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.

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.

“… 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

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.

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.

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.