Brand Design Blog, News and Ideas

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and a is conference that brings together great speakers from around the world.

The TED web site houses a gold mine of presentations given on topics ranging from Business to the Environment, from Culture to Innovation.

With talks by guests such as Jane Goodall, Al Gore and Brian Greene each FREE video presentation is packed with insightful and interesting information.

Each speaker is given (approx) 18 minutes to give the talk of a life time on their chosen subject.

There is some really great stuff on the site and I would highly recommend that you take some time to check it out.

I’ve also selected a category on design which I think you’ll interesting – “Design like you give a Damn” features a range of great speakers talking about all aspects of design.

If you found this interesting, leave me a comment and let me know.

Here’s an interesting little post that I found the other day, that walks you through how the Google logo was created and how it’s colours were chosen.

In my opinion, the Google logo itself is nothing for a designer to marvel at.

But…

By keeping the logo simple, the design doesn’t have many flaws (a key to successful design) – Allowing it to become one of the worlds most recognizable symbols today.

It’s always better to go with simple and clean, than over-complicated and over-worked.

You can read the article at: www.wired.com

In the design industry you often hear the phrase ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ or ‘Keep it simple, son’.

Both amount to the same acronym ‘K.I.S.S.’

Keep those 4 letters in your head and you’ll do alright.

So, why keep it simple? What does keeping it simple mean?

Well, the reality behind the idea of ‘keeping it simple’ is pretty straight forward.

The simpler you make a design, the less chances you have to make a mistake.

Each element that is added to a design (of any sort) ’should’ have a purpose. It should perform a task or fulfill a need. It should target a purpose.

‘Purpose targets’ can involve everything from function to communication to efficiency.

By adding unnecessary elements to a design, your design requires more power to perform its function, the message you wish to communicate is diluted, and your design performs at a lower efficiency.

Here are some examples:

• Logos designed with fine line work. Viewed at a small size the line work becomes jumbled or disappears. The same when large logos are viewed from a distance.
• Television ads. Too much background noise, music or sound effects. Causes the message spoken by the voice over to be hard to hear. You miss the message.
• Magazine advertising. Too many messages or too much text dilute the most important idea. The messages fight for attention. You end up with the reader not receiving enough impact from any one message. They fail to be called to act on your idea.

So with each element you add, you have another chance of missing the purpose target and ultimately causing the overall design to miss it’s full potential.

By keeping the elements involved in a design to a bare minimum, you have less chance to miss your purpose targets and you allow your design to become efficient.

I see examples of over complicated design every day.

Have you seen design that could be simplified to become more efficient?

Can you simplify your own designs?

There is more to this topic, including Keeping it simple for customers. Which I may discuss in another post.

But for now, I’d be interested in your feedback.

We’ve just completed work on a Life Insurance Website.

Life Insurance Advocates are specialist insurance brokers working out of the Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.

The brief was to encourage more people to contact the Brokers via their website presence.

So we broke the task down into two major areas.

Firstly, to take the old, dated design and restyle the website branding to give it a new, fresh look. While in the process giving it a friendlier face and making the sites ‘online’ contact areas more accessible.

Second. Our client wanted a stronger search engine presence for key terms within their industry. To begin this process, we cut out all the table based design and moved towards CSS styling. Allowing for less coding and easier crawling for Search Engine Spiders.

We also moved all important keyword phases to be text based to once again make them more accessible to the Search Spiders.

All major service areas of the business were also given their own pages to make for more relevant listings and copywriting was reviewed for additional search penetration.

This natural (white hat) form of search engine optimization pays off well in the long run, as it’s less prone to the ups and downs of chasing after Googles latest Algorithms (not that that is an exact science either).

You can check the site out at www.lifeinsuranceadvocates.com.au.

I’d be interesting to hear your thoughts on the site revision.

Just been announced at Mac World 2008.

The New Apple Laptop. Macbook Air. The worlds thinnest notebook.

Everyone had been wondering what Steve Jobs might announce at this years conference after the press that the iphone got last year.

This new laptop is ultra thin. At it’s thickest point you are looking at 22mm which then tapers down to a 4mm ‘blade like’ edge.

Even if you’re not a Mac fan, this one is definitely worth a look.

You can view the commercial here.

Or, have a closer look with the guided tour here.

I’ll be interested to read your feedback on this one.

We all know that business cards are one of the most useful pieces of promotion in our marketing armory.

But, making your business card stand out from the crowd can often be a difficult task.

Here’s a post from a blog I found recently that has some great reference material that will help keep you inspired when you’re banging your head against the wall for that great idea.

Check the post out here: Cool Business Card Ideas

I’d love to hear of any other great design resources that you’ve found.

White space is an important element in creating clean, functional design.

The idea of white space does not relate to the colour white, but instead the allowance of space surrounding a design object.

By allowing this ‘white space’ we let objects function without being impacted by surrounding design elements.

To explain more, I found this great article by Mark Boulton at Alistapart.com

Coming up to the New Year the internet is becoming flooded with the ‘best of’ lists for 2007.

Here are a few of the best 2007 design listings out there.

• The best of CSS Design for 2007
• Graphic Design Inspiration
• Web Design and Functionality

If you have any other great design lists, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Back in Disney’s hey day, they created some animation reels that feel more like documentaries than just cartoons for children. Here’s a great example of their vision for the future of highways and the automobiles that run on them.

Some of their ideas have started to become reality. But unfortunately, Disney’s vision lies in a perfect world of endless money and materials.

In the real world, most of this technology would simply be stopped by the cost of upkeep and repairs.

If anyone knows the date of when this animation was actually created, I’d be interested in hearing the answer.

Enjoy.

Credit where credit is due. I first saw this video at myextralife.com.

I know I’ve said that you may never need a design book again with internet services such as Flickr around…

…But, if you’re stuck for gift ideas for the designer in your life. You could do worse than to purchase one of the great design publications from this list over at You the Designer.com