Over the past few months, I've been working with a friend on the branding of his fledgling company. It's been a fun and challenging experience: one that refutes my earlier belief that working with people you know only leads to disaster. Although my expertise is certainly not in the skill of brand identity, undertaking a company identity project has been a ton of fun.
Originally Scott approached me with the idea of working with him on a basic brand and website under the imaginative name ASM Technologies — his initials. After toying around with some promising logos and wordmarks in this theme, I challenged him to explore other names. One key was obtaining a suitable domain as his website is going to be his primary marketing tool. Names flew back and forth across the wires for over a month, friend and family were enlisted for input, and we finally settled on Swiftradius, which we both felt had nice connotations for his company without limiting him to doing one particular thing.
I won't go into the nitpicking details of the logo, but we eventually came to a simple wordmark with a symbolic radius on the right. Then, we worked on a website for the company. It's been particularly interesting working with a programmer who primarily develops back-end systems often involving XML and showing him the ins and outs of semantic XHTML. In an especially geeky moment Scott excitedly showed me how he's validating the site using his normal XML parser tool and how cool that was.
For any CSS geeks out there, the menu along the top of the site is an unordered list using relative positioning of each element to push it over the item before it. I'm also using the background image hover technique where both states of the menu graphic are in one file and the background simply moves up or down as you hover over an item.
The website itself is really in a beta state at the moment. Scott needed the site live for a proposal, so it was launched a little prematurely, so expect content to be added and existing content to be altered over the coming months.
Comments
pF - May 21, 2004 9:41 am
Nice. I personally would have tried to make a top banner out of that swanky red logo in this here post. The site currently feels a bit cold, and the faded red that you had in that image, stretching from one side to the other, may really draw your attention.
I know sticking a red banner at the top is nothing new... but with that logo you guys came up with I think it would work really well... either way 'good show old bean'.
Scott MacIntosh - May 25, 2004 9:03 am
Thanks to Daniel for all the hard work on this.
It was a really interesting process we went through, short-listing names and envisioning a brand built around that name. The most interesting part was gathering comments from a select group on a shortlist of names. This branding stuff is very subjective, and there was _no_ consistent feedback on any given name.
I am especially proud of the logo that grew out of this. The comment on using the 'white on red' logo as a prominent feature of the site is a good one. We had one version of the site that had a red background with white text throughout, but we thought it was a bit garish and hard to read. It was too much of a good thing. I would like to resurrect some portion of that in a later version, since it is so stylish.
Coming soon on <a href="http://www.swiftradius.com/" > the Swiftradius site. </a>
<ul><li>Various dynamic forms driven by a J2EE backend.</li>
<li>Some sort of weblog functionality, probably driven by Roller weblog engine. </li>
<li>A home grown J2EE time management system for internal use. I would open-source this if it turns out to be useful.</li></ul>
I have a mirror view of the process that Daniel describes above. Who says a systems architect and a web designer can't get along? ;-) And, make no mistake; Daniel is a geek too, just a different kind. His description of 'background image hover technique' above doesn't have the intensity you will get when it is described to you face to face.
We went out for a little site launch party on the weekend. And, a site launch mountain bike ride at Brookvale yesterday. Geez, he's a pretty good rider too.
Cheers,
Scott
Adam Bramwell - May 31, 2004 5:01 am
The idea of a post launch mtb ride sounds swanky to me, such are the benefits of working with friends!
Daniel you're right about the available domain name pool shrinking, securing a company name is a task not well suited to being scheduled in a short timeframe. Rumination is required!
On the Swiftradius site, the boxy rectangular topnav seems at odds with the curvelicious implications of the company name to me. It certainly look good though! Further, when reading the tagline 'complete agile solutions' I heard 'complete angled solutions'. Must be my dyslexia..