Another batch of Wolff Olins snake oil

November 23, 2009

New aol logosAOL (or, I guess, Aol.) revealed a new logo treatment today.

You can look elsewhere to see what the overall consensus is. (My take: What. A. Joke.)

That being said, there’s a bit of inconsistency that proves Wolff Olins’ ability to b.s. their way through a logo design.

From AOL’s press release:

“Historically brand identity has been monolithic and CONTROLLING, little more than stamping a company name on a product. AOL is a 21st century media company, with an ambitious vision for the future and new focus on creativity and expression, this required the new brand identity to be open and generous, to invite conversation and collaboration, and to feel credible, but also aspirational.” said Karl Heiselman, CEO of Wolff Olins.

Their solution, naturally: stamp the company name onto a handful of stock images.

Come on, guys. After the London 2012 debacle, don’t you think we should be trying a little harder? I mean, THE LEAST YOU COULD DO is make sure the fluffy, inspirational quote defending your work isn’t at odds with the nature of the work itself.

By Corey

Filed Under Advertising, Marketing, Design, Criticism, The Process

What Montana taught us about design

November 10, 2009

It happens what seems like a million times in what seems like a million meetings around the world. Over-designing. Too many gradients and too much color and seven different fonts and a billion little bullet points and a few logos – one for each sponsor, as well as one for the company itself – and suddenly…

Ugh.

You and I know better. But that doesn’t mean we can stick it to some group of design non-believers with a list of the Seven Deadly Design Rules and force them to submit. We have to understand that, sometimes, circumstances require us to be creative in our application, that, sometimes, those bullets are necessary and that extra typeface is needed and those logos are untouchable.

Then again, sometimes, we need to stop, step back, strip it all down and reconvene with the bare basics.

Believe it or not, sometimes, it works.

Today’s example: the State of Montana.

After years of diverging license plate designs, ugly pastels, a roster of causes (105 in all, not counting University-specific plates) and, yes, what seems like a million typefaces, Montana took its recent history of over-design and wiped it clean.

A lack of consistency? Gone. A full palette of colors? Gone. A feeling of retro freshness that will hopefully inspire others (including Nebraska, of whom we will only say, “Please. Hire. Designers. Next. Time.”)?

Absolutely.

New Montana plates (c)AP Photo/Matt Gouras
(Photo via greatfallstribune.com, ©AP Photo/Matt Gouras)

Great design doesn’t mean doing the most with what you have. It means doing the best with what you need.

Thanks be to Montana for reminding us.

(via: Design Observer, which was via: W Magazine)

By Corey

Filed Under Design, The Process

The Sioux Falls Area Chamber of Commerce Annual Meeting - A Recap.

October 30, 2009

What does it take to put on the Sioux Falls Area Chamber of Commerce Annual Meeting?

It starts during the summer. Themes are discussed, a stage is mocked up, and a speaker is booked. This year, the Chamber’s theme revolved around the consistent exposure Sioux Falls receives as both a business-friendly city and a place with high quality of life. The forerunner in this praise: Forbes Magazine.

So the natural choice for a speaker? Steve Forbes.

Steve Forbes

Throughout the summer and into September, the staging is finalized, the design is set and the invites start going out. Schedules are coordinated, extra help is brought in. We build monster set pieces. It’s like being in Play Production, except the stage is massive and the talent does more than botch lines from As You Like It.

Setting up

As we get closer to the date, work swirls in a fever pitch. Our building is filled with staging pipes and banners – printed in house by Jason – and speeches pass over an entire series of desks. Video reaches the final stages of production, and a handful of lucky HSers work late into the night.

And then, it’s the week of the show.

Though the program is Tuesday night, we begin setting up Sunday morning. The stage takes a day and a half to erect, video is double- and triple-checked, and the HS Dancers go through their final run-throughs. A skeleton crew stays back at the office while the real action occurs at the Sioux Falls Convention Center in a flurry of construction, rehearsal and anticipation.

An hour before the show begins, you’d have no idea that this has been a process of months. When the lights go down, you’re seeing the end of the work, and the beginning of a grand celebration of the area we call home.

The Stage

The Stage

By the end of the next day, it’s all gone. The room is ready for the next event. Hopefully, you attended. And hopefully, you gained a new appreciation for everything the Sioux Falls Area Chamber of Commerce does for us – not just businesses, but everyone.

If you could believe it, that’s not even the end. Because chances are, we’re already looking toward next year’s show.

Program and Pie

By Corey

Filed Under Design, HenkinSchultz, The Process

SEO vs. Content: Not a Battle After All

October 12, 2009

Search Engine Optimization gets people to your site. It boosts your page rank. It performs magic tricks, prints money and cures cancer. It’s the golden god of content management, at times, and it’s the number one goal of a company: get your name out there, and get it noticed.

If I sound a little sarcastic, you’ll have to understand that I’m a writer. Which means I have one goal over any other: create interesting content.

It’s this goal that makes me cringe when people say that SEO is the most important part of putting together a successful Web site; that copy should be manufactured with the robotic eyes of a search engine in mind.

And it’s this goal that often leads me astray, railing against SEO in the name of art and literature and everything the act of writing stands for.

Because the truth is – SEO isn’t king. And neither is content, anymore. Seems that both have to work in harmony.

See? Now I’ve just upset both sides of the debate.

There are two arguments in the battle. For SEO champions, it’s, “If your content is good, but no one sees it, is it worth it?” And for the content wonks, it’s “If you get people to your site, but they aren’t interested in staying, is it worth it?”

The real answer lies somewhere in between. It isn’t all or nothing for either side. You need both. In fact, one should naturally lead to another. Great content should generate positive SEO, as great content relies on communicating in a way that gives the reader exactly what they came for. And great SEO means you’re covering all of your bases – that you’re thinking for the masses instead of your little corner of intelligentsia.

It means more than compiling lists of regurgitated facts and keyword-laden copy. Conversely, it means more than developing beautiful prose more akin to Steinbeck than Sergey. It’s right in the middle. It’s what we sought out when we redesigned our Web site. And it’s helped us in both cases: better content and better search results.

No, it’s not SEO über alles. Nor is it content without regard to searchability. Simply put, it’s writing the way people will read. Will think. Will care. It’s managing content logically and creatively.

It’s copy written for robots and people. How futuristic. Are you doing it?

By Corey

Filed Under Technology, Marketing, The Process

A Web Message From HenkinSchultz

September 17, 2009

The New HenkinSchultz Web Site!

(And now a message from the corporate sponsor…)

We’d like to take a moment to re-introduce www.HenkinSchultz.com.

What? Re-introduce? Huh?

Well, yeah. We’ve re-designed the site. It’s been up for a few weeks, but this is the official launch, my friends, so let’s rock this joint.

But it’s more than a re-design. It’s a re-imagining of what our Web site is here for: namely, providing content to current and potential clients and the community as a whole. Our clients wanted more access to the awesomeness we’re providing, and we were happy to oblige.

So we’ve got constantly updated portfolios, HenkinSchultz’s Greatest Hits, easy contact to all of our other outlets – Facebook, Twitter, Post Haste – and the same devotion to our people.

It works because we’re all in on it. Every employee has a chance to update as necessary. It’s crowdsourcing at its best: when it works together for one common goal and not against each other for a cheap fix.

So welcome. We like what’s going on over at www.HenkinSchultz.com. And we hope you do too.

(We return you to your regularly scheduled Post Haste post.)

By Corey

Filed Under Advertising, Technology, Post Haste, HenkinSchultz, The Process

A Letter to Your Customers

September 15, 2009

Letters of Note compiles famous and important letters from famous and important people. As you can imagine, some are staggering in their meaning – Ghandi’s letter to Hitler, for instance, or the letter Winston Churchill wrote for his wife in the event of his death.

But, above all, these letters all have one thing in common: they represent communication in its rawest form – words on paper, no sound, no video, no Flash; just the bare bones message of one person’s desires and thoughts.

The art of communication depends on words as much as it does design, technology or media mix. In fact, in this humble copywriter’s opinion, it needs words above anything else.

In marketing, each word is carefully chosen to influence and clarify. When you think about it, every message a business sends out to the public is simply a letter from company to customer. Every ad is an open letter to the viewers. Every Web site is a letter to someone who stumbles upon it.

Which means the decorum of letter writing should always be evident. Are you being clear? Are you presenting an argument for change, or are you simply making a joke? Are you being genuine, or is your message false?

If you were sending your advertisement to someone, would they want to continue correspondence? Are you offering anything worth responding to?

Maybe Hitler didn’t heed Ghandi’s request. But it certainly wasn’t for lack of clarity or influence.

By Corey

Filed Under The Process

UX by MTLB

September 8, 2009

We’ve been thinking about the cross between impressive technology and customer usability a lot around the HenkinSchultz offices as of late.

So it’s a pretty awesome surprise that my good friend (in a strictly “blogging-on-the-same-Internet” sense) Bill Green of Make the Logo Bigger summarizes the User Experience discussion in a series of Pac-Man and vehicle side mirror analogies.

From “Why is this user experience [swear word] so hard?”

However, if I want to incorporate more features into my Facebook page, the effort it’s taken hasn’t been worth it. A simple thing like incorporating YouTube videos or my Flickr account has been a major pain. I’ve wasted so much time with what I thought “should” be an easy task, and still not gotten it right.

It’s like Pac Man: I just need to get from Point A to Point B, but instead, I have to do a bunch of stuff first and avoid some very bad things along the way.

Cue endless pokes and virtual beers thank you very much.

(If Pac Man isn’t to your liking, then how about this metaphor: Trying to do something on Facebook is like entering your front door by first going through the garage, then walking around the house.)

Read the rest here. And rock on, Bill Green. Keep fighting the good fight for all of us.

By Corey

Filed Under Technology, Design, Criticism, The Process

Sandwich Artistry

August 20, 2009

This past week, Craig and Cami proceeded to take our pre-lunch hunger pains and rake them over the coals of agony as they turned our studio into a veritable sandwich shop for a Dakota Provisions photo shoot. Though we’ve done hundreds (thousands?) of photo shoots, this one was by far the most attractive.

If you like sandwiches, that is.

Check out their sandwich artistry below.


The Set Up

Setting up the shot.

The Staging Ground

The casting call.

The Finishing Touch

You’d be surprised the difference that one tomato made.

The Turkey on Rye

The Close-Up

The Full Meal

Yeah - that’s a tasty beer in the background.

To see the set, check out our Flickr page.

ProTip: Those tomatoes look pretty fantastic, right? Well, those drops of faux perspiration aren’t coming from the tomato – they’re manufactured. Karo syrup, actually. See? Food photography is both artistic AND educational!

By Corey

Filed Under Design, HenkinSchultz, The Process

Defending jingles

August 11, 2009

Jingles are primitive. Jingles should be reserved for local companies on AM radio. Jingles show a disregard for the listener’s intelligence. Jingles are hacky and stupid.

Jingles get a bad rap, especially by some enlightened advertising experts.

But you know what? They work. They work really well.

Sometimes, too well.

Take my daughter, Sierra. Though we try to keep it at a minimum, she sometimes breaks through our barriers and steals a few minutes of television. Which means she sometimes takes in the fruits of my industry’s labors: television advertising.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when, upon spotting a yogurt cup, she began singing.

“ACTIVIA!!!!”

My wife and I looked at each other. Did she… Was that… Wait, here it comes again…

“ACTIVIA!!!!”

Though the pronunciation needs work, the pitch was perfect. It was the Activia jingle. And we couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d buzzed her hair and begun acting like Jamie Lee Curtis.

Admittedly, I was kind of proud.

For me, these jingles aren’t cheap or grating – they’re part of my nostalgia. To this day, I can’t see the name “Mennen” without humming the three-note tag jingle. I still have the Carnival Cruise “If You Could See Me Now” jingle running through my head from time to time.

You have the same memories, I guarantee. Maybe not the same songs, but most certainly something similar – something that keeps that brand’s name alive in your mind long after you’ve turned off the television. It could be something ancient - the short burst of a jingle that signed off old Diet Coke spots - or something more recent.

So before you go slagging on the artistic merits of jingles and their place in popular customer, think of it from an advertising standpoint.

They work. And they can be a lot of fun, too.

(As long as we ignore Subway’s entire history of jingles. Those have all been preeeetttyyy awful.)

By Corey

Filed Under Advertising, Marketing, The Process

Avoiding Social Media Weak Sauce

June 29, 2009

A lot of small businesses are using social media. But it is interesting to see how few businesses are actually using social media well. Unfortunately, not many of them do.

Most still approach social media as if were just another place to put their billboard. How many times have you seen a Facebook page or Twitter post history that consist of nothing but product blurbs?

What they fail to see is that they are missing great opportunities to start conversations with potential customers. They aren’t harnessing the ability to build community around their brand.

Often times, there seems to be a correlation between companies with weak interaction skills and companies that don’t really seem to have a coherent brand. If a company doesn’t even understand brand, then of course they won’t get how everything can be an extension of their brand.

Could it be that the same mentality that doesn’t understand the concept of “brand” can also be linked to organizations that don’t even want to venture in to social media?

Like social media engagement, early brand management was stymied by an inability to show direct quantifiable results. Despite that, there were some who rode the hunch – who understood the power of a strong brand and used it to build business empires. Today the value of a strong brand is not only quantifiable, but often times what failing businesses lack most of all.

I am not contending that Social Media alone can bring in these kinds of numbers, but it can strengthen a brand. After all, isn’t a Brand ultimately a means to build a group of people who favor your product. Isn’t that what successful social media does as well?

A few companies really do understand how to leverage the power of social media when it comes to a more practical aspect – like customer service. You’ll see a lot of great examples on Twitter.

Companies like Zappos or Quicken Loans aren’t just using the web to make the customer feel a little more empowered or validated – they’re giving customers – and, in turn, the customer service rep – the power to instantly address concerns.

They realize what other companies miss: that the interaction doesn’t end once the service problem has been addressed. It continues beyond the transaction – as the satisfied customer spreads the story of the experience through e-mail, word of mouth, Twitter. In doing so, these customers are strengthening a company’s brand and helping secure future business.

For many companies, the step into social media is be a big one. For those that not only adopt it, but really use it to its potential, the rewards can build and sustain platforms to gain valuable insights and future revenue.

If you have seen any other good examples using other web venues, we’d love to hear from you.

By Mike

Filed Under Technology, Marketing, The Process

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