Lately, I’ve been really interested in store window designs, or rather, the designs on the store windows. There’s a lot you can do to play with light. Take for instance this door at Starbucks– when seated on the couch or at a nearby table, the hands seem to be reaching out to you on the floor, leading your eye to the door and sales point: the Starbucks Rewards Card.
Even something as simple as decals on a door with business hours becomes interesting when the type casts a shadow on the wall behind the door.
Have you spotted some interesting window designs/decals?
Everybody check out the BARK About Healthcare Blog. Molina Healthcare, where I currently work, is a member of the BARK consortium, and I designed and developed the blog in Wordpress. The blog is for people who are seeking government and other health and financial resources they might need after being laid off or if they’re having financial troubles. BARK’s being piloted in Missouri, and if it takes off, there’ll be a BARK for other states as well!
I’ve been really interested in the new beta redesign for LA’s transit system, metro.net. I never thought the design was terrible, but it did take me some time to find what I was looking for before I had it memorized. The new design is seems pretty minor, but there are some important differences.
All the random tidbits toward the bottom of the page to find frequently needed content (i.e. Maps, timetables, rider info, etc.) are not longer graphically presented. Instead, the top tabs have a nice little menu system with each section’s contents broken down.
Service updates now live on the homepage, presenting which lines are currently affected. Before, there was a link which then would take you to a listing of service updates. Less clicks and also, more urgency attached to the alerts.
A typographic improvement to the Trip Planner.
Popular pages listing, which is useful for riders who use the site for specific information again and again.
Nifty icons for E-mail Alerts, the RSS feed, and Twitter at the upper-right hand corner. I think some of the other social media icons could have gone there as well.
A news section (”The Source” blog) with post titles and summaries on the lower half of the page. The JavaScript tabbed content system (one of my favorite scripts for displaying large amounts of content) here is used throughout the site for other pages.
Awesome illustrations are used throughout the site, and very strategically on the Projects & Programs pages to draw interest to the projects and programs that the public may not know about.
Neat semi-new areas (some existed before, but were not easy to find unless you were looking for them) like the photo gallery.
In other words, I very much approve. One of my favorite features is the Developer website. I think it’s part of a general movement by the different branches of government, led by the awesome Obama web team, to embrace web accessibility and social media (will be doing a piece on the awesome resource Usability.gov soon, though I’m not a huge fan of the type treatment).
A while back, my boss Tiffany was showing to me the new Brink’s Home Security identity. It’s no longer “Brink’s Home Security” anymore, but “Broadview Security”. Same company, but a completely different name, and thus, a completely different identity. From their June 2009 press release, CEO Bob Allen explains,
“Our new name, Broadview Security, captures the essence of who we are and what we do,” said Allen. “It stands for the active protection we provide to families and businesses through the wide range of security services we provide. It represents our long-standing commitment to deliver peace of mind to our customers. Broadview Security provides a strong platform to continue our growth through the expansion of our security offerings.”
What caught Tiffany’s attention was that the new identity seemed unreliable. We all remember the Brink’s commercials with the burglars who roll by a house, see the Brink’s sign on the front lawn and decide they’re better off not robbing that house [See the new Broadview ad]. Well, the Broadview sign, with its smiling-parenthesis, looks more like an invitation.
And then there’s my friend Marlyn who pointed out the new Union Bank of California logo to me on the signage right next door to our office building. She immediately thought the logo looked like it was trying to be young and hip, not necessarily secure and reliable, but it’s growing on her now. When I tried to remember the old logo, I couldn’t quite picture it– “maybe something like a shield?” The logo was actually a red square. It also has changed to just “Union Bank” as they now have taken on other states. The new one has a shield-like “U” and a very modern, sans-serif typeface. The red has lightened up and the addition of the blue makes it more “patriotic”. The “Invest in you” tagline now has a place to live. I think it may be an improvement, but as usual, change can be hard to take. I do miss the old red…
It seems that the unstable economy has brought on an unstable design economy. So many companies are rebranding and making drastic changes to their logos and websites, for better or for worse. Does changing your brand change the effects of the atmosphere it must exist in? I have mixed feelings. In such turbulent times, you look for something that is stable, something that is the same and secure. And yet, a company doesn’t want to be associated with the sins of its past or with the sins of its peers in the present. Like most of us, I think these brands are just feeling their way through.
