Daily Brad, the blog

KFC Boldy Goes where no brand has gone before by unveiling astronomical, 87,500 square-foot, contemporized Colonel Sanders logo in Area 51 desert to launch “KFC of the Future”.

Kicking Off a New Brand Image Campaign
The event marks the official debut of a massive global re-image campaign that will contemporize 14,000-plus KFC restaurants in over 80 countries over the next few years.

KFC’s new fresh look updates one of the most recognized, respected and beloved brand icons in the world and spans all visual elements from logo to restaurant design, advertising, packaging, uniforms and more.

The new logo depicts Colonel Sanders with his signature string tie, but for the first time, replaces his classic white, double-breasted suit with a red apron. The apron symbolizes the home-style culinary heritage of the brand and reminds customers that KFC is always in the kitchen cooking delicious, high-quality, freshly prepared chicken by hand, just the way Colonel Sanders did 50 years ago.

The Logo Construction
It took a team of nearly 50 designers, engineers, scientists (including astrophysicists), architects and other professionals working nearly three months to conceive, create and execute building the world’s largest logo.

The “Face from Space” took more than 3,000 hours to create from inception to launch and was built by Synergy, a leading event company.

The logo consists of 65,000 one-foot by one-foot painted tile pieces that were assembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle: 6,000 red, 14,000 white, 12,000 eggshell, 5,000 beige and 28,000 black.

The logo took 24 days, working around-the-clock, to manufacture and ultimately produce. It then took six days on site to construct the logo, during which time the logo design pieces were kept hidden and under cover from identified and unidentified flying objects.

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Attention illustrators and designers - if you need to promote yourself and your illustration skills (and make a few extra dollars as well), why not give Threadless a try? What is Threadless? Threadless was created by a couple of guys called “the Jakes” under their DBA Skinny Corp. to give designers and artists an opportunity to unleash a little creativity and display it to the masses. Anyone can visit the site, download their templates and submit a t-shirt design. Then, the designs are voted on. The winning designers receive $2,000 in cash and prizes, huge amounts of notoriety and their design printed and sold on a tee.

Since they launched the site, Skinny Corp has received over 60,000 tee shirt design submissions. It’s been a great way for designers and illustrators to get their name out there. Over 300 winning designs have been printed and sold so far, with 6 new ones coming out every week.

The site features interviews with some of their designers, some who’ve won only a few times, while one guy from Louisianna has won over 13 times. (That’s a hefty chunk of cash and prizes) Plus, it worked into a job for this particular guy - and now he works at Threadless.

One of their winners, S. Bradley Askew when asked if he thinks Threadless helps designers:

Honestly, its one of the best things in the design community right now. Some of publicity T receives helps catapult designers who get featured in magazines like ‘GQ.’ PR like that is great and to tell clients you had work featured in publications like that, that wasn’t some sort of paid advertisement, it’s golden.

So if you’ve ever had a good idea for a t-shirt design - design it, enter it. There could be some recognition as well as a little cash in your future. (Heck, I’ll give it a try and post my design - wish me luck!)

So I blogged about Donuts the other day on my Tweet Sweet blog. Heaven knows that I love donuts. Thank goodness for a fellow employee that brings them into my work every-other Friday (You rock Joe!).

In the blog post, I mentioned Glazies, a donut location paired with several Hogi Yogi/Teriyaki Stix food locations. The eating locations (Hogi Yogi is all about Sandwiches and Yogurt, Teriyaki Stix serves rice bowls) are franchised by Hyats, LLC. To become a franchisee, the cost is about 300K which is pretty typical for a shop like this. The Hogi Yogi headquarters are located in the Riverwood’s area of Provo, Utah located in a nice brick building above a large Hogi Yogi/Teriyaki Stix location. When trying to find a link for Glazies (which doesn’t exist) I headed over to their home page at HogiYogi.com and found a page that has not been updated since 2002, uses terrible outdated design and frames. (Does anyone use frames anymore?) At first I thought I had landed on the wrong page, and tried doing other searches. But THIS IS their corporate page. Here’s a company that is obviously not taking advantage of the power of the web, or doesn’t think that their online presence has much to do with their offline business.

Take a look at another franchise in the area - Cold Stone Creamery. If you visit their website, you’re greeted by an attractive site with a red background reminiscent of the wallpaper in their stores, and pictures of their yummy desserts. Not only does their website give the history of the company and franchise information, customers can also buy gift cards, sign up for their birthday club, and view tastefully photographed pictures of their desserts (notice the reflection effect that I blogged about the other day on their ice cream page).

How does your company’s website fit into your overall image, your brand? A well-designed website can:

Think about the movies you saw that you’ve seen in the past. Okay so think about Spiderman, Austin Powers, and James Bond for examples, what do they have in common?

Time’s up.

Did you know that these movies made millions of dollars even before they were ever released? How you ask? It’s called product placement. It’s when a company pays Hollywood to include their product in a movie. Companies do it all the time! James Bond introduced us to the BMW Z3 Roadster in Goldeneye (there was a huge uprising from the Austin Martin lovers at the time), Spiderman almost got trampled on by a Terminix truck, and let’s not forget the Mini Cooper in Austin Powers Goldmember. Wonder what it cost them to do this? Well, just to give you an idea, Burger King spent $15 million in MIB II just to get their products featured on the screen.

Sometimes it’s obvious, and sometimes it’s subtle, and then other times (as in a recent Wayne’s World rerun I saw on TV lately) they make fun of the fact they’re doing it. Ever seen a floating blur over people on reality shows? I assume that’d be about as opposite as you can get of product placement.

But what happens when product placement goes wrong? I got a good laugh out of a recent Yahoo news article entitled “Heroes” Lawsuit Down the Drain” where Disposal maker Emerson filed a federal lawsuit Monday (Oct 2) against NBC to prevent the network from re-airing the pilot episode of the new drama Heroes, which featured one of the title characters demonstrating her superhuman healing prowess by sticking her hand down the drain. The drain featured the company’s In-Sink-Erator product in clear view and according to the lawsuit’s claim “casts the disposer in an unsavory light, irreparably tarnishing the product” by suggesting that the appliance “will cause debilitating and severe injuries, including the loss of fingers, in the event consumers were to accidentally insert their hand into one.”

Oops, better edit that footage.

So the year was 2000 and we had just launched into a new decade (and a new millenium) without too many Y2K headaches. Remember the Y2K buzz? I remember watching the news before that New Years Night and airports around the world were nearly empty for fears that planes would start crashing into each other when the New Year started. It seems silly now, but it was big business then.

Thrust into being Self-Employed (Kinda)
This was the year I became a freelance designer full-time. It was half by choice, and half forced into it. When the company that I had helped found, Gear Media, lost a couple of its partners, (one on good terms, the other not so good) the remaining partner and I had a heart-to-heart discussion about the future of the company. We both decided that we would not keep our doors open. We had a beautiful office, a great staff, a long list of portfolio clients who’d we’ve done work for… but after some big adventures (long story) my heart was no longer in it. So that’s when I decided it was a great opportunity to go at it alone.

The Dot Com era was still heating up… and people were inventing new concepts and launching new websites all over the place. Venture Capital money was flowing like water and business plans were napkins with coffee stains. I had 6+ good years of graphic design experience under my belt, a dedicated (though small) group of freelance clients with whom I had moonlighted along the way and so I decided I would go for it.

Choosing My Brand Name
So first things first. A name. I needed a business license, a website, a brand… holy cow (a Utahnism), but what should I call myself? The names I thought of back then seem a bit silly to me now, names that were based primarily on nicknames as a child or words that I thought had a cool sound to them. But then I thought what am I selling? And then the choice was easy - Brad McCall, designer became my company name.

Creating A Logo
My logo really came as a natural extension of everything being created at once. It first started with my favorite color, and then moved with my concept with being outside the office (working outside the “cubie”, being outside the “box”) and became a simple treatment of a block of orange. I used a combination of my favorite fonts at the time - Swiss 721 and Trade Gothic Condensed. (I am still VERY fond of these fonts, so they were lasting choices for me).

My stationery identity/business system was a bit unique as well:

What made it especially unique, is I did everything on a small budget. I went to a label manufacturer and had 3,000 one color square labels printed with my logo on it. I could use regular stationery paper and envelopes for my identity and use the glossy orange sticker to give them that high-end touch. I also used the logo stickers on any folders, CD media, or other items my clients would recieve from me.

I even went so far to make my signature style to wrap gifts in white paper and put my single orange sticker on the top when giving gifts to clients and friends. The business card I designed was simple (it gang-printed with my first promo and thank you card to save money) and an odd size (square). It had my logo on the front and my URL on the back. Since I’m not a big fan of phone calls, this was a perfect solution for me. It was printed uncoated so I could write whatever contact info it needed on it for its recipient.

The final items were my promo and website, but I’ll save those for another blog. The new website design is coming soon, and I’ll post comps when they’re ready. But another note on budget - my entire start-up costs including hiring a webprogrammer, having a promo printed and mailed, creating my business identity system was less that $1,000.

Your given name as a URL
One of my good friends decided to put up his first personal website (a portfolio site) a couple months ago (Yes, he is VERY late to the game as far as that goes). Since the most obvious choice for a URL is your own name, (as a freelance graphic designer or illustrator, it IS what you’re selling isn’t it?) we went online to see if the URL for his name was available to register. We typed his first name only into a browser, adding a .com to the end and an all-black page with a few links came up, so I told him to email the owner and see if he would sell it. This worked for me with brad.com 5 years back (though I just sold the domain last year and made a good profit from it). The response was that the owner had bought it for his son, and was waiting for him to grow into it. (No isn’t that interesting?) So we tried his first and last name, it was taken by a book author with the same name. We tried shortened versions of his first name, using his middle initial, nick-names and combinations of all three. Nearly every good combination had been taken. I suggested that he use his first and last name divided by a dash. Dash domains - even if they are .com domains - seem to be slightly frowned upon in the commercial space, but search engines don’t know the difference. We’ll see what he finally decides on.

Have you Google’d your name?
Have you ever Google’d your name? Go ahead, do it right now if you haven’t. Don’t forget to put quotes around your name so it will only look for that exact name combination. Just for fun, I’ve Google’d several of my friends names and found it pretty comical when very interesting people show up who share their same John Hancock.

Why is it important to do this?
You can find what others can see about you. Where have you been mentioned before? What does a simple web search say about you? When I enter my name, I find posts that say I went for a Macromedia Flash training conference in Mountain View, CA 7 years ago. (I happened to email the teacher to tell him thanks and he quoted me and my name and employer still appears on his website.) My name also shows up in genealogy forum posts for a granny I was looking for nearly 5 years ago. But mostly my name appears in relationship to my website bradmccall.com and my freelance business as a graphic designer – I’ve been able to keep control over my brand online.

Your name online and your personal brand
Your name is an integral part of your personal brand (more posts to come about your personal brand later). Every post you leave, everything you write about online, leaves an electronic trail that can be traced back to you. Do these things reflect positively on your personal brand? Would an employer or potential client find these things positive? Especially as a freelancer, your brand is important to your livelihood – it should be carefully managed.

Several years ago I developed a method for inventing company names when I worked on the SkyDisc brand. Over the years I’ve refined it slightly, but in essence it works pretty well for creating names to be used for a technology company or product. I used this technique most recently while developing the Omniture name when it rebranded itself as an enterprise analytics provider from its previous life as MyComputer.com, a small/med business webmaster tool shop. Here’s my technique:

1. Create a Brainstorming Matrix
Create a matrix that includes the following headers: (The following examples are portions of the exercise I did while at Omniture.)

1. Industry Words (Words related to your product, service or industry
2. Web Words (If you’re web-based, this is a necessary column)
3. Prefixes
4. Suffixes
5. “Feel Words” (Words that you want people to “feel” when they think of your product or company.)

On this particular brainstorm, there was probably about 300
more “Feel” words and another 100 more or so industry words on the list.

2. Brainstorm Name Combinations
Begin brainstorming with the matrix. Combine multiple words together and add new words – search through the dictionary and the thesaurus to gather more ideas and word combinations. Be sure to look at Latin roots for words and their meanings. Remember, no name is a stupid name at this stage in the game.

3. Run a Personality Test
Once you’ve brainstormed a giant list, run what I call a “personality test” on each name. Write them down and see how they flow. Are they hard to pronounce? Hard to spell? Do they sound like your company or some kind of pharmaceutical drug?

4. Organize Favorites.
Once I’ve sorted through them and have gathered a list of potentials through the personality test, I then organize them by first, second, third, and fourth choices before I make the final presentation.

5. Run a URL Test
Begin rounding the large list down by going to the Web. Visit a “who is” directory and check all the URL’s associated with each name to see if a company already exists with this name. This is a quick pre-trademarking search. If the site is small, or looks home-grown, chances are if you love the name, you can buy the URL for the right price. Begin marking any off your list that don’t pass the URL test.

6. Run an Initial Trademark Search
Visit the Website of the United States Patent and Trademark Office to do an initial trademark search. They’ve got many different ways to search for your potential company name.

7. Consult Legal Council on Full Trademark Search
If you made it through all the previous steps, and things are still looking good, consult your legal council. Now’s the time to do the full search and then register the trademark.