Are 3-D logos ruining or revolutionizing logo design?

brandchannel is hosting a 'branddebate' on this topic. As they state in their introduction of the topic: "On the front lines of the branding industry - among the designers - an ongoing battle is being waged over an essential branding component: logos, and in particular, 3-D, or dimensionalized, logos..."

It used to be said that format restrictions were a primary functional limitation that informed the decision making process of logo designers. Thoughts like 'it has to look good in black and white', or 'our budget only supports two color printing' often informed the amount of detail and color that made up a logo design. With the web and better/cheaper printing, these two primary limitations have less bearing on the design process (but don't forget about low quality fax cover pages!). Overall, it is now more of a pure design decision. What level of detail, color, and dimensionality will best serve the brand you are representing with the logo design?

Read some interesting opinions on both sides of this topic at brandchannel.com

Where does design belong in your organization?

Here's a nice article from cooper.com: "These days, more and more companies are recognizing that design and innovation are essential to their strategy and bottom line: effective design sells products and services, improves your position in the marketplace, and turns customers into loyal advocates for your brand. If you've gotten your organization to this point, take a moment to enjoy your success! Creating demand for design is no small achievement. Unfortunately, to reap the full benefits of design, you probably still have a lot of work to do on your organization's structure, processes, and culture.

One of the first things you need to do is determine where in your organization design belongs..."

Major points covered are:

• In-house vs. outsourced
  
• Internal consultancies
  
• Design teams assigned to products long-term
  
• A blended approach
  
• What's right for your organization
  

Read the full article at cooper.com

Cause/Effect, Design As Change Agent

The Pursuit of Design | VIDEO: "Zoom In Online presents the first in a new Pursuit of Design mini-series, "Cause/Effect". This episode features "Design As Change Agent", a one-day event taking place at Parsons The New School. In this video, a wide range of designers, creatives and artists gather with students to discuss how design can be a powerful agent for change on both the local and global levels..."

Click here to watch the video online

8 trends to capitalize on in 2008

trendwatching.com has released it's report on "8 trends to capitalize on in 2008". Always an interesting source for high-level marketing strategy and thought, the in-depth overview is worth a read (note: the full report download is a premium item). To summarize, they've dubbed the hot 2008 trends as:

1. Status Spheres
   
2. Premiumization
   
3. Snack Culture
   
4. Online Oxygen
   
5. Eco-iconic
   
6. Brand Butlers
   
7. Miy | Make It Yourself
   
8. Crowd Mining
   

The End of Advertising as We Know It

"The next 5 years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did. Increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked. Our research points to four evolving future scenarios – and the catalysts that will be driving them. Traditional advertising players – broadcasters, distributors and advertising agencies – may get squeezed unless they can successfully implement consumer, business model and business design innovation..."



This is a very interesting 28 page PDF document packed with valuable data, and some hypotheses worth contemplating.

read more | digg story

The 12 Master Ad Formats (Video)

Competitious: New product in the works

Competitious.com: "Competitious is an early beta release of a much more robust service we’ve been planning here at RivalSoft... The service will be a comprehensive web-based platform that helps companies manage and analyze all information about their competitors, and will incorporate almost all of the suggestions and feedback we've received on Competitious. The new service will also have a new name (which we are keeping under wraps for now). All of your data from Competitious will be migrated when our new service launches. We are aiming to launch the new service in 2-3 months..."

Competitious is a great service even in its current form. It's a handy way to organize a group of related Companies / URLs and attach articles to them, create a comparison matrix for them, and also monitor Alexa traffic. You can create multiple "projects" which makes it handy for doing different competitive scenarios. I've even used it as a quick research tool when looking into topics or new market trends.

Create an irresistible free trial for your app

thinkvitamin.com: "Free trials are a super effective way of increasing sign-ups to your service, but to reap the rewards later it’s worth following these four tips for your campaign... So what is this success formula I’m talking about? We’ve narrowed it down to four simple rules for how a free trial of an online service should work. Let’s go through them one by one."

1. Signing up for a trial account should be easy and painless
2. Do not require trial users to enter their credit card information
3. Do not cripple the trial
4. Include a "highlight bonus"

read more | digg story

Web Apps 101: Your Three Point Success Plan

TechCrunch - Building a web app is easy. Building a successful and profitable web app is where most people fail. If you want your app to stay out of the Dead Pool, you need to know the answer the following questions:

1. Who is it aimed at?
2. Why will they use it?
3. Will they pay for it?

Also, you can download the MP3 audio and PDF presentation that appear to be the foundation for this article at: http://www.futureofwebapps.com/

read more | digg story

Google's Founders didn't know HTML!

Product Manager for Google: "The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface... The name 'Google' was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for 'Googol'..."

The next time your are pondering Google's apparent brilliance in regards to strategy, ui design, and branding - refer to this list. Another reminder that dumb luck and happy accidents are your friends. There are a few interesting metrics for feature adoption in this article too.

read more | digg story

Don't Lose Your Visitors: Better 404 Pages

Devlounge: "Error pages control a lot more of our destiny than you may think. If a visitor has the unfortunate coincidence of reaching an error page on your site, chances of them attempting to access the page again are slim to none, especially if they were referred to the page from a direct link. How can you prevent this? Don’t let your error pages, especially 404, go un-noticed..."

This article is a handy summary of why it is important to carefully consider the design of your error pages when developing your site strategy. This can be of particular importance if you are doing a major redesign or any other thing that will change the existing structure of your site. You don't want to completely lose what you've worked hard to gain in terms of bookmarks and search engine entries.

MySpace News: The Digg Killer?

"MySpace is launching a news aggregator called MySpace News in the second quarter of 2007. It’ll rely on both algorithms and user rating - basically a combination of Google News and Digg..."

Yeah maybe it will be like the parallel-universe kind of digg with a really ugly design, giant ads with scantily clad women, and constant intermittent outages! I know, I know, it will probably succeed due to the sheer volume of existing users... Add to the '_-killer?' watchlist :-P

read more | digg story

Future of Web Apps: FREE MP3s, Podcast and Slides

The "Future of Web Apps" happened in London from 2/20-21. Well, it's a wrap and now you can find Speaker Presentations & MP3s (includuing a Podcast RSS Feed) on the program website. I just finished pulling down the last of the presentations in iTunes. There are some great speakers in the lineup.

The 50 Most Important People on the Web

pcworld.com: "Despite what Time magazine would have you believe, you are not the most powerful or influential person on the Web. At PC World we love online personals, social networks, and videos of people falling on their keisters as much as the next person, but without the folks who create the Craigslists, MySpaces, and YouTubes of the world, much of the Web's potential would be lost among spam sites and other online detritus."



read more | digg story

How To Name Your Company

thinkvitamin.com: "Successful entrepreneur Michael McDerment advocates following a rigorous process for determining that all important company name. Here are his tips for making the right decision"

Short sweet article.

Five Tools for Spying on Your Competition

"By understanding the marketing strategies of your competitor, you can always stay a step ahead of them. The key is knowing how to obtain all of this vital information without having to hire a PR firm, an FBI agent, or an undercover spy. Luckily for us, all we need are a few online tools to find out exactly how are competitors are running the show."

Spying is kind of a harsh word when it comes to keeping an eye on the competition. It's not like these sites are tracking down secret formulas. However, they appear to be some easier ways of tracking down info than completely manual processes. I find Google Alerts to be very handy. In fact, I suggest setting up google alerts related to your own business as a way to keep an eye on your own internet presence. Sometimes you'll be pleasantly surprised to see a link on a blog or something you might now be aware of without the help of such an alert.