[ocaml-biz] basics of Branding

[Brandon J. Van Every]

William Neumann wrote:
> Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>
> > There's nothing free about that advertizing.  All those
> > Nike swooshes are bought and paid for somehow.
>
> Yeah... they're bought and paid for by the people who by the shoes,
> shirts, etc.  Sure, they pay a guy like LeBron 10 million dollars a
> year to wear his stuff, but how often do you see LeBron while you're
> out golfing?  Or walking the dog?  Never... but you do see plenty of
> normal people wearing that swoosh.  That is not even free advertising
> -- that's advertising that people are *paying Nike* to let them do.

When you develop the OCaml clothing line, you let us know.  :-)
I suppose T-shirts are possible someday.
People also would put an "OCaml Powered" logo on websites.

> Reddy
> Kilowatt is essentially a stick figure man with lightning
> bolts instead of sticks, and a light bulb for a head.

I know that logo, but not the company associated with it.

> > Apple's connotation is "we embrace your
> > entire graphic design lifestyle.  You, the New Media chic,
> > are our core
> > customers.  We know what good design is, and PCs don't."
>
> Well, that's more from the sum of their entire branding style
> than just
> their current logo, which doesn't really say much beyond
> "clean".

Yes, a logo should be designed in the service of an overarching brand
identity.  This is a rather different philosophy from your idea that a
logo need merely catch the eye.

Incidentally, I would say that O'Reilly used 'technical' or 'high
quality draftsmanship' to develop the brand identity of its books.  It
ships technical books, so it has highly technical, meticulous pen
drawings.  They could have chosen abstract expressionist drawings.  Why
do you suppose they rendered in the style of engravers or Old Masters
rather than Monet, Van Gogh, Dali, etc?  Lotsa visual styles could have
been eye catching, but they made this technical, meticulous choice.

I feel that what we're bogged down in here, is a very basic discussing
about marketing and 'Branding'.  When we were working on the Python
logo, we had a graphic designer who did this sort of thing
professionally, and CEOs who had stewarded brands to success in the
marketplace.  Here, we seem to be a bunch of techies reinventing notions
of 'Branding' on first principles.

If I had the time, I would trouble myself to read a book on the subject.
Then I'd use that to argue from a position of greater authority, so that
we don't have to go round and round in circles on the basics.  Maybe it
would be better to scare up a person who designs logos for a living and
has some results from the field.  Unfortunately, I don't know that guy.
Anyone else have such a contact?

> > I don't see why we're talking about how to design logos for 10 or 20
> > years from now.  Let's deal with problems now, shall we?
>
> Yeah.  'Cause nothing says brand identity like changing logos every
> three years...

When designing Python logos, we had the goal of making something good
enough that might hold up over the long haul, but that would at least be
good enough to last a few years and move Python forwards.  If Python
grew to the point that someone with a bigger advertizing budget wanted
to give our effort a makeover, we'd call that victory.  Lotsa things
would be better than Python's current eyesore logo,
http://www.python.org, without being the perfect UberLogo.  The
dimension of volunteer energy has to be recognized.  We don't have some
umpteen million dollar advertizing budget to acquire deep market wisdom
and hire the best logo designers available.

We don't have infinite time to debate, make submissions, or revise
either.  Debating brand identities is the easy part: we all know how to
use words cheaply.  Once we start drawing and submitting, we're gonna
find that "um, it's not quite good enough" gets real old real quick.  To
set a realistic expectation, however, we'll be re-drawing stuff for at
least 1 month.  It takes a lot of revisions to cough out commercially
viable stuff.

Font treatment is another thorny problem besides the logo itself.  One
can chew up a lot of time wondering what friggin' font should serve the
brand identity, as well as where to obtain the font.  So if anyone wants
to start worrying about fonts instead of logos, feel free.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
                          - anonymous entrepreneur