Serious Stuff | Aqua Vita

4.17.2012
Client Website Launch, Serious Stuff

Project :: Nordaggios Branding

Published by Jonathan Cox under Client Website Launch, Serious Stuff

Project Description

Nordaggios Coffee has been doling out delicious doses of caffeinated crack in Tulsa since 1998. Since then, they’ve grown to include roasting, wholesale, and catering.

Our team was selected to craft their new national brand, website, and packaging.

Objectives

Brand style: Artful minimalism with a hand crafted feel.

Website: Deep coffee experience, easy to navigate, fun to explore. Helpful to customers.

The Results

The Reaction

The new look you designed for our company is gorgeous. We’re very proud of it.

I love the new website. The content management system gives us a way to keep our website relevant and fresh, and to tell our story. It’s great.

What We Learned

A picture is worth 1,000 words. A video: 100,000. There’s no substitute for professional photography and video when working with a very visual or emotional product. For this project, we selected Matt Steele over at Zumi Studios. You can check out his work here, if you so choose. It’s worth it.

Best idea ever: Attitude surveys. We tested the new brand direction with customers, team members and strangers early in the project. As branding genius Marty Neumeier says: “It’s not what we think, it’s what they [customers] think. (Neumeier, 2006)” Truer words, Marty.

Coffee good! We drank about a million cups of coffee over the course of this project. Thanks, Tor!

Works Cited

Neumeier, M. (2006). The Brand Gap. Berkely : New Riders.

2.29.2012
Serious Stuff

Google Privacy Changes: Don’t Panic

Published by Jessica Cox under Serious Stuff

Google brings a massive Privacy Policy Update live tomorrow!

What does this mean for you?

Everything you do on Google, Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs or any of the other 60+ properties of the Google-verse will be tracked, and the data shared.

Basically if a tree falls in the Google-verse, they will be able to measure the impact, wind speed, and how many chipmunks were affected on the other side of the forest.

The National Association of Attorneys General were not happy:

“Google’s new privacy policy is troubling for a number of reasons.”

“On a fundamental level, the policy appears to invade consumer privacy by automatically sharing personal information consumers input into one Google product with all Google products.”

Fun Fact: You can’t opt out.

You’re in for the whole ride. Unless you want to stop using all Google properties.

Why are they doing this?

Google wants to tailor the web just for you. They will use all the information they have about you to tailor your results to perfection. This means over time, no two search results will look the same.

This should come as little shock to you.

After all, Facebook knows your age, sex, religion, political affiliation, whether you are dating, what year you graduated from college, how you spend your free time, and whether you like Star Wars.

Wowzers.

Photo by keso

2.01.2012
Design Inspiration, Serious Stuff

Branding Design Strategy: A 5-Year-Old’s Perspective

Published by Jessica Cox under Design Inspiration, Serious Stuff

Fantastic video from Ladd Design. His five year old looks at various logos without the names to see what impression she gets from each one.

This video demonstrates how logos provide memorability, but they are not the brand. She associates and remembers logos based on her life experiences so far with these brands.

For the brands she recognizes, she gives distinct examples. For ones she doesn’t recognize, she uses logic to arrive at what the logo is. Those brands are a big part of her life, so this video helps us get a better understanding of branding.

Branding encompasses the entire impact your product/service has on a consumer’s life. Logos are the touchstone they remember best. Great brands are built on great experiences for their customers.

11.29.2011
Serious Stuff

Jenks Chamber – Business Over Breakfast

Published by Jessica Cox under Serious Stuff

Leadership Lessons from Youtube

Tedford Insurance put on a great talk today at the Jenks Business Over Breakfast.

Mike talked about finding what works for you, and shared some great examples of leadership in action.
Worth a few minutes to watch!

Video takeaway: People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

Video takeaway: Be easy to follow. Leadership is all about your followers.

Video takeaway: Everyone has a story if you take the time to look.

11.08.2011
Serious Stuff

Web Design: Images & Text

Published by Jessica Cox under Serious Stuff

Close your eyes and think about the word “elephant.”

web-design-images-vs-text-example

What did you see?

A dictionary entry about elephants, or big gray ears and a long trunk?

We experience the world in pictures.

Images pass through our eyes into our retina, where a thin layer containing a few hundred million neurons pass the output to about a million ganglion cells.

web-design-images-vs-text-cheetah

These in turn pass the visual data into the brain, creating a three-dimensional color model (our visual reality).

From the moment we are born, we start processing these images. Before we learn to speak, we can recognize our mother’s face.

web-design-images-vs-text-elephant

Let’s look at the numbers:
Images race through our brains at 90 million bytes per second.
Text creeps along at about 50 bytes per second (James S. Hawkes, 2005).

If you want to keep your website visitors engaged, you need to use both.

WORKS CITED

James S. Hawkes, W. H. (2005). Discovering Statistics. Hawkes Learning Systems.