We particularly like the bit about Frank and lunch. It’s memorable in addition to being entertaining and different.

We categorically do NOT, however, like the light grey text on the white background. It’s hard to read, rendering this clever copy annoying to spend time with. Big win, canceled out by unfortunate Fail.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

But here are a few good ways to check your site’s Awful Factor for yourself: if your site looks like it could be a site for a preschooler birthday party clown (above), and you write grown-up, alpha-male / strong leading lady romance novels, it’s time to redesign.

If your name shows up in your masthead with a big gap, or if one of the letters in your name is so funky it’s hard to read and you are relying on the fact that you think your name is recognizable without being readable, it’s time to redesign (or at least fix it).

If your name changes color and flashes like a disco strobe light and you are not a porn star, redesign. (Also consider not mixing art deco images, rainbows, and curlicue little girl fonts.)

If your site features strong color on strong color on strong color and makes people wince and draw their heads back upon your home page load, redesign.

And if you think that photo of yourself sitting spread-eagled is appropriate, think again. And as for the photo your husband snapped of you without makeup? Please don’t put it on your bio page. You are a professional!

All of these things just came across my desk in the last hour. I feel traumatized.

And this isn’t even bringing up all the sites where the author had only a teeny book cover on the home page — or no book cover at all. I mean, really. How can you call yourself FICTION BEYOND THE ORDINARY if you don’t show a fiction book on your home page?

I realize that not everyone has a professional design team in their budget crosshairs, but surely people must realize that a bad website is a liability.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Or rather, it should have been about buy-in.

A few days ago, on their Facebook page, Gap updated their status with:

Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We’ve had the same logo for 20+ years, and this is just one of the things we’re changing.  We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to… see other ideas.  Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.

By “Passionate debate” they really mean, “everybody hates it” and by “thrilled” they probably really mean, “at least everybody’s talking about us.” Such is the nature of spin.

Says Gawker:

The main problem: Gap just stuck the logo on their website without bothering to tell anyone they were rebranding, or why. The secondary problem: the logo is dumb. Ad Age explains the sophisticated critiques of Gap’s new strategic direction being posited by the world’s foremost corporate branding experts:

Across the internet detractors have been picking apart the new look, with the most common sentiment being that it looks like something a child created using a clip-art gallery.

Even had Gap conducted a campaign first, announcing a new look, maybe run a test instead of just plunking the new logo in the corner of their site, they might have achieved a small measure of buy-in. Instead, their actions were jarring. This is not a new product making a splash, complete with press releases and stock jumps. This is a LOGO. To quote Emily, Waxcreative’s Creative Director: “This is the icon that reassures people that you are who you are. There is integrity implied. There is relationship behind it. Changing your logo is not a move to make lightly or without strategy.”

Art may jar audiences, but design must communicate clearly and smoothly (This is something that Emily says a lot). And the lameness of the new Gap logo aside, the last thing any company wants to do is to cause their audience to question the brand, because the brand represents the message. Communication: Fail.

Emily says: “I have nothing against Helvetica, but this logo is uninspired and says nothing. The old logo was so recognizable, I just can’t imagine what Gap was thinking in not easing in such a huge change.” As far back as ten years ago, when Kelly Goto and Emily first published Web ReDesign 2.0, they talked about the importance of easing an audience into redesign changes. They focused on web redesign, but the tenet holds true whether visual or product or packaging. If you change it drastically, ease your established audience in. Ease them in and they will follow. Jar them and they will balk. And in today’s twittersphere/blogosphere/Facebook-ruled-universe, that backlash will happen quickly and spread like crazy.

Sometimes you can just boldly go and to heck with the masses. For instance, when Apple first announced the iPad, there was instant backlash about the name. Eventually, though, this debate was forgotten, the name was solidified in the First World zeitgeist, and the iPad was accepted as the cool, innovative new piece of hardware. People bought into the reality. But that kind of initial backlash would have sank a lesser company’s product before it even hit.

Epilogue: Just a day after Gap’s unannounced release of their new logo,  Craplogo.me showed up. You can make your very on Helvetica-and-blue-gradiant-square logo in two clicks. We had fun with it, but at her desk across the studio Emily muttered, “No one at Gap is happy right now.”

Indeed. But they have no one but themselves to blame.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

And yes, this is the same unbelievably talented guy who wrote this viral wonder that circled the globe attributed to “anonymous” for years:

Good things.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Look at a bunch of websites… look closely at the space to the sides of the images. Does the content goes too close to a cover graphic? Look at the space between the letters in the main titling. It should read beautifully.

In the site I have up on my screen (and no, I won’t link — I am not into bashing, but this is pretty ubiquitous around the web — I have recreated an example here) the I and the Z of “Elizabeth” are smushed too close together. I am willing to bet that this was not a conscious decision on the part of the designer, it’s just that her name was merely typed out (and yes, colorized with a drop shadow applied). This is not design. This is typing out a name and sifting through various options to make it pretty.

In the top example here, we simply typed out ELIZABETH and OLIVIA in a super fancy font, Aquiline. This is an exaggerated example as this font’s autokerning is way off, but it illustrates the issue well. The top version is merely typed out. The bottom version allocated a bit of designer time to eyeball the space between the letters and make adjustments. And also to drop the baseline of the initial cap on Elizabeth. Doesn’t the O in OLIVIA want to come down, too? These details are all in the name of seamless design.

On the complete other side of the spectrum, with Garamond (the Roman example), a near perfect font out of the box, simply typed out is still not smooth and even (though pretty close!). We adjusted the space between the Z and the A to tighten it, and the O and the L — due to the shape of the letters those spacings need attention. And then, to illustrate where we would take it a step further, we left the gap between the A and the B alone so you can see how that feels bigger now with the Z and the A tightened — we would tighten that, too.

The point is that a good designer will notice and kern text. You might not see the gaps if you are DIY. Or if you are hiring on the cheap, the cheap designer might not have the experience to see it, or she might not have the time in her budget for additional typographical attention, even though it just doesn’t take much extra time. It’s just something to think about, because it’s a little jarring. Even if the rest of the site is okay, it’s important to note that good design is never jarring. Because while the little detail might not be noticed, per se, the feeling of not moving smoothly over the site is, and this feeling is cumulative. Those minor, seemingly jarring experiences add up. You might not be able as a viewer to put your finger on it while you are viewing a site, but it just feels unprofessional.

And that is definitely not the feeling you want to project.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Hats off and much genuflecting to the creators. This makes me want to dance, get chips, and speak Spanish.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

It is, obviously, the Book video for Julia Quinn’s upcoming book Ten Things I Love About You, created by Brady Hall, Harper Collins’s go-to guy for video. And yes, I know I called Julia’s last video (also Brady’s work) the The Best Book Video Promo Ever (more on that below), and yes (full disclosure) I am Julia’s sister, but I am also a professional. If I didn’t like the video I would simply do my familial due diligence, post it to Facebook and be done with it.

But let me repeat: Best. Book. Video. Of the Year.

Clearly, the Best Video of the Year’s filmmaker has to be one of the best out there, and Brady is. One quick click-thru of his YouTube page and I wonder why anyone else bothers. But even within his superb portfolio, the Julia Quinn promos are giraffe heads above the others.

First of all, the concepting is great, and the content superb. As a designer I know that no final work can be much better than the sum of its parts. If I get crappy content, the best I can do is gild the garbage. And Brady confesses that he has had some awful content to work with in the past. But for Ten Things, the Powers-that-Be-at-Harper-Collins, Brady and Julia rapid-fired ideas at each other and very quickly the concept of the sketches, the countdown, and the Monty Python-esque feel came together to create a fantastic springboard from which Brady could start filmmaking. All that was needed was a tight script, lush illustrations that could visually carry the film, and an actor to do the voice over with just enough over-the-topness to nail Funny without becoming Camp.

Check, check, and almost check.

“A good script is key when a trailer depends on a narration or acting performance or on screen text,” Brady points out, acknowledging that Julia’s scripting is top-notch. Julia tips a hat right back at Brady. “I am not a visual person,” she admits. “With each video Brady came up with a great concept from which I wrote a script. That makes sense, since I’m the writer. What I’m NOT is a filmmaker. I could never have ’seen’ either video in my head. He is very good at what he does. I pretty much just do my bit and let him run with it.”

Next, the illustrations. Brady had been wanting to work with this illustrator for some time, but the project had never been right. This one was perfect. Justine Jones, whom Brady rightly calls “an insanely talented artist” worked up initial sketches for the main characters Annabel and Sebastian, and once the script was locked in and the look of the drawings was approved, Brady turned Justine loose. They didn’t even storyboard. “She whipped up a huge pile of drawings based on the laundry list of things I needed for the piece. As I received new art from her through email, I just worked it into the animation. It came together wonderfully.”

Finally, the voice. Brady could hear it in his head. He knew what he wanted but had no idea where to find someone to do it. So he did it himself for the draft. “I half expected somebody at Harper Collins or Julia to say That accent is horrible!! Whom did you hire?! And then I would have had to actually find an old British guy to do it (which might be tricky in Seattle). But nobody said anything except that they loved it!” Check.

“Every book video promo is different,” Brady says, “and that’s why I like doing it so much. You never know what you’re going to do next, and you definitely don’t know how much the publisher or author will want to meddle. Sometimes that works in favor of the finished product, and sometimes it doesn’t. There have definitely been a few projects where I have asked the publisher So basically we just have to do what this author wants and make a horrible book video promo and that’s that? and they say Yep, our hands our tied! So it’s always nice working with somebody like Julia who gets it and contributes what she knows she can improve and lets everybody else do what they know how to do.”

What I, Emily, know how to do is to call out excellent design when I see it (even when it makes me jealous that I didn’t think of it myself). And last spring I confidently and exuberantly dubbed the book video promo for Julia’s What Happens in London to be The Best Book Video Promo Ever.

I was not wrong, and The Huffington Post went on to pick up the video (via this blog, thankyouverymuch), with author/blogger David Colbert (no relation, I don’t think) saying this about book video promos:

…[book] videos are working because they’re less faithful to the books. Authors, myself included, tend to use promotion to tell readers the reasons they should buy our books, instead of just making customers desire them… Fidelity to three hundred pages of prose is the last thing you want in a thirty-second spot.

True, true, and the video for Quinn’s London was the best out there until the day before yesterday, when this new bit of spectacular promo was posted. Bravo Brady, Justine, Pam Spengler-Jaffee at Harper Collins, and of course, Julia.

I am already wondering about next year’s video.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Bravo OK Go! Wired has a great article on how this Rube Goldberg machine was built, but feat of engineering or not, it’s beautiful to watch.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

The New York Times is calling these logos “Warmer” and “Fuzzier,” which is an editorially cute way of saying “More Accessible,” which is exactly what it is… or more correctly, what it has evolved into.

With Web 2.0 (you know what it is even if you didn’t know what it was called) has made everything much, much friendlier, at least in terms of sharing information. (In reality, however, I think that people are less friendly, at least on the street. We are all so zeroed into our iPhone/Blackberry that we have stopped looking around and making eye contact… but that is fodder for a different post.)

I highly recommend this short and interesting New York Times article about the recent trends in logo design. Even if all you do is scroll through the images and captions, it’s worth it. There are nine frames, and they tell a nice logostory — start with box #1 (even though I posted box #2). Subscription required.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Last month, on her birthday no less, we launched Stephanie Tyler’s new site. It was so exciting for us that had she not been across the country, we would have brought over cupcakes.

The newly redesigned StephanieTyler.com

StephanieTyler.com is a big site. It is content-rich, and not just in the blog. However, two potential problems with a huge site exist:

A) the tendency for the navigation to get out of hand as everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) gets a navigational button and/or some sort of call-out on the home page. When this happens to site I call it the Cheesecake Factory Menu Effect. Have you ever eaten there? Good food, nice ambiance, but the menu is a book. It takes people FOREVER to order. They simply can’t make up their minds. Too many choices and they often get flustered. We didn’t want that to happen to Stephanie’s new site. (We don’t want that to happen to anyone’s site!) Because when you are already parked and hungry and a waitress is standing at your table, you will eventually make a decision. But when you are in front of your computer and nothing from the great mass of choices has a clear sense of importance, you may just give up and go elsewhere to be entertained.

B) To combat the CFME, sites will frequently under-navigate. True, sparseness has a certain elegance, but then content frequently goes un-found. Secondary pages have lots and lots of subnavigation and as a site owner, you are now relying upon the visitor to have a strong desire to keep searching. That is a lot to depend upon, even when you have robust content.

Stephanie is a great content provider. She loves sites that keep giving and wanted one herself for her readers. “I want a site that feels endless,” she challenged us.

Enter the action boxes. Visit StephanieTyler.com and try to resist those beckoning blue and purple right-hand boxes.

Says Stephanie: “I can tell things are easier for people to navigate because I’m getting requests from readers and booksellers for goodies, whereas I never had before and I had the same information up on my site for years!”

We invite you to head over to StephanieTyler.com and explore. It goes on and on and on… And on this blog, Waxcreative and Stephanie are giving away a signed copy of Risking It All to a randomly selected winner. All you need to do is leave a comment telling us what content treasures in Stephanie’s site you found and liked. A winner will be announced here sometime Tuesday. Thanks!

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.