Everyone wants to have a “lifestyle brand” – one of those brands that represent a way of life – a life you want to have (or at least a life you want your friends to think you have). What bucket does your brand fit into – and how can you expand your brand?
What savvy social media users know is that there’s a science to getting it right–if you follow certain parameters, you can get the results you were working toward. All it takes is some knowledge and forethought, and you can be well on their way to posting engaging content.
Check out these beautiful infographics to gain an edge when posting content to your social properties.
Via Sure Payroll
Designers love to play with crazy concepts and occasionally strike gold. With the arrival of football season, let’s take a look at one designer’s take on combining the NFL and the NBA logos of each city.
Southwest Airlines on Monday unveiled a new logo amid a brand overhaul that includes a new look for its aircraft. The new “Heart” paint scheme will be the carrier’s first new livery since it introduced its current “Canyon Blue” look in 2001.
The new logo and look aren’t only for Southwest’s fleet of Boeing 737s. The carrier also rolled out a new-look website Monday morning, and says the new branding will go up at its airports nationwide. Rapid Rewards cards and in-flight snacks also received the new treatment.
The branding overhaul comes amid a year of change for Southwest. The airline is close to wrapping up its merger with AirTran, which Southwest acquired in 2011. The final AirTran flight will take place in December, and Southwest will then need to finish repainting the remaining AirTran 737s that it plans to absorb into its fleet.
“With all these exciting changes happening, we thought it was time for a new visual expression of our brand — one that marries our past to our present and sets the course for where we’re headed in the future.”
— Southwest CEO Gary Kelly
A topic with which business owners and marketing students alike struggle – what is branding?
A School of Visual Arts Masters in Branding student named Sarah Fudin was inspired to gather 100 definitions of branding from 100 different people in various industries: marketers, designers, strategists, authors and more. These definitions are original and have been acquired through email, phone calls and in-person meetings. We’ve collected our favorites here.
When I was getting my start in the business of graphic design, I began life as a sign maker. Yes, mostly with vector graphics and a vinyl plotter, but I lived in that interesting moment in time when the old ways were stepping aside to the new digital age. I had to have one foot into the old world of how we “used” to do things.
New Texas head coach Charlie Strong had the iconic Longhorn logo removed from the white Texas helmets as fall practice commenced in Austin in preparation for the 2014 college football season.
According to writer Laken Litman of USA Today Sports, Strong’s offseason motto for Longhorn football in 2014 is to “Put the ‘T’ back in Texas Football,” one step at a time.
“He (Strong) prohibited players from throwing up the ‘Hook’Em Horns’ sign with their hands, saying they had to earn it. He’s made them walk the half mile to practice instead of taking a bus as they used to under Mack Brown. And he’s even stripped the Longhorns off their helmets.”
When the Texas players arrived for the first day of fall practice on Monday, their helmets were solid white,” Litman reported.
Presumably the Longhorn logo will return to the helmets of those players Strong and the coaching staff at Texas deem worthy of seeing game action come the start of the 2014 season later this month.
Via Fansided
Browsing Amazon Prime Video a few days ago I discovered a fantastic little movie called “Linotype: The Film.”
Linotype: The Film is a feature-length documentary centered around the Linotype type casting machine. Called the “Eighth Wonder of the World” by Thomas Edison, it revolutionized printing and society. The film tells the charming and emotional story of the people connected to the Linotype and how it impacted the world.
The Linotype (pronounced “line-o-type”) completely transformed the communication of information similarly to how the internet is now changing communication again. Although these machines were revolutionary, technology began to supersede the Linotype and they were scrapped and melted-down by the thousands. Today, very few machines are still in existence.
The highly-skilled operators of the Linotype are in a battle against time. If their skills are not passed along to a new generation of operators, the machine will die completely. There is a small group of former operators that want to save the Linotype from the scrap yard, but some see this as a fruitless endeavor.
What place does the Linotype have in the age of new technology? Should the machine be shoved into a museum and left to rust? Why should anyone care about typography or the technology of communication? The film seeks to answer these questions.
Watch the movie for free if you use Amazon Prime or order it from Amazon or iTunes.
Think of wireframes as a blueprint for what’s to come. Wireframes help a designer experiment quickly – move navigation elements, hero images, banners, product images, etc without burning a lot of billable hours immersed in code or working in Illustrator or Photoshop. Let’s take a look at some example wireframes:
There are all types of designers working at agencies and acronyms thrown around at meetings you may have heard. Fast Company via Pixelapse looked at a few of the most common and explained their job functions
