It’s becoming more evident that simplicity in branding and design can be effective and beautiful. It’s gone beyond being a design trend and has begun to permeate business thinking, mostly in good ways.
Along with the desire for a clean, simple brand presence, some businesses have caught on that Helvetica is an effective typeface to achieve this. I’m not going to get into the history of the typeface in this article but I feel safe saying it’s one of the cornerstones of modern visual communication. When I say Helvetica I mean to include Helvetica Neue, knockoffs such as Swiss 721 and Arial, and to some degree, other neutral faces which are often mistaken for Helvetica. With its neutrality (brought on by its Swiss roots and huge adoption base), clean lines and unfussy appearance, it’s fit for the job of being a straightforward, clear communicator. It works well for brands that offer high value, widely accessible solutions. However it doesn’t exactly jump off the page on its own, especially compared to other typefaces.

The problem with not jumping of the page is that the business / brand is missing an opportunity to differentiate and identify themselves apart. Given Helvetica’s ubiquitousness across industries, this issue goes beyond competitive differentiation. If selecting Helvetica as your primary face, you run the risk of dissapearing in a sea of trades companies, mobile service providers, discount warehouses, hair salons and what not.

However this doesn’t mean Helvetica should be avoided. Many companies have built a successful brand around this and other neutral faces.

Using a neutral or common typeface for your brand means you will need to be ready to invest in a few things:

1. Writing

Your company name, tagline, should be consistent, polished, and unlike anything else out there. That means getting a writer go through the paces and research to ensure your front facing content refers to your company alone. Helvetica is mute in terms of messaging – so people go straight past form and right into content that the letterforms are delivering.

2. Voice

If Helvetica were to speak in North American English, its accent would be somewhere in between Akron, Ohio and Tacoma, Washington. That is to say, it’s quite unrecognizable and somewhat bland. People seeing your brand will look for your voice and personality and will not get very much from just a name and tagline set in Helvetica. Voice can be best delivered in medium and long copy connected to your messaging.

3. Secondary brand elements

Any non-typographic mark accompanying Helvetica is going to pop nicely. After all it’s not competing with anything other than a name which could very well be as generic as the face in question. Given that more attention will be given to this secondary element, it pays to really sharpen that piece so its right on target with your brand.

4. Typographic variation

One subtle way for your logomark to stand out is customization of the letterforms. Customization should of course work in tandem with the typeface – either extending its visual language or providing a significant contrast to it. Alternatively, you can combine Helvetica with another typeface to gain more uniqueness.

5. Repetition

Many large corporations, especially those using generic marks or neutral typefaces rely on the cultural permeation of their mark for recognizability. This is brought on by rigorous consistency and repetition. They advertise on all channels simultaneously, through brand or campaign messaging. Repetition is a cornerstone of marketing and is that much more important when using a neutral mark.

6. Brand standards guidelines

I believe this to be one of the most important tips for using Helvetica, or any other neutral face for that matter, to be effective. When you render your mark in Helvetica, you need to be certain that the particular colours, spacing, positioning, and all visual qualities are locked into a system. Over the long term, its the system that will become recognizable rather than the mark. Think Massimo Vignelli’s work for the New York subway system. Generating a guidelines document and distributing it to anyone using your brandmark will enable your neutral, Helvetica bold logomark to be much more effective.

The bottom line is if you want a minimal, clean, simple typeface for your logo, you need to be ready to invest in the above 5 to ensure your brand will stand out from competitors and become recognizable in your industry. The idea that a brand lives in consistency and usage rather than in the logo is that much prevalent with Helvetica based identities.

The problem is most of the world still doesn’t run on new phones. Even when considering your audience, you may find startling device usage profiles. You may find that they use something completely different than what you consider standard.

How mobile phone types can be used to segment your audience

Different mobile users have different expectations on their experience. The huge number of device types is a pretty good map of mobile users into varying market segments. You can use these users expectations to back any experience adjustments you need to make to your web product.

For example, North American Blackberry users running on Blackberry OS 4.x browsers are often hooked up to a server set up by their large, Fortune 500 employers. They are often executive level – with busy schedules and less-than-perfect eyesight. You can start to develop a persona based on this (if they are part of your target audience).  However Blackberry has maintained a younger audience keen on ultra-fast texting. 5.x and later Blackberry users may very well be in their mid-20s and are going to have much different expectations for their experience.

That being said, the brand of your device does not necessarily indicate your income or demographic, but it does say a lot about your experience expectations.

The mobile device as moving target

Consider for a moment the advent of the film camera. There were many attempts at providing just the right form factor, size, usability to allow that device to do the best that it could. Of course its development was closely guided by the varying science that allowed light to be captured into a static image. This is where the mobile device sits with us now as an invention. We as a human race are still discovering and defining what a mobile device is. Even though you can say we’ve come a long way in its definition, there are thousands of opinions still out there – and we will need to run the course to determine what the ultimate expectations we have for these powerful devices.

Basic mindset

Since it’s impossible to account for every last variable that defines a mobile experience, we need to think about mobile products differently than concrete or even online products. Rather than thinking of a mobile product as a singular reality, we need to think of it as if it were in a hall of mirrors – there are many slightly different variations visible, but it’s ultimately one cohesive unit.

This multi-reality thinking needs to be built into strategy, design and development. Design and strategy wise, dig deep into that product’s brand to create a identity detailed enough to help define how you define details like small snippets of text or tiny icons. From a development standpoint, agile is well suited. In fact that defines how things should be built: flexible CSS and well structured code that allows the content to breathe. Use Yahoo’s well established Graded Browser Support to setup your segmentation. Integrate testing at a cyclical level, rather than the typical practice to lump all of the testing at the end of the project. Think of the sculptor taking a step back from a work in progress, checking out all of the angles at a distance.

These techniques can help you a more air-tight product. Establishing this workflow early will set up a much more realistic offering, a richer product, as well as potentially open up opportunities to identify your audience even further.

Icon design challenges a designer in three main ways–

• You need to come up with the essence of a particular idea, much like the process of creating a brand
• The icon needs to reflect the surrounding user experience and any interactive qualities it might have, and
• You are often working in impossibly small dimensions and restricted colour spaces.

It’s these main challenges that really appeal to me as a designer. It’s been quoted that design is a process of overlapping constraints until the final design reveals itself and the design of icons is a pretty pure example of this.

I’ve decided to launch a personal site + blog to run concurrently with offbeat studios. It will be more dedicated to general design observations rather than interaction design specifically.

http://peterchlebak.com

And a Short and sweet portfolio

http://cargocollective.com/peterchlebak

View the brand guideline document for this project here.

There are two types of cycle commuters. Those that like to overtly advertise their practice, and those that consider it a normal part of getting around. If you fall into the latter category, you might find it difficult to find cycle wear that is both functional and low key.

Enter Rapha, a UK based company. While they have their roots in bike races such as the Tour De France, there’s no overt spandex or splashy logos. Instead you’ll find classic materials like merino wool and thoughtful but minimal features like reflective arm bands.

I for one love their tweed softshell jacket. But be sure to check out the rest of their offerings.

From an interaction design standpoint, it’s a great website as well.

Why document?

1. Showcase Details.

As designers we are responsible for being obsessive over details and we are the only ones who truly understand how details can impact a project. A positioning shift to the left or right as we know can dramatically change click through rates and affect the outcome of a project. We need to call attention to these visually small, but functionally big ideas when sharing proofs with the stakeholders.

The Stakeholder
The stakeholder doesn’t have the capacity to care for all of the details on a project. They actually rely on more detail oriented people (supposedly us) who in a perfect world ensure every element reflects the project in some way. As managers, stakeholders will most likely have multiple projects on the go so they always need contextualizing to help put their thoughts on your project.
Notes like “See attached screenshot where I’ve updated the button on the top right” can go a long way to get their brain back on your projects.

2. Impart Interactive Design

Although we act primarily as visual designers, we are also interactive specialists. As such we should be thinking about how things work as we design, and contribute thoughts accordingly. When time has been budgeted, we can use prototyping methods, where we isolate a particular interactive element and roughly script/code in behaviours. But we don’t always have the time to build out a flash file to show how every button might operate. A more time effective solution is simply add few notes on interactive behavior.

Also be sure to check out the great collection of imagery that informs and inspires the collection at the shop here.