BRANDING, GENRES & AUTHENTICITY

Pretty gruesome cartoon, isn’t it? When I hear business people evangelizing about the importance of “branding” I can’t help but think about the original meaning of the word and the whole subject of herding animals.

For most of my life the word “brand” was practically synonymous with “company” or “manufacturer.” Kellog’s was a brand of cereals. Campbell’s was a brand of soup. These brands were big, permanent, iconic parts of society, as Andy Warhol well appreciated. In the last few decades, however, brands have become slippery, filmy, elusive things that come and go, spring up like mushrooms and often fly by night. In the age of corporate buyouts, outsourcing and transition from a manufacturing to a service economy, brands and companies seem to have become separate entities.

Several years ago I was videotaping in a factory that manufactured a certain product for several companies. As I taped, my tour guide made sure I avoided capturing images of packaging that would reveal who the factory’s clients were. He explained that if people found out that some of their favorite brands are manufactured in the same plant, by the same people, from the same raw materials and on the same production lines as many other competing brands, they might be a little upset.

Today when I look at product labels, advertisements or websites, I think back to that factory and realize that the images companies strive to project - of unique products created by passionate people in special places - are often a bunch of baloney. That down-home chili company that shows a grandma stirring an iron kettle on its label and gives a mailing address in a small Texas town may be nothing more than a guy with a phone and some investment capital, making deals with manufacturers and distributors from his office in New Jersey.

In the boomtowns of the Old West (where the benefits of branding, in the original sense, were well understood), businessmen knew how to herd people into their tents and take their money. They did it by nailing a bunch of boards together, painting them to look like storefronts and propping them in front of the tents with signs that said things like “Jake’s Elegant New York Bar: Fine Sprits, Wines and Card Room; Ladies Welcome.” Never mind that the walls would flap on a windy night.

Today we are living through another Boomtown era in which, as marketing people say, branding is everything.

When I first moved to Seattle I was struck by the fact that all the apartment buildings here have names. Where I come from only the grandest buildings have names. Now, as Seattle booms and grows, apartment buildings are being replaced by condominiums that not only have their own names, but their own “brands” and marketing campaigns. As soon as a couple of quaint old houses up on Capitol Hill are razed, a big sign springs up over the muddy pit, with stock photos of trendy young people and text that says something like, “YOU ARE THE CITY – Come live on the Cutting Edge of Street Smart Architecture in the Uber-Sexy Ferronnzzatta Condominiums, pre-selling now, from the low $300,000s.” In the coming months I watch as guys in flannel shirts and hard hats throw up two-by-fours, drywall and corrugated metal siding, as behind the sign rises...yet another crappy apartment building. Never mind that the walls may flap on a windy night.

Sometimes the branding craze gets so out of control that it parodies itself. Recently I saw a truck with lettering on its side, reading “Image Movers: We deliver an image of quality for you.” What???? Doesn’t this company realize the irony that can be read into their motto? Do they really think I would trust them to move something important for me, when all they promise to deliver is an image? I would sooner trust a company advertising itself as “Joe’s Movers, Since 1972.”

Why am I ranting about this subject today? Partly it’s because the corporation that owns the restaurant where I work has been talking about “re-branding” us. Although many people love our restaurant, the hotel to which we are attached is being renovated, so the corporation feels that it may be time to give the restaurant a new name and decor for good measure. They also hope that a new image will improve our sales. For those of us who have put a lot of ourselves into making this restaurant a unique local eatery, the idea of being “re-branded” feels like the threat of a red-hot iron on our backsides.

It is important, of course, for a product or a company to have a personality and character that make it unique in the public eye. But the best kind of branding, I like to think, grows naturally out of the actual personality and character of the product or company, rather than being invented out of whole cloth in a marketing department and slapped on like a paper label.

I was glad to find the same kind of spirit applied to software and website design in one of our readings for this week: Tim Greenzweig’s Aesthetic Experience and the Importance of Visual Composition in Information Design. Greenzweig argues that style is not something that can be varnished onto a product at the end of a design process, but should be built in at every stage. Software engineers and website designers, he writes, too often consider the “look and feel” of a website or a software product to be merely “an issue of how to ‘decorate’ the information,” rather than as an issue of how to create and structure their product from beginning to end.

Greenzweig goes on to discuss various traditional methods of composition and Gestalt theory, including grid systems, the rule of thirds, juxtaposition and musical ABA structure, recommending that information designers and usability experts harness these principles throughout their design processes. By imbedding good design principles deeply within products, Greenzweig believes, designers will make the very use of these products aesthetically pleasing. Greenzweig envisions people enjoying software programs and websites in the same ways they enjoy listening to music or looking at paintings.

Greenzweig is right. A good tool is a pleasure to use. For me, using a well-designed software program like Final Cut Pro, Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word is, indeed an aesthetically pleasing experience - like dancing or eating a good meal - and a well-designed website is a pleasure to visit. And it isn’t the trappings, Flash animation or “branding” that make them so. No amount of these can overcome a poorly designed product.

Another part of our assignment this week was to define a website genre and describe three examples of it. Our group was assigned e-commerce, which we defined as websites that allow people to buy and sell products or services. For my three examples I chose websites that sell skateboards, bagpipes and a mysterious industrial product called “cores.”

The Bagpipe Store, at www.bagpipestore.net, is a classic e-commerce site with L-shaped navigation, thumbnails of products, customer reviews and a rating system of stars on its home page. All of products featured are rated with five stars. The site uses a shopping cart system with the classic shopping cart icon, but calls it a “basket.” Perhaps this is the Scottish or the European terminology. In keeping with its traditional products, deeply rooted in history, the site boasts that it has been “selling bagpipes online longer than anyone else (since 1995).” Here one can buy not only a variety of bagpipes and accessories, but also clothing, jewelry and Scottish products for men, women and children. Clearly, this is the place to go not only for bagpipes, but the complete bagpipe lifestyle.

My next example is a company called Simpson Enterprises, which sells a mysterious product called “industrial cores.” Their website is identifiable as an e-commerce site because of a large aerial photo of their plant in Three Rivers Michigan on the home page. I was hoping to see a Flash animation of Homer Simpson himself walking out of the plant and hopping into one of the cars in the lot, but I was disappointed in this. Links from the home page lead to descriptions and photos of their manufacturing systems and their one product: industrial cores. Even after looking at photos of these “cores,” which looked to me like some sort of molded plastic elbow widgets, I had no idea what the company’s products are or what they are used for. This is the classic sign of industry-to-industry marketing: complete opacity to outsiders. Equally mysterious is the fact that although I wrote down this website’s URL as http://simpsonent.com/, this URL will not work now and a Google search for the company yields only its address and phone number, but no website. Was I dreaming when I visited this site?

Equally bewitching and opaque to outsiders is a website for a Southern California organization called the Toymachine Bloodsucking Skateboard Company at http://www.toymachine.com/, It is hard to tell at first whether this is an e-commerce site or…something else…I’m not sure what. The main feature of the front page is a sort of photo blog with dozens of pictures of skateboarders showing off horrible wounds and doing various things not necessarily related to skateboarding, captioned with often cryptic descriptions and with even more cryptic comments from blog viewers.

The most unusual thing about this site is the fact that all of the text is hand-written in a crude scrawl, like some teenager’s Junior High School poster project. Only when you move your cursor over some of the scrawled words do you realize that they are actually hyperlinks. Scanning down a navigation column on the left side of the home page, you find “products” and “shopping” links mixed in with various news and entertainment features. This website seems well targeted at its audience and “branded” in an authentic way. I laughed, however, when I thought about all the sophisticated HTML coding by a professional designer that must have gone into making this site look so crude and home made. Like Dolly Parton likes to say, “It takes a lot of money to make me look this cheap.” Well done!

DESIGN: THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY

My father, Sam Raymond, came up with the idea for the cartoon above many years ago. Like Harvey Pekar of American Splendor, Sam has lots of ideas for cartoons, but lacks the drawing skills to put them on paper. He frequently tells people his cartoon ideas, apologizing for the fact that he has to describe them. It was this habit of his that inspired me to draw my first cartoon for this weblog, and now look at me: I have become addicted to cartooning!

When I described Sam’s idea for the “go fishin’” cartoon to my friend Jennifer, she giggled and said, “Engineer humor.” True, indeed. Sam is an MIT-trained engineer, just like Donald Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things, which I read for my book report this week. Like Norman, Sam has strong feelings about good and bad design in everything from garlic presses to deep-sea camera housings. He has designed many of the latter for oceanographers and filmmakers including James Cameron, but he exhibits no less passion when talking about the engineering of humble, everyday objects like the former.

My father and Donald Norman have a lot in common. I laughed out loud when I read Norman’s story about his elaborate modifications of the light switches in his laboratory to achieve more “natural mapping” between the controls and the lights – in other words to help him figure out what switches controlled what lights. This is exactly the kind of thing Sam does all the time: adding screws, clamps, guards, extra holes and so on to all sorts of manufactured items that come his way in order to make them better suit his purposes.

In some families on Christmas morning, parents have to stop their children from playing with their presents right away. In my family, the children try in vain to stop our father from not only playing with his presents – and our presents - but also taking them apart, reassembling them and grabbing tools to start improving them.

One primary edict of Norman’s with which Sam would agree whole-heartedly is “Make controls visible.” Devices with invisible controls or tiny, low-contrast labels drive Sam nuts. He battles them with Sharpie pens, Scotch tape, brightly colored paper and paint. He has no compunction about taking a sleek, shiny, expensive new stereo component or computer device and immediately plastering it with hand-drawn arrows and big lettering to clarify how it should be used. To him, devices are things to be used, not status symbols or art objects, so no modification that could make something easier to use is out of bounds.

I have never learned to modify things with such ease. I like things to be pristine and cannot even bring myself to make a mark in a book. By contrast, the first thing Sam does when he buys a new book is pull out a pen and start underlining. His kids laugh at him a little because he will often underline the title, the author’s name and everything else on the cover page. It seems to us that when you underline everything, you defeat the purpose of underlining.

I finally broke down and “did a Sam” the other day with the remote controller to my DVD player. As on most remote controllers these days, the important buttons are jumbled in with a lot of other buttons I never use, so I constantly hit wrong buttons, which often leads to chaos. While watching a subtitled German film one evening I accidentally turned off the subtitles and couldn’t figure out how to turn them back on. Since I don’t understand German, I had to quit watching the movie. The next morning I bit the bullet, pulled out a Sharpie pen and drew big black marks around each of the four remote control buttons that matter to me. Then I tossed the controller aside with disgust. Now it is ugly, but I can see what I am doing in a dim room. I have joined “Sam’s Club.”

As an engineer who knows how to design things that work, Sam often wonders why, why, why there are so many badly designed things in the world. Norman has several interesting theories on this. One that I found especially illuminating has to do with the difference between design in the pre-industrial and the industrial world. In the old days, Norman explains, when things were made by individual craftspeople, it was relatively easy to modify designs because things were made one by one. This led to a slow, natural, Darwinian evolution in design.

In the industrial world, by contrast, things are manufactured in tremendous volume in elaborate processes that require costly templates and specialized machinery. This makes modifications more difficult and costly. In addition, designers are now distanced from users. In the old days, the blacksmith chatted with his customers in the forge, but today engineers and designers are separated from the end-users of their products by many layers of corporate bureaucracy. In many companies, designers are actually forbidden to communicate with users because of patent issues or the general culture of secrecy that pervades today’s corporate world. Another factor is the pressure of the capitalist market on manufacturers to constantly come up with something new and different to set their products apart from the competition.

The end result of this is that products seldom evolve gradually any more. When companies decide to modify a product, they usually introduce a whole new model with all kinds of new features added and often with good, old features removed. Norman discusses the paradox of products that evolve to the point of perfection and then go past that point and return to imperfection. If someone comes along and designs a perfect device, Norman writes, it is incumbent upon someone else to come along and design a competing device that will be different, and therefore less perfect.

I have a fantasy about some day giving my father a Christmas present that he would find so well conceived, engineered and executed that he would feel no need to modify it, only to admire it, using the word he reserves for the best kind of design: elegant. He would probably pick it up, look at the name of the manufacturer on its side, grab a Sharpie and underline it!

REALITY IS MY HOME PAGE

A Sitemap. That’s what the two perplexed kids in my cartoon need. I didn’t really know what a sitemap was until I read about them in Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler’s book “Web ReDesign 2.0.” Now I look for sitemaps on all the websites I visit. Websites that offer them to users are probably the sites that need them least, however, because they are usually the best organized. Websites that don’t offer them may fail to do so because their designers never bothered to create a sitemap for themselves in the first place, as the authors indicate is all too frequently the case.

I have been to many a website where I have felt as lost and befuddled as my cartoon kids, going deeper and deeper into cyberspace against my will, as links lead me to places I didn’t expect and “back” functions lead me to places I don’t remember being. Often I find that links have led me through two or three websites, without my realizing that I ever left the first one. When entering a web page from a search engine, I often find myself in what feels like a lonely outpost of some great metropolis, with little or no indication of what city it belongs to or how to get to the main gate. Often I feel like a cyberspace Dorothy, clicking my heels together and saying “there’s no place like home page; there’s no place like home page.”

The usual results of my fumblings on the Internet are either getting unexpectedly kicked out of websites or deliberately dumping my searches and going back to Google. I almost always start my Web activities at Google and always go back there when I get lost. Google is a foster home for wandering waifs like me who can’t find home pages.

A “home” button on every page is a great thing, but a sitemap gives you an overview for which there is no substitute. The amount of information and the random access that the Internet provides are certainly wonderful, but the biggest thing I miss from the old fashioned, pre-computer days of browsing and doing research is OVERVIEW.

Most of the students in my class are too young to remember something we used to have in libraries called Card Catalogues. A card catalogue was actually a large area in each library where there were row upon row of big wooden cabinets, in each of which were hundreds of little drawers containing thousands of little cards with information on each book in the library. As I remember (it’s been a while now), there were two sets of card catalogues, one arranged alphabetically by subject, and the other by book titles and authors’ names.

I still remember the exciting feeling, when starting a new research project, of approaching the card catalogues and taking them all into my view, like Prince Henry the Navigator surveying the Atlantic from the cliffs of Sagres, vowing, “I shall send ships upon these waters.” Going up to the subject catalogue and finding the general alphabetical area for my topic, I would pull open drawer after drawer like so many treasure chests, and in a few quick glances would know how much gold lay in these territories. You see, there were little tabs that stuck up from the cards that indicated subjects and sub-categories of subjects, and so by glancing at these and at how many inches of cards lay between each tab, you got an instant overview of your topic and how much territory there was to explore.

There were a lot of drawbacks to card catalogues. Often you had to jockey for position with other people using the card catalogue or wait your turn to look in a particular drawer. Sometimes you would get a sore back or dirty knees from stooping or kneeling down to look in low drawers. Sometimes you would find a drawer missing because someone had pulled it out and put it on top of the card catalogue or on a nearby table to look through it. And of course once you found a card for a book that interested you, the card could not tell you if the book was actually available at the time or checked out. You had to go to the stacks to find that out. Then, if the book was not in the stacks, you had to go to the circulation desk to find out when the book was expected back. For librarians, who had to manually type each card, I am sure there were many other drawbacks.

Computerized library catalogues have removed these shortcomings and intoduced many powerful new tools, but so far they cannot offer the kind of all-encompassing overviews and lightning-fast random access that physical card catalogues made possible. Maybe I need help from a good librarian, but I find using computerized library catalogues extremely tedious and laborious as I click in and out and in and out of entries, endlessly going down and backing out of blind alleys, where my fingers used to dance lightly through card catalogues like those of a casino dealer riffling through a deck.

“Riffle” is a good word. I just looked it up and found that it means “to turn over something, especially the pages of a book, quickly and casually.” The ability to do this is definitely a feature of the physical world that the virtual world needs to better develop, for the sake of overview and fast random access.

Think of picking up a magazine and browsing through it. By riffling through the pages, you can, in about two or three seconds, get a pretty good idea of what is in that magazine: how many articles there are, how long the articles run, whether it has a lot of pictures or not and what tone and style the magazine and the individual articles have. You can also, in these two or three seconds, probably pick out at least one or two articles that interest you because of their titles or illustrations.

Now, try to do the same thing with a website. Sure, the home page will attempt to give you some oversight and some juicy teasers, but you have to click on hyperlink after hyperlink, going in and backing out of page after page, to get the same kind of overview of what’s really in there that you can get in a few seconds of flipping through a magazine.

Has anyone developed a tool that lets you “flip” through a website yet? If so, please forgive my ignorance. If not, could someone please start working on one? I realize that it takes a little time for each page of a website to load, so perhaps a “flip” or “riffle” feature could be made from graphic simulations of web pages rather than actual web pages. A sliding bar could be used to allow users to scan pages at incremental speeds - similar to sliders used to scan video in editing programs such as Premiere and Final Cut Pro. While flipping through these simulated pages, a user could stop on one that he or she finds interesting and simply click on it to be taken to the actual web page with all its hyperlinks and Flash features and whatnot that take time to load. Another, simpler way to do this, I suppose, would be to put whole websites, or big sections of them, onto single pages that users can scroll down quickly for overviews. I know that most website experts recommend that web pages should require minimal scrolling, but perhaps long pages should be re-considered or at least offered as an option. For online shopping websites, riffling or scrolling features like this might prove to be very profitable because they would increase serendipity and impulse buying.

My theme here is making cyberspace feel and function as much like real space as possible. Perhaps this seems a little old fashioned and curmudgeonly. But remember, we still live in the real world and that is where our senses and sensibilities are based. We have not yet morphed into cyberspace creatures, as people do in science fiction. So, as long as the physical world remains our home page, we would do well to learn from it and imitate its best aspects when we design websites. I suggest that old-fashioned magazines and library card catalogues are great models from which we can learn.