The recipe for a perfect logo design 3/6

Part 3 – Applying the method

To ensure a successful logo the design must be simple, memorable, timeless, versatile, and appropriate. Be mindful that an elaborate, overworked logo is probably not going to be a pretty sight. The most memorable logos are also the most simple. Here are some things to remember when you are considering a variety of concepts provided by your designer.

1.    Consider differing mediums
You will more than likely want to use your logo on a variety of marketing materials, whether it’s online or in print. Bearing this in mind, your logo will need to be reproduced in varying sizes and to span various mediums. When you are considering creative concepts, try scaling the designs at down to 10-20%. Viewing logos at their smallest is a good indication of whether or not your logo will work across many platforms, whether it be a favicon on your website or a small advert on newspaper print, to a sign on the side of your building or a poster on a hoarding’s board.
Whilst okay in larger formats, designs with too much embellishment: thin lines, small shapes and light and fanciful typography should be avoided as these qualities will be lost and may even disappear when used at a smaller scale. For some great visual comparisons view this useful article written by iStockphoto,  it’s worth bookmarking!

2.    Preparing a logo catalogue

Colour
Okay, so you’re already thinking about different mediums where your logos may be used, but sometimes you may come up against technical questions that you’re not quite sure how to answer. For instance, you’re booking a black and white advert space in a newspaper and the sales person is asking you to provide a 1-colour version of your logo for a mono newspaper advert. Your designer only provided you with an all-singing-all-dancing full colour logo that looks great on your website and business cards, but once the colour has been striped to gray-scale by the production team at the newspaper, will look more like someone’s lent on your advert while the ink was still wet  –  just one big, unrecognisable smudge! In cases like this you really need to have several versions of your logo that work in any environment.

• 1 colour – usually black on white although potentially it could be blue on white or any colour of your choice.
• Reversed-out – in some instances your logo may work better white on black or on another colour. The term ‘reversed’ just means white.
• 2 colour – If your logo already looks like its uses just 2 colours, chances are they are made up out of a 4-colour process. This can cause some colours (greens and oranges) to look lack-lustre and may be better off printed as a 2 colour Pantone. Your designer should be able to produce a Pantone swatch book for you to choose an exact colour. As with the 1 colour version, these options may be requested for newspaper printing or screen printing onto a tee-shirt.
• 4 colour (also referred to as ‘full colour’) In printed materials a full colour range is usually made-up by the following 4 colours: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK), however on screen, these colours are defined by Red, Green, Blue (RGB).

Full colour logos can also be very expensive or difficult to reproduce. To keep costs to a minimum keeping your design to a couple of colours, then use tints of those colours. Reducing your colour palette can also work to keep logos from looking too busy.

When considering your corporate colours, be mindful of obvious references. For instance, a financial advisor should avoid red as this colour can be associated with ‘being in the red’ or red ‘final-demand’ letters. Eco-friendly companies would want to adopt earthy tones as opposed to garish, loud colours that are not naturally found in such environments.

Format
Different horses for different courses. You will need your final logo provided in a variety of formats. Here’s a rough guide to their general usage:

• AI and EPS – Vector graphics that preserve the quality of lines and curves etc. when resized larger and smaller. Used for print.
• JPEG, BMP and TIFF (.jpg or .jpeg) — pixel image formats widely used to display photographic images. Resizing is limited. Images are okay when used 100%, but will distort and pixelate if made larger. Used for print and web.
• GIF and PNG – pixel image formats that have transparency qualities. Images are okay when used 100% or less, but will distort and pixelate if made larger. Used for web.

If your logo is to be used by staff members or work associates for internal documents or for a dual-affinity branded piece, I’d strongly advise creating a ‘standards’ document allowing you to distribute a guideline of do’s and don’ts to relevant individuals. In brief, this should include: corporate colours, rescaling, clearance zones, fonts, etc. This will help to project a consistent ‘tone-of-voice’ in all your correspondence with customers and fellow businesses alike. Not only protecting your brands integrity, but incrementally building and promoting a professional company presence.

Missed Part 1 and Part 2?

Next time – Part 4 – Using the correct utensils

Decision-making models in Web development

Unlike in the medical and the aerospace sectors, erroneous decisions in the Web development domain do not cost lives. However, poorly made decisions in all these sectors can lead to serious financial consequences. Good decisions can save both time, money and lives but the difference between bad and good decisions is not always clear until the project team gets into the last stages of the development process. In order to avoid making bad decisions in the Web domain, the Smashing Magazine provides an overview of the most efficient decision-making models that can help Web developers structure and ultimately make more informed and better decision during the design of their online systems.

The most useful decision-making models for the Web and other domains include:

1. SHEL, which stands for Software, Hardware, Environment, Liveware, is used as a brainstorming and planning tool to assess the interactions in various situations. This model is normally drawn out as a cross and it places Liveware (i.e. the end user) in the middle, which reinforces the point that the end user should be the main focus of the planning process. Going clock-wise, the top of the model allows decision-makers to consider Software (e.g. browsers, operating systems, Flash, JavaScript), the right arm of the model focuses on second type of Liveware (e.g. social media, support), the bottom of the model aims to capture Environment (e.g the whereabouts of the users and the context in which they are using the end product), and finally the left arm of the model considers Hardware (e.g. monitor, PC/MAC, mobile device).
2. DODAR, which is an acronym for Diagnose, Options, Decide, Assign, Review, captures the five key areas of any decision-making process in the form of a circular flow. The Diagnose stage is concerned with using all available resources to find out what the problem is and what causes it. The Options stage helps to assess whether the problem is urgent or can be left for a while. The next stage, Decide, focuses on deciding what course of action is sensible and whether it should be pursued. The Assign stage concentrates on allocating appropriate tasks to people who are capable of performing them. The last stage, Review, is of the highest importance as it helps to assess whether everything is going as planned and if the expected results are achieved. If things are not going according to plan, then it is necessary to find out why and run through the DODAR cycle again until all the problems are rectified.
3. NITS Brief is a quick communication framework, which can be of assistance when a task needs to be communicated to colleagues or clients. It stands for Nature, Intentions, Time and Specials. Nature is concerned with the nature of the problem or task (e.g. what is it and why did it happen?). Intentions relate to the actions that are hoped to be taken to solve the task. Time refers to the length of time that is needed or expected to carry out the actions. Specials are concerned with anything unusual or unexpected, for example, if a particular colleague would normally be expected to do something else?
4. Swiss Cheese Model was developed by arguably the biggest expert on human errors, James Reason. This model is widely used in different industries (e.g. medical and aerospace) and it is based on the assumption that if errors in separate system layers are not caught out on time, collectively they can align and lead to more serious problems. Therefore, it is necessary to address errors in individual layers when they do not pose serious problems.

I hope that, on the consideration of the aforementioned models, you will be persuaded to check them out and in general focus more time and resources on ensuring that you make well-informed and correct choices in your designs.

Tips on how to create user-friendly content

It looks like a lot of websites out there have problem with sticking to the main topic of content that they initially started to publish on their sites. For example, websites that initially aim to publish reviews primarily about technological gadgets for some time stick to their core interests, however, a common occurrence is that later they widen the scope of their content to Internet technologies such as Web development, emailing, etc. While there is nothing wrong about including other related topics on the website, it is necessary to do it in such a way so that users interested primarily in main topic of the site (in this case gadgets) do not get overwhelmed by a sheer amount of content about something different (i.e. Internet technologies). So, to help you create user-friendly content that is geared towards your audience throughout your site, we offer the following tips:

1. Create content that meets your audience’s standards
   Firstly, create a main category of content that mirrors your goals and is fully geared towards the main topic of interest of your audience and create subcategories for other related topics. Secondly, you need to ensure that your site’s content meets the comprehension level and topics of interest of your key audience. So, for example, if your site is aimed at teenagers and young adults, then the site’s content should be written in a causal and relatively simple way. If however your site is aimed at highly educated older adults with high levels of professional responsibility then your website content should be written in a more sophisticated and business-like manner.
2. Create content that complements your website
   Your content needs to compliment your website, namely, it should be relevant to the topics that you cover.  The homepage should have an introduction that gives users a general idea of what topics are included on the website and how they are structurally organised. This practice will make your site more user-friendly and ultimately will make your users want to come back to the site again.
3. Create skimmable content
   It is very rare for users to read content word by word. It is a more common practice to skim through content in order to quickly find the interesting and applicable areas that users are looking for. Therefore, it is important that you break down your content into short and understandable sections and/or bullets as it will help users quickly and easily find what they are looking for. Another good practice is to make your content more skimmable by highlighting the most relevant keywords or by creating separate titles for several topics.
4. Create direct and to the point content
   Your content should be direct, to the point and it should give viewers an impression that it is addressing them personally.
5. Strengthen your argument
   When you make arguments on your site you need to back them up with authentic and respectable sources or facts. Therefore, it is good practice to occassionally link your content to other reputable sources (websites, books, journals, magazines, etc.). Not only does this strengthen the correctness of arguments in your content but it also assure users that they have chosen the right place to read about certain topics. For example, the content of this article is based on Kent House’s in-house expertise, as well as advice provided in external sources such as W3C and WebCredible.
6. Make your voice consistent through the website
   You need to ensure that your content is consistent throughout your website and does not include any contradictory statements as conflicting content may make your users think that you are covering topics which you do not fully understand and this may decrease your site’s credibility. To avoid this, always check your current content thoroughly so that it relates to what you want to publish. Also, give users a chance to voice their feedback on your site’s content and structure as this will assure them that their opinion is important to you and that you want to make their browsing experience as user-friendly as possible.

I hope that the advice in this article will make you rethink the design of your Web content and help you create more user-friendly sites.

The recipe for a perfect logo design 2/6

Part 2 – Weighing and measuring

If you want to go one step further with your design brief, why not consider using a mind-map to help your designer process all the information you’ve set out for them? It’s always great to introduce such a tool as an aid to avoiding creative mind-blocks. Every designer has, at one point or another, stared mindlessly at a blank sheet of paper in the hope that an idea will fly in though the window and present itself. Sometimes this actually happens, although this is usually when the designer has been provided first-hand with a clear cut design brief. Most of the time, a designer will more than likely look to the web or a selection of design journals for their inspiration, however, when perusing such a broad-sweep of the market, this could potentially cloud their judgement and start them off on the wrong path.

Using a diagram to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea can generate ‘out of the box’ inspiration and help visualise, structure, and classify ideas. This method can be adopted as an aid in study, organisation, decision making, creative writing, etc., in this case – problem solving.

Rather than producing your own drafted mind map, this tool may be more productive used during the initial briefing process, involving the designer in a collaborative ‘blue-sky thinking’ session.  After all, two heads are better than one!

Missed Part 1 – Gathering key ingredients ?  Read it here.

Next time – Part 3 – Applying the method

The recipe for a perfect logo design 1/6

You get out exactly what you put in!

One of the single most important visual elements of your business -
is your logo.

I don’t know why, but I’ve always likened the creative process to that of
baking a cake. It may sound odd, but if you read on, the visualisation should all become clear.

You begin by collecting the ingredients, carefully weighing the quantities, then, by applying the method laid out in the recipe and using the correct utensils, before you know it you’re setting the timer – et voila! …a perfect result, created solely to delight and satisfy any appetite.

However – this desired result can only be achieved by properly preparing the ingredients and following the recipe step-by-step. Otherwise, you’re likely to end up with a disastrous result, leaving a bad taste in your mouth and only good enough for the dustbin!

Over the next 6 installments, I’ll be directing you through each stage of the logo development process and enlightening you with some valuable tips, tricks and interesting facts, along with some worthy points of consideration:

• Part 1 Gathering key ingredients
• Part 2  Weighing and measuring
• Part 3  Applying the method
• Part 4  Using the correct utensils
• Part 5  Setting the timer
• Part 6  Proofing the pudding

Now’s the time to pre-heat the oven, tie-up your apron strings and roll up those sleeves…

Part 1 – Gathering key ingredients

From a designer’s perspective, there are 6 key questions I always ask my clients in preparation of any initial creative briefing meeting. Regardless of whether the briefing is for a logo, a website or a corporate brochure, the questions are always the same:

1. (If an established business) Can I see what you have produced
   in the past?
2. Can you provide me with a mission statement or a list of your company’s core values?
3. Do you have a detailed customer profile or an example of your target market?
4. Is there anything you like/dislike about your competitors’ brands?
5. Do you have any preference to: colour, shapes, typeface, iconography, photography, illustration etc.?
6. Can you provide me with visual examples of things that inspire you?

Valuable time dedicated to research and planning prior to putting pencil to paper will equip any skilled designer with the clarity and understanding to adopt the mindset of a typical customer, therefore understanding the need for your business’s products and/or services and able to produce work perfectly positioned for that market. In my opinion, this is half the battle of arriving at a successful outcome.

Next time… Part 2 – Weighing and measuring

User experience Balanced Scorecard

In recent years, a lot of organisations started to open their eyes to the notion of user experience and many companies started to treat it as an integral part of their overall business strategy. Previous research in business and other disciplines has shown that providing good user experience in products and services delights customers, increases adoption, retention, loyalty and most importantly revenue. While poor user experience discourages people from using a given product or service and drives them to the competition.

Therefore, to go with the spirit of the current times and to be successful in today’s fierce business world, organisations need to better plan how to manage and measure user experience. The usual way of doing this is to have some sort of system for managing strategy and measuring progress toward achieving goals. One such popular system is the Balanced Scorecard, which first came into attention of the business world in the early 1990s with the publication of the Harvard Business Review article “The Balanced Scorecard – Measures that Drive Performance” by Dr. Robert Kaplan of Harvard Business School and Dr. David Norton, the co-founder of the consulting company Renaissance Solutions.

Kaplan and Norton suggest that the strategic objectives of every company need to be balanced across four perspectives:

1. The customer perspective—companies need to find out how customers perceive them.
2. The internal business perspective—companies should ask what it is that they must excel at.
3. The innovation, learning and growth perspective—companies must ask whether they can continue to improve and create value.
4. The financial perspective—companies have to decide on their strategic objectives in terms of increasing revenue and reducing cost.

Each perspective of the Balanced Scorecard includes:

1. Objectives—the major objectives companies must achieve.
2. Measures—the observable parameters companies use to measure their progress toward reaching their objectives.
3. Targets—the specific target values for the measures.
4. Initiatives—action programs companies initiate to meet their objectives.

For each perspective there might be many objectives. Objectives for user experience may include user research, design reviews and usability evaluation, etc. With the Balanced Scorecard system, organisationa can align and manage their key corporate objectives in terms of user experience and become driven by their mission rather than by short-term financial performance.

According to David Norton, the Balanced Scorecard “puts strategy at the centre of the management system instead of finance”. However, this desirable switch doesn’t provide instant results. Norton says that organisations have to allow up to two years for the process and cites the example of Mobil Oil, which in 1993 ranked seventh among the major oil companies in comparative profitability and within three years of using the balanced scorecard system, it led the industry and its share price had doubled.

The Balances Scorecard system is definitely worth trying.

Making ideas happen

The Smashing Magazine has recently published an article that includes 5 tips on how to make any ideas happen. The author of this article, Scott Belsky, has spent over 5 years studying exceptionally productive people and teams in the creative world and has published a book titled “Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision & Reality” that makes suggestions for taking your ideas and making them reality.

Apart from proposing that anyone can strengthen their ideas through being organised, nurturing connections with one’s community and developing leadership capabilities; Belsky also gives the following suggestions:

1. Avoid a Reactionary Workflow
   Instead of spending most of your working hours each day on email, text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, phone calls, instant messages etc., try for a few hours per day to avoid any incoming communication and focus on your list of long-term projects that require research and deep thought.
2. Strip Projects to Three Primary Elements
   The three primary elements include: action steps, backburner items and reference items. Actions steps are tasks that begin with verbs and can be implemented in life almost immediately.  Backburner items are essentially ideas that are the result of brainstorming or some other creative activity and although they are not actionable in the time of their invention, they have a potential of being acted upon in the future if recorded appropriately. Reference items include articles, notes and other stuff around you. In order to make the best use of them try to organise them chronologically in one big file.
3. Measure Meetings with Action Steps
   To get more out of your meetings with clients and colleagues, conduct at the end of each meeting a quick review of the items discussed and capture the action steps.
4. Reduce Your Insecurity Work
   We are often insecure about the different things in our lives such as website’s traffic or bank account and we often loose a lot of time using the existing technologies to check the current status of these things. Therefore, to be more productive in your working day try to reduce your insecurity work by becoming self-aware and introduce some discipline in your daily life.
5. The Creative Process is about Surviving the ‘Project Plateau’
   In general, we are all good at creating new ideas, but most of us are not so good at sticking with our ideas and making them reality. Most ideas get abandoned at what is called the “project plateau”, that is the point when creative excitement evaporates and the pain of deadlines and project management becomes kicks in. To prevent your ideas from disappearing from the daylight show them some respect and spend some energy executing them.

Hopefully, Belsky’s tips will help many creatives convert their exciting and innovative ideas into reality.

10 ways to enhance your site’s usability

Many websites have structure, layout and features which are largely unusable for less capable users, such as older people and people with disabilities. What surprises me the most is that, although older people are the fastest-growing segment of Internet users and supposedly have a lot of disposable income, the vast majority of companies struggle to gear up their websites for accommodating the needs and wants of heterogeneous users. There is a a twofold moral and financial incentive for creating simple and intuitive designs as industry studies show that well-designed products and services have the potential to improve customer satisfaction and this in turn allows companies which value good design to exhibit high growth.

So, to walk many website companies out of the dark with regard to web usability, I looked at the research of Jakob Nielsen, the leading web usability consultant, Usability.gov, as well as different usability writers, such as Bill Scott and Theresa Neil (”Designing Web Interfaces“), Jared Spool and colleagues (”Web Site Usability: A Designers’s Guide“) and Steve Krug (”Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability“), and collated a list of 10 most important ways of improving your website’s ease of use. These include:

1. Place a link to the home page on every page in case a user gets lost.
2. Provide a clear and complete ‘about us’ page and ‘contact’ page.
3. Make your most important links visible and easy to read.
4. Eliminate captcha systems or mandatory logins.
5. Create multiple access points to important content like subscription options.
6. Place your advertisements in places where they don’t interfere with the main content.
7. Avoid cluttering your sidebar with unnecessary links or widgets.
8. Provide targeted content and links in the post footers.
9. Use a large, comfortable font and provide space between each paragraph.
10. And last but not least… Once your site is designed, it is also advisable to ask one or more users (preferably with decreased capability) who have never seen your site before to browse it for 3 minutes as you stand over their shoulder and watch without interrupting their utterances. At the end of the 3 minutes ask your user(s) for feedback and diligently note all the comments. This little usability test will not only make you feel good about being more considerate about the needs of the more disadvantaged sections of the population, but it will also give you valuable feedback on the site’s selling potential from a prospective user and focus your attention on achieving your financial goals.

You need to remember that once a user gets to your site you are only a few clicks away from actually selling something or being left forever, so strategically it really makes sense to be more perceptive to users’ usability issues.

Cambridge’s own Dragon’s Den

Recently, I was one of the ‘dragons’ in a conceptual design competition organised by the Engineering Department at the University of Cambridge.  Among other judges were members of companies such as Rolls Royce, Jaguar, Siemens, James Dyson Foundation, PA Consulting Group, Mott MacDonald, and TTP. We were asked to judge the best and most innovative designs for a new product that can be used in the kitchen, bathroom or living room that accommodates the needs of older adults and enables independent use.

I have to admit that I was very impressed with the high level of maturity in thinking and the quality of analysis of user capability ranges, as well as marketing and engineering issues that some of the students exhibited and it seems even more impressive when I look at the fact that they were first year students. I have worked with many designers and consulted big companies on improving user experience in their designs and now in retrospect I can see that a lot of the experienced designers that I came across in my work had more trouble with considering the human component in their early conceptual designs than the students had with a simple assignment task. Maybe it has got something to do with youth… It was Jack Schmitt, a former NASA astronaut and the last of the Apollo astronauts to arrive and set foot on the Moon, who admitted that the Apollo programme achieved so much in so little time because of a combination of things, one of which was “extraordinarily motivated twenty-two-year-olds… [who] were just out of engineering school and highly imaginative – basically, they didn’t know how to fail, they hadn’t been around long enough to know what failure was like, so they didn’t worry about it” (Smith, 2005, p. 280). Or maybe with the fact that many organisational, technical, legislative, financial and time related compromises have to be made during the product’s progression from conceptual design through logical design to a physical form, all of which result in designers creating less for humans and more for product for product’s sake. But then again to objectively compare the performance of students with the performance of experienced designers with regard to the inclusion of the human component in their designs, we would have to observe how both groups went about product design from the preliminary conceptual stages through the stages of creating a logical model of a given product to the physical embodiment stages. However, in recent years academia has been paying a lot more emphasis to improved product-user interaction and different scientific methods that facilitate that interaction than in previous years when the experienced designers were educated and so the students have the advantage of having more information on user experience. Also, industry research carried out by Frost (1999) shows that for some time designers have been ignoring structured methods that would help them to improve their design processes, for the reasons such as:

• the lack of availability of large quantities of data, which is often difficult and expensive to collect and when data is unavailable or incorrect the whole process of applying design methods seems redundant
• not enough time nor inclination to research and use scientific design methods
• designers and scientific writers do not share a common pattern of thinking and language and, as a result, design practitioners rarely refer for help to design science resources
• the experiential knowledge of designers is often faster and more certain than the deployment of insightful but esoteric and abstract design science methods in situations where only an incremental change to a product form is required.

Although many designers are reluctant to employ design support methods in their work, the problem may not necessarily lie in their unwillingness to recognise the benefit of such methods but rather in the lack of visual, easy and quick to understand, implement and use methods that lead toward improvement in design practice to increase the chances of producing an accessible and usable product. So, there is still hope that one day designers will be given support methods that will fit their ways of thinking and working and more importantly that they will be happy to use such methods in their daily work.

1. Smith, A. (2005) “Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth”. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
2. Frost, R. B. (1999) “Why Does Industry Ignore Design Science?”. Journal of Engineering Design, Volume 10, Issue 4, pp. 301-304.

Exclusively from Cambridge: The importance of being last

Is winning in competitions or job interviews down to sheer ability of the contestants or does the order in which contestants perform also play a significant role? Lionel Page and Katie Page, the researchers from the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge and the Heythrop College at the University of London respectively, seem to have an answer to this somehow intriguing question.

The analysis of data from over 150 shows worldwide in the X-Factor and Idol series led the researchers to suggest that irrespective of ability contestants performing in the later positions are less likely to be eliminated in the following rounds. While, contestants that performed in the early and intermediary positions are more likely to be subject to elimination. It also appears that the first performer is less likely to be eliminated than either the second or third placed contestants.

According to Dr Lionel Page, one of this study’s authors, “in a job interview process a very good applicant who is the second or third interviewee seen, may be less likely to get the job because he/she is less likely to be remembered than the later candidates. This is both unfair for the candidate and inefficient for the organisation which may not select the best candidate for the post. It really does appear that the last shall be first”.

The results of this study show that two mechanisms, memory and direct comparison, both play a significant role in the evaluation of people’s performance. Memory-wise both primacy and recency effects are implicated when sequentially evaluating performance. With respect to the primacy effect, people who perform first are more likely to be positively evaluated than those who come in second and third positions. Whereas, a strong recency effect is implied in that people who perform in last positions have the largest advantage with respect to positive evaluations. Also, the authors of this study provide compelling evidence on the importance of a direct comparison effect with the previous contestant. More specifically, the evaluation of one participant’s performance is influenced by the evaluation of the previous participant’s performance. For example, a person performing after a weak contestant is more likely to be evaluated less favourably than a person performing after a strong contestant. There is also strong evidence that people put more effort and motivation into their performance after having witnessed the previous performance and this in turn results in the evolution in contestants’ actual performance rather than the change in the judges’ criteria.

While more research in this subject remains to be done, it raises important questions about the fairness of any competition’s evaluation process and the efficiency of the judges.

More detailed information about this interesting research can be found in the Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organisation.

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