September 30, 2011 • 11:46 am • POSTED BY bmckenna
This past Wednesday, a group of 160over90 believers donned their Sunday best and hoofed it to First Unitarian Church to receive Communion free pretzels and hear Aaron Draplin preach the good word.
With 150 rapt designerds filling the pews, the bearded reverend delivered one hell of a sermon. Topics included: his life story, that one f*cking video, design tall tales, stuff he loves (including sweatpants and America), and stuff he hates (Kid Rock).
The moral of the story: make rad stuff for people you love, and everything else will fall into place.
September 26, 2011 • 12:46 pm • POSTED BY stephen penning
As a creative director you need a myriad of things to align to make great work. An awesome client product certainly helps. An awesome product and a good creative process are even sweeter. But if you have both of those things going for you and the client doesn’t trust you you’ll likely end up frustrated, asking yourself “what if” as you close the bar on a Monday night. This is not one of those instances. This is a look at rebranding, through the eyes of the client.
It was in the summer of 2010 that I was introduced to Hiro Leung and Song Kim, owners and operators of Imagin Asia Restaurant Management Group based in Gainesville, Florida. In 2005 they opened Rolls’n Bowls, a restaurant where you can build your own sushi roll or rice bowl. It was met with great success and Hiro and Song realized there was an opportunity for expansion. It was soon after that, that our relationship began.
STEVE: Let’s take a step back in time for a minute. Tell us how the concept of building your own sushi roll came to fruition?
HIRO: It was a typical day at our other restaurant Dragonfly where one or two hour waits were the norm and we would go through crazy amounts of sushi rolls on any given day. Getting to the restaurant at 10 in the morning and not leaving till midnight was part of our lives. After our busy shifts, we would usually end up eating whatever was left over as our family meal by creating our own roll or bowl. Mostly everything was gone by then so we had to be creative in making what was left into a meal. Ironically, we noticed that what we ate was really good so we opened up our initial QSR (quick service restaurant) concept that revolved around our family meal. Build your own roll or bowl.
At what point in the restaurant’s existence did you realize that the concept was something special?
We usually travel around the Country looking for inspiration and we realized that we could not find anything like this. Furthermore, we have guests that not only ate our food but also wanted to open up their own store in their hometown.
Rolls’n Bowls was succeeding. Why was there a desire to rebrand the restaurant?
We knew that with the help of a great agency we could take our concept national. It’s like taking something that was good and making it great. The agency was able to tie and strengthen our brand so that we can be ready for our national expansion.
How does a quick service Japanese restaurant in Florida end up hooking-up with a branding agency in Philly?
Before we engaged in a full rebranding, we spent literally half a year looking for the right partners. I love Florida, but I have to say we don’t have the creative talent that other larger cites have and 160over90 was no exception. From the attitude, client experience and creativity we knew 160over90 was the one we wanted to work with. The question was did they want to work for a small growing concept such as ours. We used the beautiful weather and beaches to lure them.
Describe the rebranding process?
The Agency really took a huge dive and studied the market before suggesting any rebranding to us. We appreciated the many hours spent on the discovery process to not only get to know us but to also study the competitive landscape.
Inside Rolls'n Bowls
Getting to know the Rolls'n Bowls staff
Was there anything you were nervous about?
Definitely! We had a restaurant that was already humming and working. We didn’t want the Agency to just rebrand for rebranding sake. We needed them to make our restaurant better. Changing the “identity” was the most nerve racking moment. It had to not only sound right but also capture what we did well and elevate it to another level.
Describe the brand direction you selected. How did you know it was right for you?
The Agency had showed us two great directions, which made the decision very hard but after thinking in terms of which idea had the best long-term direction and the most authentic feel, it was easy.
After the brand direction was established we created a new name for you. Tell us about Yume Ume?
The name fits what we do and it has so much potential. It has subliminal message as well as a strong meaning. Our name is about creativity, fun, unique, fresh and intelligent. In Japanese it means delicious dream.
How would you describe the experience at a Yume Ume? How does the brand direction inform it?
The experience at Yume Ume is about dining out with personal expression focusing on the creative nature of the product. It is organic and illustrative celebrating imagination by highlighting the thrill of great slow food made fast.
What is your favorite piece of brand expression that has been created?
There are so many pieces to choose from but my favorite piece is the copy for our to-go container. “Let’s go back to…your place”. It is so intimate, fun and emotional. Exactly what dining at Yume Ume is all about!
When is Philly going to get a Yume Ume?
Soon…very soon. If you’re reading this and would like to partner up. Come and check us out!
September 23, 2011 • 12:29 pm • POSTED BY Tammo Walter
Scientist from the University of California Berkeley developed a system that captures someone’s brain activity and reassembles it to video data.
In the video below you can see on the left hand side what the test person watched. The video on the right was reconstructed purely based on the measured brain activity. Obviously it has ways to go until you’d be able to clearly see what someone else saw or thought about but it’s a pretty radical breakthrough in regards to reading someone’s mind eventually. Good or bad? Probably both.
September 16, 2011 • 2:27 am • POSTED BY Tammo Walter
All of our brand strategy and development projects start with a research and discovery phase. And in most cases the discovery phase leads us to the heart of the brand, its home and the place where we meet with and talk to its creators, stakeholders, influencers and consumers. A place where we question everything and go like archeologists on a thorough search for the truth (no matter what that might unearth). Some things you just can’t imagine but have to experience firsthand, especially if you want to tell others about it. And it becomes even more important if you are somewhat critical about its offerings.
When we set out for our discovery trip to the University of Notre Dame I was curious and skeptical about what we would find out and experience on campus. For a couple of reasons: 1) it is already one of the most recognized university brands in the US and therefore comes by default with a lot of preconceptions and 2) I am always careful when religion gets married with education. Given that and the nature of a discovery I kind of was the devil’s advocate on a Catholic campus.
As strange as it might sound it is not a bad position to be in when you are trying to find out how water proof a concept, philospohy or idea is. If you already bought into something you don’t listen and look as careful as you probably should. But, no risk of that in this case. And that also had a lot to do with the people we interviewed and met with. As with every journey or road trip you’d take you come across things you didn’t expect, which more often than not is what makes it memorable in the end. With universities it’s rarely the beauty of the campus or the advanced labs you might see during a campus tour (although Notre Dame’s campus is cool and the view into the stadium from the press lounge awesome).
Most often it is the stories and people you meet that embody the essence of the brand and bring it to life immediately. In the case of this trip it was definitely the meeting with 94-year-old Father Ted (Rev. Theodore Martin Hesburgh, C.S.C.), former long-time president of the University of Notre Dame, holder of the world record for most honorary doctorate degrees (150) ever awarded to one person, the first figure in higher education to receive the Congressional Gold Medal and the highest civilian honor the Medal of Freedom, former Chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, advisor to several US Presidents and a thousand other unbelievable things. Simply put he was one of the most impressive people I ever met for as least as many reasons as he has doctorate degrees.
Especially amongst catholics he is a living legend, one that always fought for a better tomorrow and against the perception that as George Bernard Shaw (founder of the London School of Economics and Nobel Prize winner in literature) once said “a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms.” Father Ted believes “there is no conflict between science and theology except where there is bad science or bad theology.”
With everything he has been involved with, from being appointed by President Eisenhower to the Civil Rights Commission in 1957 and by President Carter to head a delegation of Americans to a global conference on science and technology for development in 1977 to going on a fact-finding tour of refugee camps around Kosovo for the United Nations in 1999 he is the living proof of his and Notre Dame’s philosophy.
Given all the skepticism I had going into this I have to admit that Father Ted was just an extraordinary icing on an amazing cake and the whole team got convinced not only by him but the whole, extremely passionate, welcoming and open-minded community we experienced during our trip. Now our big challenge was to capture everything we learned and to translate that into a Notre Dame undergraduate brand that can convey its story to a variety of different audiences in the most engaging and truthful way. Communicating all the facts, achievements and opportunities, especially to the 16- or 17-year-old high-school student that starts thinking about what they want to do with their lives.
And now, roughly six months later we hold the seminal piece of the new brand in our hands, fresh off the press. I hope this viewbook will inspire and convince the audience as much as we were inspired and convinced. And when it comes to advocating, no question I am now on Notre Dame’s side.
September 14, 2011 • 9:00 am • POSTED BY Mark Llobrera
We’ve added a ton of new work to our main site recently, but one thing that might not be immediately evident is that the site is running on a new content management system (CMS) built with Drupal 7. For years we’d been limping along with a custom-built CMS, but after we built a few Drupal sites we decided it was time to bring that knowledge home.
A Few Goals of the Project:
One CMS for Multiple Sites
Earlier this year we attended An Event Apart Boston, and knew that we needed a radical re-think on our approach to our web work. So when we started mapping out the new CMS we decided that we would not only support our existing Flash site, but build out a mobile site that would allow us to experiment with the latest responsive web design techniques. The end result is a CMS that generates XML feeds for the Flash-capable experience, but detects iOS/Android mobile users and gives them an HTML experience that’s been designed for smaller screens.
Don’t Wait to Get Started: Release, Then Iterate From There
We knew that a fully mobile-first, responsive re-design of the site would take more time than we had, so we decided to do what we could and iterate from there. So: the mobile experience uses Drupal’s Mobile Tools module to funnel mobile users to one of two themes, one for phone-sized devices and one for tablets. We went with separate themes to sidestep the issue of delivering unnecessarily-large images to the smallest screens. We view this as an interim step to something better. The recent responsive redesign of Palantir.net shows that a fully-responsive design can be done in Drupal, so that’s the next step.
A Few Things We Learned:
Drupal 7: A Newscaster Who Sometimes Doesn’t Wear Pants Behind the Desk
Drupal as a CMS consists of core modules, and third-party contributed modules. So while the core modules were ready for primetime and a big improvement over Drupal 6, there were a bunch of third-party modules that were…a little rough around the edges. Metadata for our images was particularly hard to implement, because we were using the Media module that was still in a state of furious development. We also decided not to manage video assets via Drupal, because the support for embedding video directly wasn’t quite there yet. Instead we’re hosting our videos on YouTube, because their entire business is based on making sure video is delivered in the correct format for the user—mobile or otherwise.
We also couldn’t find a good module to translate content to XML feeds for the Flash site, so we wrote custom views to do that instead. Which brings us to the next key learning:
Bring Your Machete
Drupal is remarkably flexible. Part of the price you pay for that flexibility is that the HTML markup it generates is extremely DIV-happy. A single content field could be wrapped in a thicket of DIVs. Towards the end of our project most of our work involved pruning the markup so that we could get it close to what we had in our HTML mockups.
Move in Circles, or: Fingers are Fat
The development cycle for the mobile site was a departure from the conventional design -> build -> ship model of web design. Instead we designed and built the mobile site, then started to test it over the course of several days, using a wide array of devices. You can use mobile device emulators (like the iPhone/iPad Simulator that ships with XCode), but there’s no substitute for testing with a real device. We ended up tweaking a few things with our design (especially for the phone layouts) to accommodate the lower precision of fingers/thumbs. We then implemented those design changes and tested again. The end result was a more organic, iterative process that we’re testing out on projects moving forward.
There is no Finally…
The great thing about releasing something is that it gives you a good marker from which to evaluate things before plunging back in. The mobile version for our site will continue to evolve as we get better at shaping Drupal’s output. It’ll also get better as we slowly integrate the new things we’ve learned in the meantime with respect to adaptive/responsive web design. In the meantime we hope that we’ve improved the experience for our users.
If you’re interested in the latest in adaptive/responsive web design, we highly recommend Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte, and Adaptive Web Design by Aaron Gustafson.
For me, surfing, its the fountain of youth, my exercise, and the best therapist in the world. It’s a part of my every day life. As I have gotten older, my family has grown, and work taking more of a priority, I find the opportunity to paddle out less and less. So when Hang Ten approached us at 160over90 to help reposition their brand, I jumped at the opportunity to get involved. I figure why not merge a little surf mentality with work, if I cant be surfing, I may as well be thinking about it. The research was going to be brutal, involving lots of water time, board meetings, and visiting surf shops (talking story with my people).
Hang Ten is such a jewel, and was such a force in establishing the action sport counter culture. The brand was there in the beginning for surf, skate, snow, bmx and moto; and played a key role in exposing the sports to the mainstream audience by promoting events and competitions and getting them broadcast on network television (and this was back in the 70′s).
The symbol of hope, carrying over 50 years of brand equity, the Hang Ten FEET are widely recognized around the world. These little feet have an incredible recognition and almost everyone has a positive affinity for them. Some can quite put their finger on it, but they recognize it. Symbolic of the most iconic and stylish surf moves of all time, The feet, they represent both performance and the casual lifestyle. We had to bring them back, treat them with the respect they deserve. Give them a strong identity with a marketing message they can rely on.
Most people we spoke to associated Hang Ten with surf and California culture, but a few remember it as a fashion brand rooted in action sports. But really, it’s all three. Throughout the last two decades, the brand had changed hands multiple times, and has become available in many countries around the globe, each country having it own interpretation of the brand. The authenticity and meaning of the brand was being diluted, yet the notion of it stemming from california remained organically. Hang Ten was in need of focus and an injection of energy. Our job was to bring everything back into focus, and help reposition the brand as an all season brand, embracing multiple action sport cultures, appealing to both a male and female audience.
It can be difficult to describe the feeling of bobbing around in the sun in warm salt water, waiting for the next set to come in. The exercise for Hang Ten made me realize something. Its not the bobbing around in the water, its not flying through trees in fresh powder, its not skating the abandoned pool down the street, its the feeling you get by doing it. Its the good vibe, the relaxed and happy mental state. Vitamin D production promoted by the sun. The feeling you get from the first warm day of spring, the first day you can take off your shoes, and go barefoot.
Its kind of like the scene in “Die Hard” when Bruce Willis takes off his shoes and scrunches the carpet with his toes.
