Tiny Gigantic

So as I was syncing my Dropbox account to my home computers, I noticed this smart little bit of branding.

There’s three things of note here:

1. No status bar to watch until your eyes bleed.

2. Dropbox is setting my expectations right up front. They’re telling me very clearly: “Hey, don’t to sit around and watch this sync. It’ll take a while and we don’t want you to get frustrated.”

3. “Grab a Snickers.” Whoa! Is this new opportunity for advertisers? I hope they’re charging Snickers for that mention.

Because everyone has to install stuff on their computers and mobile devices, and everyone has to wait for said stuff to finish installing, might there be an opportunity to push related brands right there in the moment?

Nice article in GQ about the utter lack of originality in Hollywood right now. And nice analogy to brand making too: Here’s a taste.

Marketers revere the idea of brands, because a brand means that somebody, somewhere, once bought the thing they’re now trying to sell. The Magic 8 Ball (tragically, yes, there is going to be a Magic 8 Ball movie) is a brand because it was a toy. Pirates of the Caribbean is a brand because it was a ride. Harry Potter is a brand because it was a series of books. Jonah Hex is a brand because it was a comic book. (Here lies one fallacy of putting marketers in charge of everything: Sometimes they forget to ask if it’s a good brand.) Sequels are brands. Remakes are brands. For a good long stretch, movie stars were considered brands; this was the era in which magazines like Premiere attempted to quantify the waxing or waning clout of actors and actresses from year to year because, to the industry, having the right star seemed to be the ultimate hedge against failure.

But after three or four hundred cases in which that didn’t prove out, Hollywood’s obsession with star power has started to erode. In the last several years, a new rule of operation has taken over: The movie itself has to be the brand. And because a brand is, by definition, familiar, a brand is also, by definition, not original.

The whole thing is here.

This might sound hypocritical since I began my career as a branding guy, mostly love everything Umair Haque has to say, and actually do believe in the power of well designed brand.

But I think the “meaningful brand” as articulated here is kinda bullshit.

Why? Haque makes the distinction between functional brands, aspirational brands, and meaningful brands. But all brands mean something (i.e., all brands are meaningful.) The difference being that some meanings are more overt than others.

Because what else is branding if it isn’t actually the creation of meaning in the world?

Here’s what I mean: Say you’re branding your company, product, or service. First, you’ll come up with a list of values. You’ll articulate a mission. You’ll define your positioning and articulate a strategy. In short, you are creating meaning. Your brand can stand for performance (see Nike) or design innovation (see Apple.) It can create a perception of stability, sincerity, friendliness, and (gag) trust. And the whole point of branding is push these perceptions out into the world in a way your audience can understand, embrace, and share.

But this isn’t even where I really take issue. What bothers me most is the idea that a brand must help consumers feel good about themselves and their participation with said brand. I agree that a brand should somehow fit or help to perpetuate peoples’ personal narratives. But the truth is, a meaningful brand is tablestakes. It has to have meaning simply to be a brand.

So it isn’t the brand that must be meaningful. It’s the product. If the product is useless or evil or broken it won’t matter how strong the brand is. And vice versa: if your product or service is good, your branding matters, but it doesn’t make or break your business. See Go Daddy: Terrible name, jenky clip-art logo. Killer business.

Here’s a little Kindergarten Krumping to help you sail smoothly into this rainy/snowy weekend. Happy weekend, y’alls.

You’ve got to have sympathy for the poor college kid who wrote this cover letter. Because while the writers at Ragan mostly mean to give her some useful feedback, it’s unlikely she’ll get over the shame and shock to receive it well.

I’m not saying she’s hopeless, but wow. Just wow.

When I do something, I give it everything that I have. When I am given a task, I get it done better than expected. The men at the radio station referred to me as “Chicago” and “sassy”—and never failed to give me stories that required contacting the hard-to-get sources. I always got them to talk, and I always got them to “spill it.” Sassy, they said, is for the ability that I have when it comes to asking the “tough questions.” They always said to me jokingly…“you have the look to get the interview with men and women alike, the charm to keep the interview, the intelligence to ask the right questions, the passion to ask the hard ones, and the innocent smile that gets an honest answer out of anyone.

I too once wrote a post that was meant to help the young designers who’d worked for me understand a little bit more what was expected from them as they transitioned from school to work. It was meant to help. But I hear they still hate me.

Ziona Chan has 39 wives, 94 children, 33 grandchildren, and 14 daughters-in-law.

He says he’s ‘blessed’ to be the head of the world’s biggest family. Taking care of this many people does not, to me, seem like a blessing. Not even a little. But then, I only have one wife.

More pics of this crazy family here.

So yeah, researchers at the Free University of Berlin in Germany are developing a car whose speed and direction can be controlled by the your thoughts.

So, imagine you’re in a cab and the driver takes a longer route. Most of us just let it go, but we think about the shorter route like crazy. So, you think “go left” and the car goes left. You think “go right” and the car goes right. But what happens when it’s a longer journey, and your mind starts to wander? What might the car do if you’re thinking about bacon?

Check the video here.

I’m that guy on the BART commute playing Angry Birds the whole way. I beat it once, and now I’m trying to get three stars on every level. But despite my commitment, no one has made me an Angry Birds birthday cake that you can actually play. Apparently, this kid has the best dad ever.

Obviously, we’re doing a bunch of naming and branding work right now. It’s good fun work, but it’s got me thinking that we should articulate a standardized and properly sequenced process for clients should go through with their naming firm. I’d always assumed that people already know how naming work, but I’ve run into more than a few people lately who don’t. So, let me tell you how it works:

1. Get briefed.
If you’re an agency, ask your the client for a written brief that articulates the purpose of the naming project, the brand strategy and positioning, the value proposition of the new brand, and the criteria for success. If you’re a business engaged with a naming shop, these things will help in getting you to what you want quicker and with as little fuss as possible. And it helps if you’ve got a sense of what kind of tone you want the new name to strike. Playful? Serious? Flip? You get the idea.

2. Generate a big list.
Most agencies sell some kind of variation on “we explore a wide range of linguistic, metaphoric, descriptive, and coined directions to generate X number of names.” This is sort of true. What’s even truer is that this whole thing is about intuition: you get a feel for what would make the client happy, what would fit the brand as you understand it, and then you start saying words and writing them down.

3. Choose a shortlist.
Here’s where the confusion hits. Often clients ask the agency to present only names that have been screened and that have available domain names associated with them. First off, this creates an artificial constraint when what you really want is to generate as many options as possible. And you can always figure out a way to make your company name work in your domain. For example, had tinygigantic.com not been available, I’d have tried tinyg,com or tinygiganticblog,com or tinygiganticsf.com.

It also assumes that the agency got it right with only minimal direction. I think it makes more sense that the agency, to the best of their ability, choose 50 or so names, present them with strategy-based rationales, and together with the client select a shortlist to run through legal. This way, the agency gets credit for all the work and thinking they’ve done and the client gets to see what’s been generated, gets to be more involved in choosing their name (always a good thing), and can ensure that everything they send into legal would be something they could live with.

4. Talk about the results.
As I said before, during a naming project, most everything dies in legal. But if it doesn’t, you’ve got some good, clean, names to fall back on just in case the second round doesn’t yield any more good stuff.

5. Repeat as necessary.

Simple, right? Got any other additions to this process?

Over the years, we’ve done hundreds of naming projects for new companies, products, services, features, and events. Once, I even conducted a naming workshop to help some close friends name their baby. But still naming is one of the hardest things to do and even harder to get right.

Here’s the two things tell our clients at the beginning of every naming project:

1. This isn’t about you.
Or your wife. Or your friend who’s in marketing who really loves web 2.0 spellings like Flickr or scvngr. It’s about strategy. So you’d better actually have one for the brand you’re trying to create. You’re gonna need to know the ideas you want the name to convey, the people you want the brand to appeal to, and the tone you want to strike. And you’ve got it put down on paper so that your naming shop can use it create the right kinds of names. This will also give you and every other stakeholder some concrete criteria to measure possible name candidates against. Otherwise you’ll be choosing a name because it reminds you of a dog you once had, or because your mom like the letter H.

2. Everything dies in legal.
Do not fall in love. Because you will almost certainly get your heart broken when the lawyers tell you there’s a trademark conflict and that you’ll likely get your ass sued if you pursue it. So don’t look for that one perfect name. Instead, look for the bunch of names that are good enough. That’s all you need. Because if your product sucks or your company is evil, it won’t matter how good the name is.

Witness here the trailer for a new short film called Las Palmas by Johannes Nyholm. People here in the office laughed so hard they spit out their sandwiches. But, uh, maybe that’s just us. Enjoy.

Thanks to Ethan at Tough Customer Music for the link.

My friend James sent me a link to this super inspiring piece about young kids in East Oakland. I moved to Oakland about 2 years and have grown to really love it, despite (or maybe because of) how broken it is. Please pass this one along.

Not to be a hater, but I think this is absolutely ridiculous. Here’s why:

Both the metaphor (for product design strategy) and the analogy (for good strategy vs. bad strategy) on which this poorly executed piece of branded content is built are broken. First of all, you don’t make cake by starting with the cake. You make cake by starting with the people you’re making the cake for.

Hell, the cake model of product design could go like this:

Assess the need.
What would taste good to your audience? What’s missing from their daily cake intake? Do they get plenty of chocolate but not enough cinnamon? Do they like to pair spicy with sweet?

Bake the cake.
Did they like it? Was it too salty? Too sweet? Tell ‘em that this was a beta cake and that the real cake will be launching in October.

Then make a better cake.
Did they like it this time? Cool. Now tell ‘em you’ll be adding filling and icing in the next month or two.

You see what I mean. The metaphor here is silly because it doesn’t actually offer a one-to-one articulation of any kind of process. It’s only there to act as a foil for what’s being sold as the better (read, Adaptive Path‘s) way to design a product. You know: make cupcakes. Which is weird because they’re the same. Cupcakes are really just scaled down cakes. I mean, first you gotta make the cake (but what if it’s dry?) and you still gotta put icing and sprinkles.

Now the cupcake (and/or cake) model isn’t terrible. Launching with a small core offering, testing, rapidly iterating, and adding bells and whistles later is the smart way to go. In fact, it’s a well-known concept from agile methodology called minimum viable product.
But in my opinion, it’s no different from the “cake model.” You assess the need, you make the smallest complete thing, you test it, and you iterate.

I like that there’s more and more startups everyday offering peer-to-peer sharing. From couchsurfing, to airbnb, to getaround, and now parking spots with Park Circa. Next up, rent your nice clothes to your neighbors when you’re not wearing them.

So there’s been a bunch of moments over the years when we at Language in Common begin (again) thinking about diversifying our revenue streams. Because, as lots of you know, the problem with running a services business is that you have no visibility into how much money you’re going to have in the future. Sure, you can make guesses based on what’s happened in the past, but you can’t really know. And so if and when you’re lucky enough to have a surplus of capital, you can’t actually re-invest it in the business because you may actually need it as a cushion if–I don’t know–say, the global economy comes to a screeching halt.

So what we did to mitigate this risk was basically ignore it, and spend the money anyway. Because sometimes you have to just close your eyes and jump.

Which we’ve done a bunch.

And mostly, we’ve failed with super fun and conceptually awesome but financially viable not-so-much mobile apps, games, web apps, and short-lived partnerships. The temporary transformation of this here blog into another services business (under the same LiC roof) was another one of those attempts.

So: why another services business instead of a product business that would include better visibility and the potential for passive income? Mostly because we’re too busy to run two different companies full time, products require some start-up cash (more than we had), and because we already knew how to run a services business. We figured it’d be easy and that we would share resources across the two businesses. So we created a smaller, more agile, strictly digital, creative services shop with a lower price point.

And it actually worked! Well, kind of. Decent work showed up for Tiny Gigantic (the web design shop), while at the same time, the same kind of work started showing up for Language in Common (the digital design agency) with larger budgets. You see where I’m going here: the plan worked in that we wound up getting more work, but failed in that we found ourselves barely making money on Tiny G jobs because we were doing them with the more costly LiC resources. And then there was the whole mind-fuck of having to remember to answer the right telephone with the right company name and send emails and invoices from the right domain.

So: lesson learned. Tiny Gigantic, the inspiration feed has returned.

Henceforth until the next urge to jump, Tiny Gigantic will be a place for exploration, inspiration, conversation, and awesomeness.

We’ll leave the kick-ass branding, development, and design work to Language in Common.

So you’ve got 500, 000 followers on Twitter. And marketers are approaching you to pay for ads in your tweets. That’s awesome for you, but a new study shows that the number of followers you have does not correlate to your ability to influence behavior. Here’s a little taste:

…follower count is not sufficient to capture the influence of a user (i.e., the ability of an user to sway the opinions of her followers). It only shows how popular the user is (i.e., the size of her audience). But, as we showed in our paper, retweets and mentions, which measure the audience responsiveness to a user’s tweets, do not correlate strongly with number of followers.

Read the whole article here.

Nice little post by Adaptive Path on where retail on the internet seems to be headed. Here’s a taste:

The future of physical retail emphasizes conversations and demonstrations.

We’re starting to see this. An Apple Store has remarkably little stuff on display. But what it does have, you can play with, and there are many associates available to help you figure out what makes the most sense for you. Some stores have the Apple Theater, with live demonstrations of new products. Umpqua Bank is bringing a coffeehouse feel to their branches, a lower-key environment that encourages discussion and engagement with bank staff about financial matters. Even USAA, which until recently had all service delivered through phone or online, is experimenting with financial centers to help members manage their financial lives.

The rest is here.

At first, I thought this was super cheesy. But then around the midway point, it got quite beautiful.

It all starts with a wireframe. However you make them—with a sharpie or Omnigraffle—wireframes help you create products, applications, and experiences that aren’t just user friendly but are also truly engaging.

At Language in Common, when we’re designing websites, applications, user experiences and the like, we always begin with the wireframe. We start here because it’s a super quick way to imagine, conceptualize and design a holistic user experience that not only benefits future interface design challenges but also begins—at the concept level—to create a final product that people actually want to use. We happen to be big fans of doing it (heh) with a sharpie because it makes the prototyping process faster, more iterative, and more collaborative—always good things when it comes to designing for usability.

Here are some resources to help you get the most from wireframing:

Wireframes Magazine: Covers a variety of topics related to wireframes and template tools, with respective sections for wireframe samples, UI tools, templates, and reader sharing.

Get Wireframing: The All-In-One Guide by Designer Grace Smith: Comprehensive list of techniques, tools, articles, etc.

20 Steps to Better Wireframing: Helpful step-by-step guide that breaks down a basic wireframing process.

Sketchy Wireframes: A look at computer-based sketchy wireframes.

The 7 Wonders Of Wireframes: A quick look at the benefits of hand-drawn (vs HTML) wireframing.

Thanks to Katharine N. for the post and tips!

Give this a moment to get started. It’s super awesome.