINGLE PAGE of editorial, they lost something like 8% of their subscriber base.

Dave Selden: 10:23
funny
that’s a lot

Thom Schoenborn: 10:23
in many ways, it’s about knowing not just what people like about your product — because people tend to like a lot of things about what you offer —
it’s about knowing about how passionate they are about those things.
which is a little different than this subject.
but they’re related.
We should just copy and paste this IM convo into a 72dpiiintheshade post.

Dave Selden: 10:24
do it.

Today, I got a haircut. A big one. My summer chop-off. Buzzville, USA, Population: Me.

I also had a very entertaining barber, from the Bay Area. He regaled me with stories of pimped out Buicks, drug dealers, and a special summer drink his cousins used to make with equal parts Mickey’s and Gallo Sangria. Drink half a grenade, fill with sangria, and add ice. Sounds filthy, but he claimed “some very high class girls” loved it after getting over the initial hesitation. He also claimed the physical limit, “even for big dudes,” was 3 of these concoctions. I think I will take his word for it.

At any rate, before he started, he “triple-checked” that I wanted the buzz, a precaution he’s developed cutting women’s hair. But he also introduced me to a haircutting trick he called “the commitment cut.” After getting the affirmative to cut after the triple check, he does what he calls “The Commitment Cut,” whereby he immediately takes a drastic cut from a highly noticeable area, thereby commiting the cutter and cut-ee alike to the agreed-upon haircut.

I don’t think a lot of clients would go for this technique, but it’s something I think I’m going to start trying in design. With the “undo” key just a “Z” away and immense hard drives offering virtually unlimited versioning potential, I’ve seen designers that get hamstrung by safety. You can always tell a timid designer: his files end in all end with “v9-r12.” Designers like that are afraid to take risks, which I feel limits their creativity.

So I’m making a resolution. Do the “undo-able.” Make the risky design decision. Fail big, because if you’re not failing occasionally, you’re just not trying hard enough. Or, as the fine folks from Mickey’s Malt Beverages say, “Get stung.” I think it might just improve your work.

Every once in a while, I see a movie that excites me as a designer. The opening titles for Panic Room, combined with that film’s amazing camera work. Fight Club, with it’s “IKEA catalog” sequences and David Carson-like typography.

Last night, I saw another such film, Stranger Than Fiction. The great typography and motion graphics first started my design pulse racing, with a great opening sequence.

Harold Crick (Will Farrell) is an IRS agent with a boring life. He has an amazing gift for numbers, and counts everything in his day, starting with the number of times he brushes his teeth each morning.

Type onscreen gives us visual clues to what Crick is thinking as he knots his tie …

… and counts the individual dots on the knot.

It’s a great sequence visually, with simple, bold graphics that really complement the photography. The motion is extremely elegant, with precise movements orchestrated to synch with what Farrell is doing. Hats off to whoever is responsible.

Beyond that, the film has a great 1960s/70s Kodachrome look to it, with rich mustardy yellows and dirty greens. Modernist Architecture is everywhere, and extreme object macro close-ups remind me of my own corkboard. I haven’t heard a lot about this film critically, but I’d highly recommend it. The web site is pretty cool, too.

1. “Real World” Interfaces.

Yeah, the menu should totally be on a banner pulled behind an airplane. Get it? It’s a “fly out.”
Leave the real world to the real world. To borrow from Clement Greenburg, “screen is screen, pixels are pixels.” You’ve got a million colors and several million pixels to play with, unlimited fonts, and the only thing you can think of is a coffee table? But the telephone links to “contact us.” Get it? Apple pioneered this interface in 1995, and your idea is neither new nor interesting. Try again.

2. No more popups. Seriously.

And do NOT expand the browser window with javascript to fill my entire screen. Likewise, do not shake it, wiggle it, or otherwise manipulate it beyond changing the content within the browser window. It is my browser, and I have it just how I want it. I am graciously giving you my attention for a few seconds, and if you so much as twitch the screen, I will leave because you have broached my personal space.

3. Buck Conventions.

Like it or not, some web design conventions have emerged over the years, and your mom is just starting to get the hang of it. Search boxes go up at the top right. Navigation on either the left or across the top. And it does not move from page to page, or when your mouse gets close to it. Text links are underlined. Unless you are prepared to retrain my mom, your mom, his mom, her mom, and the millions of other web users who have learned to follow these established conventions, do not break the rules, unless you have a very, very good reason. And no, that reason can’t be “it looks better.” Or “it won’t fit over there.” Make it work.

4. The Filter is the Message.

Just knock it off. Lens flare does not a design make. People who design realtor’s web sites seem especially prone to this. TIP: For an *instant* realty web site, open your realtor’s portrait or house photograph in Photoshop. Play the default action called “Quadrant Colors.” WOW!

5. The Helvetica Goes Up to 11.

Helvetica is an awesome font. Used for your headlines, body text, logo, tagline, bylines, fishing lines, captions, pull quotes, it is boring. It has been used to death by the Web 2.0 crowd, and if I see another all-Helvetica site I will probably look up your house on whois.sc and Google Maps and sign you up for lots of spam and laugh at how tiny your hard drive looks from 100,000 feet.

6. Idiot Quotes.

As opposed to ’smart quotes.’ Even Microsoft Word knows better than to use vertical quotes in setting text. I will forgive you not doing this in HTML text, but when you are using an image for a headline, it’s inexcusable.

On a Mac, get a curly quote with:

option + shift + ]

On a PC, visit Apple.com and order yourself a Mac. On a Linux box, get a real job.

7. Comic Sans.

Greater minds than mine have addressed this serious issue, but with the frequency I seem to encounter it, I think it bears repeating.

I’ve been reading Luke Sullivan’s Hey, Whipplefor the first time, and one of the things that really jumped out in the first 80 pages was his concept of ads touting the “benefit of the benefit.” Of course there are many other ways to sell a product, but this one stood out to me as a new way of getting inspired. The example given is that of the quarter-inch drill bit.

“People don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes.”

Extending that idea to some of our clients:

• Leatherman sells not knives, or even preparedness. They sell an escape from a sticky situation.
• Freightliner doesn’t sell trucks, aerodynamics, or improved fuel economy. They sell more money in a driver or company’s pocket.
• LP doesn’t sell high-tech building products. They sell the American Dream: an affordable, well-built place to call home.

What is your company really selling?

Apparently, that intersection is called Helio. Take special note of the wet floor rollovers. Great attention to detail in the animation, very crisp and with that special bounce.

The copy is great, sophisticated and smart, but short enough for the attention span of a 15-year old. Not dumbed down, not trying to be cool (This phone is off the hook!), but short, sweet (like tasty), and sweet (like really well done).

The design is great, too, taking a page from Apple’s glossy, spare, coffee-table-sized book. Love the HUGE billboard area at the top, too.

In July of 2006, Pop Art’s President, Steve Rosenbaum, commissioned the Pop Art design team to develop new marketing materials to coincide with our move to a new office space. During this process, Pop Art’s existing logo was called into question, and the design team set out to develop a new logo.

As with most internal projects (industry-wide, not just at Pop Art), the process was long and sometimes contentious, but the result is something the whole team is very proud of. 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.

I thought it would be fun to show the route we took to get here from there.

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 kinda boring.

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’ve incorporated Ben’s early CMYK idea in some of the identity materials we’re developing (hence the logo on those background colors.

I’d love to hear what you think of the new logo.