Murphy’s Hypotenuse—The Unmistakable Power of Icons (Part Two)

By Patrick Murphy

 In Wednesday's edition of Murphy’s Hypotenuse, we explored my love for icons, as well as how Canon makes nimble use of a virtual icon flood to effectively demonstrate product attributes in digital cameras.

 Now, we’ll take a look at a couple of different impactful ways that icons drive the world of products and services.

The second reason for increased icon prevalence is that they contribute heavily to the customer experience. They’re optimized ergonomics for our frazzled consumer brains. Today’s product and service markets are complex and saturated  with vast options and an incessant flow of information, and trying to make decisions based on that multitude of information available can be an arduous process. Any time this information can be simplified or summarized, as with icons, it’s an opportunity for a better experience for the customer.

There are quite a few examples of good and bad information delivery with or without icons, but I’ll focus on one to get my point across. Time Warner Cable offers TV, internet, and phone services. The services they offer have gradually shifted, in consumer minds over time, from luxuries (the 80s) to commodities (now), and they are now taken for granted so much that actually shopping for them is seen more as a hassle by many people than an enjoyable experience. Add to that consumer perceptions of TWC being a monopolized utility concern, and you have a couple of ingredients for a platform of diabolical consumer experience.

However, Time Warner has mitigated some of this perceived awfulness through the use of icons:

TWC’s main product page offers this banner of four simple icons, the first three representing their different services, and the fourth a clear combination of the first three describing the ability to “bundle” them. Unlike some tech service companies that flood their websites with so much information that it’s difficult to grasp exactly what it is they’re selling, they’ve stripped down and iconified their entire breadth of offerings into a simple set of graphics. These icons don’t remove the chore-like element of subscribing to these services, but the intuitive and clutter-free interface at least infers some element of ease in the process at the very beginning of the purchasing experience.

Now for the not-so-practical truth about icons—they simply have a cool factor you can’t get in any other design vehicle. A good icon has swagger, and it’s a bold statement of confidence and character. It’s a brand planting its flag with pride on its merchandise.  

Icons draw a buyer in, much in the same way tattoos draw your eyes on people on the street day to day. Due to its simplified nature you may not even understand it the second you lay eyes on it - but when you get it, it burns into your retina and delivers its message. Some of the best logos feature icons – especially newer, emerging companies who cannot be recognized by simply their name or centuries-old trademark

Icons are the little guys in the design world that pack a great punch in so many ways, telling brand stories, making bold statements to define customer experience, and alerting buyers to important features, benefits, technology, and applications that drive the purchasing process in a powerful fashion.

Murphy’s Hypotenuse—The Unmistakable Power of Icons (Part One)

by Patrick Murphy

Out of all the artistic expressions I have the privilege to explore in my world of industrial design, there’s nothing that provides the instant gratification of an icon, whether it’s placed on a product or used in marketing applications to sell it.

 In other words, I love a good icon. I’ve recently been creating quite a few icons to further flesh out Trig Innovation’s brand identity for some of our emerging service frameworks, as well as some work for some really innovative clients. In a short time, I’ve become the icon guy around here, and I love that. Here’s a taste of what I call my “Iconfolio” at Trig (barring work still protected under current non-disclosure agreements, of course):

Icons offer the designer their own unique challenge—icon work essentially takes a complex concept and represents it with a small, simple graphic, a graphic that communicates a ton of information in a very concise way. It’s also a great exercise in “stencil techniques,” that is, posterizing an image into just black and white. A lot of icons out there involve multiple colors, shading and even complex gradients—especially with the recent prevalence of mobile device apps. But I generally guide my work with the the basic graphic design rule of “if it doesn’t look good in black and white then it’s too complicated.”

 It’s difficult to create certain forms or scenes using just pure highlighting and pure shading. Working through sculpting some of the more difficult icons I’ve created has undoubtedly made me a better designer though, especially in the realm of fast-action concept sketching. I usually colorize icons later in the process, sometimes with multiple colors, but generating them in black and white imbues them with extreme flexibility and an inherent striking look that can only come from a “stencil” image. Banksy knows what I’m talking about. I’d like to imagine that every icon I make could be tattooed on someone and still look good in 30 years. Karim Rashid clearly has the same mentality about icons, seeing as he has literally done this:

Icon creation is a skill set that I’m glad to have developed, because icons are now, more important than ever, so prevalent in the product and service marketplace. They are important for a couple of very practical reasons, as well as one that’s not so practical.

The first reason is the perceived increase in value that icons can bring to a product or service. While they may not necessarily bring value in the monetary sense, more value in terms of attributes, features, technological advancements, and benefits. Surely if people took their time to make icons for specific features or advantages of their products, they must be something new or innovative, or just plain better, right? Iconizing these elements, like product attributes, features, benefits, and technology advancements, elevates them from a boring regurgitation into something special that deserves buyer investigation.

A package displaying eight icons of a product’s attributes, versus a competitor’s with only three, may automatically register the first product to a buyer as a better choice, regardless of the validity of the comparison. Granted, there is an upper limit to icon quantity, a point of diminishing returns where a manufacturer plasters a package or product page with so many icons that the value of each is compromised in a sea of multitude (of course, this breaking point varies by product type and industry context).While upwards of 10 icons would normally be too much for packaging, on this website for Canon digital cameras it works quite well. Digital cameras compete within a highly-saturated market for technical dominance. The difference of a single feature or product spec can leapfrog a brand offering ahead of a big pack. So, in this case, the more icons the merrier. The vast iconography actually simplifies what would be page upon page of text into a visual summary of what features and technology consumers are obtaining within the product.

Canon also consistently marks this format and layout of its iconography across its entire product range, so that customers can ascertain differences between models quickly and proceed to making a purchase. Many of these attributes, may, in fact, be standard across the variety of digital camera brands, but when Canon displays them in such a compelling way, it appears that their cameras are even more feature-packed.

Part Two of this series will appear on Friday, June 1. Stay tuned!

See You at PDMA Innovate Carolina 2012

This week marks an exciting time for Trig Innovation, as we celebrate the expansion of our business through our presence and sponsorship at the Product Development and Management Association’s Innovate Carolina conference on Friday, April 20th.

An annual event of the PDMA Carolinas chapter, Innovate Carolina has quickly become an essential conference for us for a variety of reasons.  We routinely meet great people who help us expand our network of clients and service partners, and each of the sessions are informative and provoking, to the point where we always leave with new ideas to explore for the benefit of Trig’s clients.

This year’s conference is particularly special for us, since we are bringing a much bigger team of “innovation athletes” to intersect with product development professionals from across the Carolinas.  

During Friday’s conference, the Trig team will be talking to friends in product development, both old and new, about our dynamic and evolving set of innovation management frameworks:

•      Industrial Design
•      Ideation
•      Customer Research
•      Brand Identity
•      Interactive Marketing
•      Graphic Design
•      Patent Drafting
•      Animation
•      Video Production

We’ve come a long way since our founding almost five years ago as an industrial design boutique. While our expansion reflects a desire to broaden the scope of our work to challenge ourselves, we can look back and see that most of our own innovation has come from listening to our clients and demanding that we integrate new solutions to meet their needs.

This year’s conference has all of the ingredients to be even more successful than the high standards set by last year’s event in Charlotte and the previous year in Chapel Hill.  From all of us at Trig Innovation, we look forward to seeing you there.

Fertile Ground - Customer Research at the Launch Phase

This week, Trig® Innovation is attending the Southern Farm Show at Raleigh’s North Carolina State Fairgrounds from February 1-3. Over 300 exhibiting companies from the world of farm equipment will make the Southern Farm Show the largest exhibition of its kind in the Carolinas/Virginia area of the country.

In addition to building our depth of insight to this industry, we’ll be attending on behalf of a longtime trusted client who is exhibiting at the show.  This client has been one of the foundational collaborators who helped us grow into the branding and marketing services space, giving us the opportunity to help them with their messaging, logos, market research, and help define a visual brand language for their design elements. They have helped us realize our ability to translate product knowledge and customer research into strategic marketing deliverables that have been a driver for growth for their own business.

In our first engagement with this client, we developed a comprehensive family of product logos, visual brand language manual for each of their 13 product lines, and supporting printed sales collateral.  Next, we worked with them to develop push-marketing techniques through direct mail and digital campaigns to build new channels for communicating with their customers. 

Our current work revolves around the launch of an innovative product line of cutting-edge technology that is truly the next step in precision agriculture.  To support the launch, they asked us to create a brand identity and messaging platform that will quickly communicate the enhanced capabilities, flexible product configurations, and clean user experience – for a total package that will shake up the industry.

It is one thing to develop a brand identity that resonates internally, but there is no substitute for market testing to see if you are on the right track.  Over the course of the show, we will be iterating on the messaging platform as we interact with customers.  This gives us the opportunity to build more effective sales tools that will help to communicate the improvements this product can make to the customer’s financial performance. 

To that end, the Trig® Brand team is issuing this challenge to the new product development community:  you should partner with a branding team that understands how essential customer alignment is to effective innovation programs, especially at the product launch.  We invite you to contact us to partner on your next successful launch.

Ty Hagler
Principal
919-480-TRIG (8744)

TyHagler@trig-in.com

Brand Identity Case Study: Parklife Communications

Client Company—Parklife Communications, Hillsborough, NC

Vital Signs:  The company is two years old, led by a husband-and-wife team of veteran corporate marketers.  Parklife provides marketing consultation and content for both digital and collateral materials.  Clients include companies in business-to-business consulting and services, legal, green building, entertainment, and fine arts.  Parklife has a heavy emphasis on the cutting-edge tactics and tools in blogs and social media.

Needs—In a classic “cobbler’s children with no shoes” scenario, Parklife has built its business over the last two years without taking time to brand itself. The company needed a representative logo and brand mark, along with color and font schemes suitable for everything from business cards to social media avatars.

Trig’s Branding Approach—First step, 3C analysis, taking a holistic look at the company, its representative clients, and its competitors.  After capturing the essence of Parklife and its people, seeing the types of clients it targets, and positioning the company within its competitive landscape, Trig facilitated several ideation sessions with the principals, leading to multiple concept iterations.

During the first ideation session, Trig assembled a list of adjectives to describe the Parklife brand: progressive, kinetic, modern, playful, fun, shrewd, business-savvy, anti-corporate, innovative, and collaborative.  Our consulting team then matched up these adjectives with fonts that reflected the attributes described, giving the Parklife team multiple options.

During the second ideation session, the Trig team probed Parklife’s penchant for color. We received some great guidance here, as the Parklife team had some well-defined opinions. We were told to avoid anything too primary and corporate, but to avoid being too trendy. The color scheme needed to be modern, but with a classic feel.

After refining Parklife’s color preferences, our design team set to work on a brand mark that would serve as an iconic representation of the company in both digital and collateral-based marketing.  An early idea that clearly resonated with the Trig team and the Parklife team was the idea of turning certain letters in the name of the company into punctuation mark-like images. After multiple iterations, we settled on the truly iconic rendering of Parklife with the A and E reflective of quotation marks.  We selected the A mark for the stand alone brand mark for use in applications such as social media avatars.

Results—The results of this exercise were inspiring for the Trig team, since we enjoyed a rare opportunity to do brand work for a service company outside of our normal industry space in hardware, tools, and medical devices.  You can see the multiple renderings and iterations that got us to the final products on our case study page.