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Stealing another idea from Neutron LLC, here’s a simple staement that will help guide you to an effective strategic brand positioning.

Read the full article “Brand Positioning” written by Josh Levine on Neturon’s site. It’s very brief, insightful, useful; I’d expect no less from Neutron. Neutron also offers this statement as a useful PDF for your next stategy session.

Following their advice to Steal This Idea, I’d like to introduce you to “Invisible Branding” as described by Neutron LLC, the well-known brand consultants behind The Brand Gap and Zag. While graphic design and other visual expressions can be important elements to brand perception, they are certainly do not define a brand alone, and Invisible Branding, as Josh Levine of Neutron explains, reveals that many less-tangible actions go a long way to define a brand.

This reminds me of an important principle about cultivating and communicating a brand: live the brand first. That is, creating a brand identity is not only defining who and what your company is and what promise you offer to your prospects, clients or customers. It’s not only creating visual and verbal expressions of that identity and promise. It’s taking actions to ensure that your brand identity and promise are delivered at every touchpoint, especially those person-to-person touchpoints that are created between executives and employees, and between employees and customers.

Neutron (as usual) does an excellent job of articulating this idea, but I believe this approach is well-practiced by today’s leading design, advertising, and marketing firms. At Martino Flynn, we adamantly advise clients to make sure to deliver on their brand promise before they make the promise to their customers. And I see similar approaches taken by our colleagues here in Rochester, NY. James Wondrack of Wondrack Design leads off his company’s website with “Translate your strategy into actions that attract, demonstrate value to, and keep customers” and focuses on the ways a company communicates with customers and employees, and on ways that these communications can be redesigned and improved. Brand Integrity states that “Great brands are built by ‘doing’ not just ‘saying.’” I couldn’t agree more.

My point? Though well-planned and well-executed design and communication programs are important to cultivating a successful brand, the research and big-picture strategy behind those communication is the crucial foundation upon which these tactics are built.

Designer Hillman Curtis produced this short film on one of graphic design’s living legends, Milton Glaser. It’s titled “Art is Work”, and offers a peek at Glaser’s thoughts on why designers do what they do, and why he teaches design.

“… the life of a designer is a life that is very much between two sensibilities, that of the businessman and that of the artist”

“… art performs this pacifying function in culture, … its practitioners create commonalities — they create things to gather about”

http://www.hillmancurtis.com/03/films/artist_series/milton.php

37signals recently launched a new version of Backpack, their web-based service that allows non-technical users to easily make web pages with to-do lists, notes, files, and images. It’s no surprise that the guys at 37signals continue to innovate with “Ajax” functions. What has always impressed me about their web-based tools is the ease of use - I originally started using Basecamp simply because it handled the file uploading process more cleanly and intuitively for non-technical users than any other system I’d seen.

I have this pipe dream that someone, perhaps one of the groups that I consider to lead the charge in web design and development that focuses on user needs and clear, effective communication, will someday soon create a content management system (CMS) that will change the way most businesses approach the web. I believe that with this version of Backpack, 37signals has created a tool that has some features and benefits that closely resemble those of a CMS. There are many content management systems available already - many of them very good. But most try so hard to be one-size-fits-all that they’re too difficult for the average business person to use. I believe that 37signals could come up with a system that would combine ease-of-use with a small set of tools that would satisfy most users’ needs. If you’re listening, Jason, I would be ridiculously interested in developing this kind of thing with your group.

I have read and re-read an article on Blue Flavor’s great blog entitled “Putting Out Fires” several times now. Brian Fling explains that “unforeseen projects or tasks that tend to come from nowhere,” or “fires” “are an inevitable part of the modern workplace.” Like me, I’m sure many of you know exactly what Brian means. As of this writing, I lead a small group in a company of about 60 people, in a culture that is centered around these fires, in which every project, every conversation, every initiative seems to be an emergency. And I freely admit that I am not only a victim of fire-starting, but am often the firestarter myself.

Brian offers some good advice here on not only how to put fires out, but how to prevent them in the first place. Brian mentions that he “once had a job where [he] received so many email requests for new work on a daily basis that it was impossible for [him] to respond and schedule next steps for all of them.” This sounds a lot like my work life right now. I use a neo-GTD system that’s centered around creating and maintaining momentum by identifying and acting on “the next action,” and while this has helped me get a lot of things done, I have not been able to work the system to deal with a workload that has many tight deadlines, and constant new emergencies cropping up all the time.

In any case, I really like the way Brian has classified the different kind of fires here, I think this is going to be a thing.

In an excerpt from his book Zag, brand mastermind Marty Neumeier of Neutron lists five ways to measure brand value. While this is certainly interesting, I’d love to hear Marty’s thoughts on not just how to evaluate existing brands, but on putting a dollar amount on the opportunity of developing a great brand, or on the risk of not doing so, or making too small an investment in branding. I’m a bit of a brand strategist myself, and while most clients that I work with want to develop a great brand, it can be a challenge to get the time and money to do the job right.

Read this great article on Core 77 titled “Experience is the Product…and the only thing users care about” by Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path. Here’s an excerpt:

When you start with the idea of making a thing, you’re artificially limiting what you can deliver. The reason that many of these exemplar’s forward-thinking product design succeed is explicitly because they don’t design products. Products are realized only as necessary artifacts to address customer needs. What Flickr, Kodak, Apple, and Target all realize is that the experience is the product we deliver, and the only thing that our customers care about.

When I was a kid, my parents always had Time Magazine around the house. I’ve always liked Time, and I feel that its clear and accessible presentation of information (including big, bold headlines, smartly written subtitles, and information graphics by Nigel Holmes) influenced me to become a graphic designer.

Time (the printed magazine, as opposed to their web presence) recently went under a bit of a facelift, which they noted within their pages. They publicly featured their editorial graphic design team, along with (I believe) designers from Pentagram that worked on the magazine’s redesign, which I found gratifying — it’s always nice to see graphic designers get some public props.

While I generally like what’s been done to evolve the look of Time, I’ve noticed some kerning problems, in the small-size Franklin Gothic captions throughout the magazine. I’d be willing to bet that this is due to some font-substitution or other font-file-related problem somewhere in the magazine’s workflow. The lack of attention to detail here (for me, at least) sullies what is otherwise a clean, clear layout. I hope the design and production team at Time is able to remedy this situation soon, so they can continue to set a good example for today’s budding designers, like they did for me years ago.

Participate in A List Apart’s first annual survey to increase knowledge of web design and boost respect for the profession. I did.

Aquent has a great series of short videos in a “thought leadership” section of their site. My favorite is a video titled “Beyond Design” featuring Dana Arnett of VSA Partners. I attended an AIGA event a few years ago featuring Dana - he talked about his work at VSA with Harley-Davidson and other clients. Hearing Dana Arnett talk about his work was inspiring enough to convince me to become an AIGA member and serve on the board of my local Upstate New York chapter. He has a very down-to-earth way of talking about the importance of designers to today’s businesses. Whenever I hear him speak, I feel that he somehow gives credit to the fact that designers today are often the problem-solvers for business - solvers of not just visual problems or brand identity problems, but of organizational or operational problems. If you’re a designer and you’re not familiar with Dana Arnett, watch this video. This is a guy who really understands the challenges and opportunities facing graphic designers and art directors today. His perspective on these is always energizing to me.