JTroll

Me: Hey, do you have an account for [random new design-related site]? I have invites.

Alex: What is it? Do I want it? Should I know?

Me: It's [lengthy description]. Don't worry, it's pretty nascent.

This isn't news, but after years of it resolutely being the case, it's frustrating: the Apple App Store is broken.

The other evening I set about a task of doing a little market research for a new app idea we had at our company, Happiness Engines. The idea we had could potentially spill into one of two App Store categories — "Utilities" and "Productivity" — so I dove into both and searched various keywords for interesting and successful apps in the spaces.

The results were, shall we say, underwhelming.

Do a search for "contacts" in the App Store for iPhone apps, and you're left with a massive unsorted grid of 2,000 apps. (I know it's 2,000 because I counted. The precise number gives me the sneaking suspicion the amount was cut off artificially, and that there are probably more.) There is seemingly no rhyme or reason to their listing: the randomness leads me as a user to believe any app with the keyword "contacts" gets thrown into the mix.

Obviously there's some basic sorts via popularity. Apps like Smartr Contacts, LinkedIn, and 1-800-CONTACTS (yes, they have an app) are floated toward the top. But there aren't any other discernable attempts to make sense of this flood of apps for the user — and that's a problem.

There's no hiding that this is a problem of scale. The App Store just wasn't built with this quantity of offerings in mind. A while back, Apple bought and subsequently shut down the independent app-discovery app Chomp. Chomp had a unique interface, but more importantly they had an innovative discovery mechanism for finding apps based upon genearl searches. While Apple may have integrated Chomp's search methodology in its App Store mobile version, it doesn't seem like that's filtered into how their desktop software surfaces results.

There's also a user experience problem to solve here in the interface, and it has to do with Apple trying to be too "smart" with its search results. Type a word into the search box in the upper right corner, and Apple tries to pull up results across its offerings: iPhone apps, iPad apps, individual songs, full albums, Podcasts episodes, full Podcasts, TV episodes, TV seasons, movies, books, audiobooks, iTunes U episodes, iTunes U collections, iTunes U materials, iTunes U courses, and (inhale) music videos.

Press the "See All" text to expand any of these verticals, and you have a giant category list (the aforementioned 2,000 apps, for example). Click any individual item to view its details; but click the back button, and you're thrown back to the master list across all verticals — instead of the category list you just came from.

Tourist: Could you give us directions to Olive Garden?

Gap's multi-year struggle to stay relevant has just hit two new massive snags, and their ramifications go well beyond what you might expect. When Monday's Gap logo refresh hit their website, they quickly devolved into bad brand management: both in how it treated its design, and in how it managed the design's public outcry. (Heck, there's even a tool now to make your own Gap-ified logo.)

The irony is that they only have to look a few blocks away from their San Francisco office to see a better model for branding success.

The Problem Cuts Deep

For over a decade, the kindest thing you could say about Gap clothing was that no one really minded it. In the mid-nineties, seminal Gen-X author Douglas Coupland wrote in Microserfs that Gap clothing was the universal nerd uniform for fitting in: it allowed you to look "like from nowhere [and no time] in particular." 

Put bluntly: If Kanye is hot pink, and John Varvatos is sleek black, Gap has been the comfortable shade of gray.

Unfortunately being the everyman-brand doesn't always pay off. Gap revenues are flatlining across the board, or falling: Banana Republic is stagnant, Old Navy dropped 5 percent across their stores, and Gap itself dropped 2 percent. The whole portfolio was in a bit of a tizzy, even before the rest of the economy took a nosedive.

Twelve months before the start of the the 2007-2009 recession, the New York Times reported that Gap's then-plunging sales were causing an internal ruckus. They needed a "broad review of the company's strategy," The Times said. It was time for a change: not only in the clothing itself, but in how the brands presented themselves to the public.

And so we enter the role of branding.

Simplicity is Selling

Moves toward cleaner branding are generally greeted with applause these days — thanks go to figures like Jonathan Ive for pushing cleanliness and simplicity into the public desire.

In the branding world, the movement has met with varying degrees of success. In 2008, for example, Pepsi famously refreshed their logo with the help of Arnell Group. The effort caused some consternation, but in the end, it stuck.

Both Coke and Pepsi have sported simplified packaging in recent years, with Pepsi using a new, cleaner logo as well.

In the same year though, Arnell Group also helped Pepsi redesign the Tropicana brand, both in logo and in a complete package design overhaul. 

The effort pushed simplicity to its extremes, and in the process lost sight of some of the key values of the brand: the iconic value of drinking juice straight from an orange was a powerful element, lost instead to a bland swath of orange. The redesign backtracked almost completely, with Peter Arnell left holding the bag explaining why they thought it was going to work:

AdAge's report showing a quick talk with Peter Arnell on why the Tropicana rebranding was supposed to be successful.

Other brands have met with more success in modernizing their image, though. Nickelodeon, for example, is in the middle of a multi-year process to overhaul their wild orange-splash imagery with an arguably more cohesive branding package, across all of their properties: Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, TeenNick, Nick Jr., and Nicktoons. New York-based Trollbäck + Company leads the effort admirably, providing a fun and flexible way to treat the portfolio.

Even internet giant AOL can be considered a success in its rebranding — in pushing from their stodgy dial-up past image to a modern content juggernaut, they managed to create a flexible and fresh multi-image identity that's allowed them to use it across their ever-expanding set of content sites. It is possible to do this right. The proof is there to see.

Taking the Gap Tumble

For all appearances though, it seems Gap didn't take the ramifications of rebranding seriously when they pushed their own modernization. On Monday they slapped the new logo on gap.com, and later announced intentions to push it across stores nationwide. The result looks slapdash, paying only lip service to the heritage the 1969 logo contained. Helvetica type over a blue gradient box are bordering on insulting, especially when one considers how Helvetica is the go-to Corporate typeface for the Microsofts of the world to stay "humanist" and relevant.

The backlash has been fierce. A quick look at Gap's Facebook page shows that much.

That public outcry forced three-year CEO Marka Hansen to write a weak public message explaining that they were looking to "evolve" the Gap brand, so that their customers "take notice of Gap and see what it stands for today." After five years of lagging sales, the impetus is clear — Gap needs to break from a more stodgy brand identity, into something that feels more current for its 20- and 30-something crowd. 

Maybe being "gray" isn't working so well any more — at least in terms of perception.

The Lesson of Levi's

But a mile or so down The Embarcadero in San Francisco sits the headquarters of a brand even older than Gap, who's managed to press forward a modern and forward-looking image while keeping the classic nature of their brand. I'm speaking, of course, of Levi's.

Contrary to the beliefs of some, brand is more than just a logo. Brand is an overall identity. It's what the public sees as your company, through both its visual and its written communication. Years ago Levi's was also struggling with timid sales growth, but all they needed to do was change how it marketed its message.

The Levi's logo has remained basically unchanged since they began stitching that white-lettered red tab on their jeans in 1936. As a branding device, it's been iconic: bold, modern, and singularly identifiable for almost 75 years. 

So how to appeal to a modern audience, despite a logo almost a century old? The message. Great agencies like Wieden + Kennedy have strung together a series of engaging, forward-looking messaging campaigns over recent years that have propelled the "cool" of Levi's — like their "Guy Walks Across America" ad (since pulled from YouTube).

Gap, on the other hand, has a crisis of advertising identity. While they've famously done ad campaigns featuring famous faces like John Mayer and Jennifer Hudson, stagnant growth should show that this approach might not be working any longer. 

To further add to the fire, AdAge reported earlier this year that they've had a hard time finding a long-term bedfellow for an ad agency, instead deciding to switch partners with each passing season.

What's the Lesson?

It's The Message, Stupid. In all seriousness, people resonate with a brand's visual identity through its logo far more than corporate heads sometimes expect. Laird + Partners — who designed the new Gap logo — is an advertising agency first, and not necessarily as experienced in generating national brand identities. Although Laird + Partners haven't publicly discussed their methodology or the extent of their customer research, it's clear that it wasn't enough. When you're dealing with the 84th most-valuable brand on earth, it's worth listening to the public sometimes.

It's time to regroup, perhaps even retreat (let's call it "pulling a Tropicana"), and give the reigns to people who know the ramifications of what they're doing.

It's no surprise that as software tech improves, new file formats get whipped up to cope with the waves of standards that tangle developers. Sure thing. I get that.

But that doesn't mean new format standards are any more convenient for end users — especially when they can be used as leverage to soft-force consumers into buying the latest and greatest software. Microsoft proved that with their annoying ".docx" format in the latest iterations of Word, replacing everyone's trusty ".doc" format and confusing office-dwellers everywhere.

But another software giant has pulled the same move. And I made a quick Venn diagram to illustrate the cacophony. 

(Check out the full-resolution version here.)

Enter Adobe. Every creative-type knows the Adobe Creative Suite as the juggernaut in the design community; you literally can't work without their products. Adobe InDesign has long been the mainstay in print design (sorry, Quark); but as they've graduated through the past three versions of the software, each one has reformatted InDesign's ".indd" file type such that it can't be read by previous versions. What?

Simply put: InDesign CS4 can't read an ".indd" from InDesign CS5. And CS3 can't read CS4 or CS5. Want to create backwards-compatible files? Sure: just export into one of these random other file types, which they've also changed over time. Simple! 

I've been using Dove soap since I was still watching "He-Man" on TV. Don't ask me why. It's just always been there. We all have comfortable purchases, and I've always known if I reached for the Dove bar on the shelf at Safeway, I'd know exactly what I was getting.

Until I saw Dove soap for men. Whoa, now. Here was a lesson in marketing, product and package design if I ever saw one. Considering Dove has made this their biggest product launch of 2010, and even pushed it in its own Super Bowl commercial, there had to be something to this. Could the Men+Care line solve the problem of flat sales in the men's toiletries business?

Heck, how many times do you even get to ask a question like that?

I needed to figure out what you got for a full $1 mark-up from the regular Dove soap. Curiosity got the better of me — being a man, after all. I dropped the extra bill and opened up a package of Men+Care to find out.

It's no joke: Dove wants you to pay a whole dollar more for a two-pack of Men+Care soap bars, up from their normal "exfoliating" flavor. Surprising? Not at all; the entire campaign has been a "lifestyles" push, not just a new product in its existing line. But what's interesting is what apparently makes us men tick when it comes to soapy needs.

First of all, we men are tech-heads. We need "patented technology" in our soap. Damn straight: this stuff fights skin dryness (my soap is a beast!), and feels bespoke: note the many manly speckles throughout. The cool, flat gray packaging with the tasteful hot orange spot color does a great job of luring me in. So far, so good.

Now let's look closer: Dove really went all out with this product push, and it shows right down to the boxy, angular bar. (Compare it to that sissy regular bar, and you instantly know which bar wears the pants around here.) It's no small thing when a company shells out the money for new soap molds (no, seriously), and I'm sure it raised the cost of the bar itself in the short term. Still, when a quick Google search shows that you can make a bar of soap yourself for around $0.82 per bar in materials cost, I'm sure they had some margin room to play with.

Look at that chiseled soap bar, though. Doesn't it just bellow "I wash lumberjacks"? In all honesty (and without a trace of irony), I found the tan coloring and typography a genuine lure. Dove has my number. I can't resist its charm.

Of course, not pictured here is my favorite bit of it all: some of the marketing copy along the backside of the liquid soap variety of Men+Care. Stop me if I'm wrong, but often you hear soap manufacturers lording on about how their "microbubbles" whisk your dead skin away. "Bubbles" is apparently too feminine of a term, though. No bubbles for this soap brand; this time, they're "micromoisture."

Sometimes insubordination pays off in truly amazing ways. To whit: French graphic studio H5's epic 15-minute animated logo-based short film, "Logorama."

This mini-masterpiece flies against the grain every which way, filling each frame with characters, buildings and paraphernalia entirely constructed with corporate logos. According to Flux owner Jonathan Wells it took an astounding four years to complete, and in the process it didn't acquire a single scrap of corporate permission for its logo usage. Yet it soars. See for yourself.

Video Here (it wouldn't let me embed it)

Full-length clips of this video are notoriously hard to find at the moment, as H5 (ironically) seems to be taking it down YouTube, Vimeo and even Facebook left and right. The link above is to a German Web site, which may be taken down by the time you read this. It's worth the search, though, if not for its story than for its sheer whimsical genius at how each logo gets weaseled into the frame.

The video's directors have done music videos for some of the most inventive European music outfits of the day (Massive Attack and Röyksopp, to name two). It's no surprise then that at debuting "Logorama" at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, it won the Kodak Short Film Discovery Prize at the 48th Critics' Week.

I recently took a half-month trip to Hong Kong, and spent the better part of my free time scouring the suburbia and the... urbia. In any case, it's no surprise that what came across was a thriving mish-mash of Western and Eastern design constructs.

In contrast to Macau — essentially a Portuguese city in style, population and culture since the mid-1500s — Hong Kong is far younger. Its first brick was set in 1841, and perhaps because it's so young, it has a much more modern flair to its urban plan and its architecture. The Hong Kongers (their phrase, not mine) also seem to be of multiple mindsets: slightly socially conservative, yet eager to try the next radical idea. This can have a downside in that little regard is paid toward older, "historical" buildings... which more often than not tend to get torn down like bad wallpaper for the Next Big Thing. But it also hits home with a vibrant design community stuck between both Western and Chinese themes.

A Suggestion

If you're of a younger bent, reverse my own trip a bit and make one of your first stops a small cafe in the eastern Hong Kong neighborhood of Causeway Bay. After School Cafe is populated by hip twenty-somethings playing Mahjong in the back, and aged wooden primary school desks scattered across the small cafe floor. It's a great evening stop after touring the endless shops in the Causeway Bay area, and it's open until 1:00am. My kind of place.

More importantly, it was a perfect location to pick up all sorts of local design 'zines and event listings, which among other things led our noses to some great galleries and design shops along Hollywood Road and Gough Street.

The Arrangement

Media has always taken its own unique turns in Hong Kong, with broadcast media in particular blossoming after the 1950s. (Just ask anyone there who "Fei Fei" is, and they'll talk your ear off about one of their most beloved screen stars of the era.) I took a particular interest in how the shapes and styles of type affected print design — obviously the slashes and complex strokes of Chinese characters lend a decidedly different aesthetic to a poster or a page than the rounded, airy shapes of Roman characters. Even the magazine covers across each language screamed a difference in how one goes about designing for each.

A Surprise

I was not, admittedly, expecting to find the French artist pair Antoine + Manuel with their own massive installation at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum. The museum itself is a bit of a hike northeast of Kowloon, in Sha Tin; but definitely worth it to see what this vector-inspired duo can do when given a room to themselves.

*Note: This post was written well before the later-named iPad was released.

Hide the women and children: the iTablet is coming. And as the querulous future of magazine publishing continues to nip at the heels of this hallowed medium, technology like this can't seem to come soon enough.

Both design and the concept of content might — might — change dramatically in today's first-world countries. In trying to dictate that future, two major publishers have partnered with design firms in hopes of planting the flag first.

Enter Time, Inc. with New York's The Wonderfactory, and Bonnier R&D with London's BERG.

The Same

Both ideas brought to the table are similar, in that they completely eschew the klunky "digital magazine engine" page-flipping model championed by groups like the UK's Ceros Media. Instead they go for a more honest and inventive approach, completely reimagining how users would want to interact with rich media content when given the chance.

But Different

Time and The Wonderfactory seem to be going for an actual hardware model approach, instead of a software platform which could sit across multiple devices (like the iTablet, or whatever Apple decides to dub its juggernaut). Nevertheless, they couldn't have picked a better model for change than the content-rich Sports Illustrated:

In contrast, Bonnier and BERG are content to muse at length about how a software platform like this might work, and why. It's a bit more of a holistic approach, and to date the general speculation seems to be that they're hoping to latch onto upcoming platforms like Apple's, instead of going rogue and following in Barnes & Noble's footsteps with the Nook. Their concept looks more like this:

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

There's no end of speculation, doomsaying and desperate well-wishing about the print industry recently. I'll save that particular wrestling match for another day, but one important point I think is missing from the debate is that the fate of our typography industry hangs well in the balance.

Everyone's worried about who will save the newspaper industry — but who will save our font houses?

The House That Garamond Built

Let's get one point straight from the beginning: I don't think the print industry is ever completely going away. Ever. There, I just completely dispelled the edge-of-your-seat suspense that had you questioning where you'd be going for your next slab-serif fix, didn't I?

But things are changing, most definitely. Major papers across the country are folding, and seemingly untouchable magazines — even in the UK market, where print is still king — are quietly going the way of the dodo. I never thought I'd see the day when Blender, Domino and EGM would all close in the same calendar year, and that has me worrying: where will all the good type go?

Right now, a myriad of tiny font houses dot the countryside. Passionate tinkerers play with x-heights, ascenders and descenders to capture just the right tone for the medium. And today, magazines and newspapers are the vehicles utilizing and pushing that innovation in type.

The image above, for example, is a little font family known as Stag. In 2005 Esquire magazine commissioned type designer Christian Schwartz to develop Stag in order to get a punchier font for their headlines. According to Schwartz, "They had been using Hoefler & Frere-Jones's sharply elegant Mercury for several years, and decided it was time to add an additional element to their typographic palette." The result is impressive: 16 beautifully balanced weights and styles in the family, with an additional 14 from the later Stag Sans that came out of it as well. But if it weren't for Esquire's art budget, it would have never seen the drawing board.

So I'm worried. There are plenty of type-promoting sites and blogs out there — the newly-relaunched Typographica is a great example, as are sites like The FontFeed, Fleuron, and so on. But a good deal of what these sites promote is the use of type in print, not on the web. For the same reasons that we need big-budget publications around to fund our best examples of journalism, so too do we need those same publications around in order to fund the Next Great Type Experiment.