Not to kick a man when he’s down, but Toyota may want to recall its communication design while it’s reworking its pedals. Just four years ago, while conducting competitive audits for Chevrolet at a previous job, Toyota was setting a good example of consistency and quality in its visual communications, with typefaces limited to overarching branding and one augmenting it’s “Moving Forward” campaign. Red was it’s clear brand color and everything evoked the core tenants of their products: reliable and safe.
Chevy demonstrates cohesive auto design in lock-step with consistent graphic design.
At GM and Chevrolet the brand communications reflected the state of the organizations: fiefdoms with a lack of perspective and inspiration. The noble effort to organize and centralize branded communications reflected an edict to pull things together. Even pre-recession GM brands showed improvement due to new industrial design standards for each brand in the GM portfolio.We synthesized Chevy’s communications to a single customized typeface, Klavika, and a few strict base elements which have lead to a strong, global unity. With the now necessary fat-trimming, GM could start to look like a nimble and relevant brand some day, and certainly Chevrolet appears to be taking the bold action inferred by its brand, communications, and design.
Toyota page sports a random range of type and lacks clarity. Note the only red is for the recall.
In recent years Toyota’s communications have exposed its growing pains. A mess of typefaces, a lack of vehicle design perspective and forgetting their color—the strongest red on their website indicates recall info—leaves them looking just as harried as Mr. Toyoda in front of congress. Moving Forward, for Toyota today, means good old bootstrapping, and we’ll see it not just under the hood but on the screen and on paper.
I’m geeked (and slightly nervous) about an interview I did with Stephen Watson at Stack Magazines about my recent publishing venture, Remedy Quarterly. The focus is on Kickstarter, an online microfunding site that allows ideas to be pitched and for the people to decide if they are worthy of funding by literally voting with dollars.
Stack is both a fantastic idea and a fantastic perspective on the world of magazines.
Stack, by the way, is a brilliant service and business model. Subscribe to stack and receive a handful of indy magazines on a regular basis, discover some new favorites and see the publications that are pushing the boundaries. It’s definitely worth checking out, I know I can’t wait for my first package.
Traditional media and the journalism industry are scrambling to locate a profitable business model. Many companies are trying a shotgun approach to target the wide-ranging, flowering market of digital devices and platforms, hoping to chance upon a model that will work across its increasingly fragmented audience.
While this method may be fine, many companies are losing track of the actual value audiences have come to expect. Any user of the New York Times’ iPhone application, one of the very first to be released in the App Store less than 2 years ago, probably knows what I mean.
While the original releases received much grief for their poor speed and propensity to bugs, the current New York Times app is quite dependable and speedy, and offers a suitable selection of features.
The main pitfall lies in the interface itself, which, despite following the Apple-issued iPhone application guidelines closely, fails to provide the chief curatorial benefit of the paper’s design with the omission of the mythical Frontpage.
Essentially Gladwell’s The Tipping Point with less pages, Seth Godin gives the word on product development and marketing today. It’s delightfully full of quips, including: Talk to those who listen. Safe is risky. The TV industrial complex is dead. Early adopters (Gladwell calls them Mavericks) are who you should focus on with innovative products, not average people and average products. A must watch:
Rarely does a website effortlessly challenge standards, consume the viewer, and give full control over to the user. The rules are the rules: A site must be X pixels wide, the images Xkb each, content should be above the fold, nobody reads in a slideshow, and dammit make that slideshow slide faster. Immersive experiences tend to be the domain of flash sites which dazzle with animation, video, sound, and little content.
A screen grab doesn't do justice. Check out the site, roll over this masthead, enjoy.
Pictory is a rare site for its format of massive images woven together by a variety of text content and custom stylesheets for each series of posts. It amounts to an intensely compelling experience, immersing the reader. Rather than commanding ‘view each image once, click an arrow, view the next image, repeat’, Pictory compels the user to consume the content at a contemplative pace, it’s impossible not to.
