Logos have designers. Brands have managers.

posted by pete on July 30th, 2009

Unspace is working on a really cool design and user experience project for a client right now. Lukas Dryja (who runs his awesome boutique design consulting company Kolor out of Unspace HQ) and I found ourselves having a very interesting conversation about logos and brands.

Jayson Zaleski at Kolor had this to contribute:

An identity requires strategic thinking. If a company is to be successful in today’s saturated market of innovators and followers, it needs to command attention. Attention is gained through delivering a consistent promise within/through quality of product/service, fulfilling audience expectations in the established relationship, and brand projection. To be memorable, all of these elements require constant policing.

However, the brand starts with the logo. It is the most universally-applied element within the brand platform. Copy writing, photography, advertising and marketing all require very targeted and consistent messaging, yet the logo is the most important of all elements.

It needs to function effectively from a technical perspective:

• Does it reduce well?
• Does it hold up on screen without loosing detail?
• Does it gain attention on a t-shirt as well as on the side of a building?

Also, it needs to communicate who you are and some aspect about what your company does. It is your business card, introducing who you are when you are not around to do it yourself. If your logo fails to communicate your distinct personality, it will fail to resonate after it is out of sight (and out of mind). It needs to hold enough conceptual might in order to provide a visual palette for the brand.

A logo doesn’t just work in the middle of a white area… it requires a larger narrative, and this narrative will provide a dynamic environment for the logo to work within.

Now, I am but a lowly programmer… but I can tell you that the brand is not “just” a logo. A brand is a personality, a character. It’s a feeling that your customers associate with it when they think about you. Brand managers spend their time planning the persona of the business, and it’s a vital part of their strategy. They think of brands as people.

Close your eyes and picture Mr. Harley Davidson walking into a bar. You and I are both thinking of the same dude. That doesn’t happen by accident!

That’s why a clever logo and a catchy domain that is available is not branding. Like every other successful online business, your brand needs a visual language and identity of its own to stand out from the crowd.

Why geeks change careers

posted by pete on July 27th, 2009

I recently exchanged a few good emails with Joshua Fruhlinger, a journalist. He was working on an article for IT World about the reasons people might stop working on Microsoft tools in favour of open source solutions like Rails, WordPress or Drupal. The article came out today and I’m happy with it. My contributions are on page 3.

Thanks Josh!

I am hearing more and more geeks changing jobs, regardless of the current economic “situation”. I’m really happy that Josh focused on the role of fear in starting Unspace. Fear is a natural motivator, and on a base level it’s fear that keeps us growing.

Any readers recently switch jobs? Are you glad?

City Limits

posted by mike on July 21st, 2009

Here in Toronto, we've been dealing with a strike by the local municipal union. The most noticeable thing about the strike is that nobody's garbage is getting picked up, which predictably means that your average Joe is getting pretty upset.

Last Friday we launched http://www.cupestrike.com to give local folks the ability to cast a vote about whether they support or oppose the strike, and to chime in with their two cents. This is the first step in a larger project we're calling Pinionated, which will aim to provide pseudo-accurate, geographically-localized opinion polling.

An item of interest to you, O consumer of syndication, might be that anyone can vote -- without giving any personal information. We ask for your opinion, your name, your whereabouts, and your two cents (if you feel like giving them), but only the opinion is mandatory. Interestingly enough, we got roughly the same results as this recent Angus Reid poll. One would assume that people would engage in shenanigans and try to multi-vote (pretty easy to figure out how), but so far it hasn't happened.

Score one for human decency and the honor system... I think.

FutureRuby is all of us

posted by pete on July 12th, 2009

I’m pleased to say that FutureRuby has been a huge success, however you want to measure it. There has been several running themes: programming Ruby, programming life, programming ourselves… We iterate through failure to find success, happiness, and in some cases, anarchy.


Thanks once again to Kieran Huggins for taking this shot. A high-res, non-animated version is here on Flickr.

Thank you to Meghann Millard, our conference director, for connecting all of the dots. I am indebted to all of the speakers for sharing their knowledge, and I sincerely appreciate the tireless efforts of all of our volunteers.

It’s pretty clear that people who understand why it’s important to participate in an event like FutureRuby are amongst the most interesting, eloquent, and in some cases wildly eccentric people walking the earth today. The next time you’re at a tech event and the crowd spontaneously breaks into a hissing, clapping, Gregorian fit… I hope that history remembers that it all started at FutureRuby.


To the future!

Is this really necessary?

posted by pete on July 7th, 2009

Accordion Guy's (RubyFringe) Toronto Guides

posted by pete on July 3rd, 2009

Last year we ran a conference called RubyFringe which was pretty alright. Leading up to the event, Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla wrote a series of amazing articles describing getting around Toronto and things to expect while you’re here. They deserve a dust-off now that FutureRuby is around the corner.

• Where did all the cigarettes go?
• Getting from the airport to the hotel
• Boozin’ in Accordion City
• The lay of the land - part 1
• Best damn cookie in town
• Active Surplus aka Hardware Nirvana
• The lay of the land - part 2
• The unofficial IRC back-channel

It’s worth noting that the IRC back-channel from RubyFringe is still running.