Link tags: branding

Why we need CSS Speech - Tink - Léonie Watson

I was talking about this with Léonie just yesterday. I, for one, would love to have CSS speech support. You know who else would love it? Content designers!

In these days of voice interaction on every platform, there is a growing expectation that it should be possible to design that experience just like we can the visual experience. In the same way an organisation chooses a logo and colour palette for its website, it stands to reason that they may also choose a particular voice that represents their brand.

It’s wild that there’s no way to do this on the web.

The Customer Onboarding Handbook [PDF]

A free PDF with five articles:

• The Brand Experience Gap by Emma Parnell
• Ongoing Onboarding: Taking Customers from First Use to Product Mastery by Chris How
• Just Add ICE: 3 Ways to Make Your Customer Experience More Meaningful by Candi Williams
• Effectively Researching and Using Customer Journey Maps by Lauren Isaacson
• Using and Abusing Surveys in Customer Onboarding by Caroline Jarrett

Three of those authors spoke at this year’s UX London!

Pixelhop new website walk through

A case study with equal emphasis on animation and performance.

Works offline

How do we tell our visitors our sites work offline? How do we tell our visitors that they don’t need an app because it’s no more capable than the URL they’re on right now?

Remy expands on his call for ideas on branding websites that work offline with a universal symbol, along the lines of what we had with RSS.

What I’d personally like to see as an outcome: some simple iconography that I can use on my own site and other projects that can offer ambient badging to reassure my visitor that the URL they’re visiting will work offline.

Round 1: post your ideas / designs · Issue #1 · works-offline/logo

This is an interesting push by Remy to try to figure out a way we can collectively indicate to users that a site works offline.

Well, seeing as browsers have completely dropped the ball on any kind of ambient badging, it’s fair enough that we take matters into our own hands.

The Worm is Back! | NASA

The return of NASA’s iconic “worm” logo (for some missions).

The Guardian digital design style guide

What a lovely way to walk through the design system underpinning the Guardian website.

Bonus points for using the term “tweak points”!

Exploring the Frontiers of Visual Identity… | Speculative Identities

Brand identity in sci-fi films, like Alien, Total Recall, Robocop, and Back To The Future.

This makes for a nice companion site to Sci-fi Interfaces.

Brand New Roman

A font made of corporate logos.

Evolving the Firefox Brand - Mozilla Open Design

I’m impressed by Mozilla’s commitment to designing in the open—one of the hardest parts of any kind of brand work is getting agreement, and this process must make that even more difficult.

I have to say, I quite like both options on display here.

Ampersand 2018 | Rob Weychert

Rob attended the excellent Ampersand event last Friday and he’s made notes for each and every talk.

The first visual identity for UK Parliament

Some lovely branding work for the UK Parliament, presented very nicely.

90 Minutes | Type Supply

Tal Leming’s thoroughly delightful (and obsessive) account of designing the 90 Minutes typeface for U.S. Soccer.

FIFA has strict regulations that govern the size and stroke weight of numbers and letters used on official match uniforms. This made me unbelievably paranoid. I had a nightmare that one of the national teams would be set for kickoff of an important match and the referee would suddenly blow the whistle and say, “Hey, hey, hey! The bottom stroke of that 2 is 1 mm too light. The United States must forfeit this match!”

How to Redesign a Tech Logo + Subtraction.com

I think Khoi might be on to something here …but I also think this change in priorities is no bad thing:

Consider the macro trend of these brands all visually converging alongside the industry’s current mania for design systems. That juxtaposition suggests that we’re far more interested in implementing ideas than we are in ideas themselves.

Building Flexible Design Systems // Speaker Deck

The slides from Yesenia’s talk on scenario-driven design.

UI Sounds: From Zero To Hero | Icons8 Blog

Following on from Ruth’s piece, here are some more thoughts on sound in UI from Roman Zimarev, the creator of icon sounds.

He makes a distinction between notification sounds and interaction sounds, as well as talking about sound identity in branding.

It’s Nice That | A new national identity: Smörgåsbord Studio rebrands Wales

Smörgåsbord Studio created a design system for the Welsh government, including the typeface Cymru Wales Sans from Colophon.

The accompanying video lists the design principles:

• Elevate our status
• Surprise & inspire
• Change perceptions
• Do good things
• Be unmistakably Wales

Re: Brand | Happy Cog

After Clearleft’s recent rebranding, I’m really interested in Happy Cog’s redesign process:

In the near future we’ll be rolling out a new website, followed by a rebrand of Cognition, our blog. As the identity is tested against applications, much of what’s here may change. Nothing is set in stone.

Designing inspired style guides presentation slides and transcript | Stuff & Nonsense

Having spent half a decade encouraging people to make their pattern libraries public and doing my best to encourage openness and sharing, I find this kind of styleguide-shaming quite disheartening:

These all offer something different but more often than not they have something in common. They look ugly enough to have been designed by someone who enjoys configuring a router.

If a pattern library is intended to inspire, then make it inspiring. But if it’s intended to be an ever-changing codebase (made for and by the kind of people who enjoy configuring a router), then that’s where the effort and time should be concentrated.

But before designing anything—whether it’s a website or a pattern library—figure out who the audience is first.

Arrival – Mozilla Open Design

Mozilla’s audacious rebranding in the open that I linked to a while back has come to fruition.

I like it. But even if I didn’t, congratulations to everyone involved in getting agreement across an organisation of this size—never an easy task.