Lost, sick, confused and in a foreign land: Iconography can be so important when you need to find information.

The work Go East did on the United Family Medicine identity/mark was an excellent example of personal experience aiding a designer’s creativity. Living in Norway for three months, working and wandering, helped me understand that good design can lead you to the help you need. When the language is foreign and the surroundings are unfamiliar, you rely on recognizable images to find what you need. I knew some of the language, but icons and marks helped the most.

As a team, we approached the United Family Medicine brand mark from quite a few directions (see the top of the blog), which ultimately helped our clients on their journey to a new identity. In our concepts, we strove to use universally recognized images since UFM is a community clinic located in Saint Paul and serves a culturally and economically diverse community. 

To reinforce UFMs values, we wanted to see one person caring/teaching another. UFM also wanted to reference the new clinic’s location, which is near the Mississippi. To reinforce name recall we wanted to keep a “U” shape.

We researched sans-serif fonts for a welcoming feel, but chose to marry the icon with a serif font to give the clinic a strong professional stature.

In the end, the mark with the two figures forging a river made it to the final three and, with multiple refinements, was chosen. The new mark has been well recieved but, as a designer, the real reward would be to know that someone found the help they needed in a time of stress and uncertainty.

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Ty Pennington has selected Post-it® Notes designed by Go East for his “Decor Picks” in Ty Pennington at Home Magazine.

The notes are part of the 2009 Post-it® Specialty Notes EcoSmart collection, designer notes created in a palette of earthy brights and neutrals.

Go East has been designing Specialty Notes for about five years. Inspiring, quirky and pretty, the notes are a cornerstone of our product design practice area and we produce one or two collections a year.

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Last year during the holidays, social media sites like Facebook experienced huge bumps in traffic. People are off work, away from home, and are — sometimes — bored. So they head to social networks. According to Mashable, last year during Christmas, social networking sites saw huge surges in traffic. On Christmas Day 2008, Twitter saw 35 tweets per minute, You Tube saw 600,000 videos tagged “Christmas,” and (according to Google) over 60,000,000 blog posts mentioned Christmas.

So what’s a good social media plan to get in front of all those eyeballs? At Go East, we are looking at the three most obvious places to make your mark this holiday.

Social Media Holiday Plan, 2009

1. Get your hashtags ready and tweet this holiday season. It will be important to get your brand out there by offering holiday specials or expressions of good will. Twitter is great for trending what people will want for Christmas, as well as seeing who is already out there tweeting about their holiday offerings.

2. People will connect on Facebook over the holidays. That’s just a fact. Long-distance family and friends will go there first to find out who did what and who got what over Christmas break. It makes sense for brands to be there. How can brands successfully integrate on FB? Right now, it is up for grabs. A quick search shows 500 Christmas applications on FB, none of which are all that compelling. However, Coca Cola already has over 58,000 fans on its Christmas advert page. That’s a wide open field of opportunities for the next “elf yourself,” and FB is the place for people to have fun with your brand this holiday.

3. Flickr now offers sponsored groups. Some, like Kodak’s “What’s our story?” group, make an obvious photography connection. Others, like the “Western Union Yes!”, start to meld social sharing and cause marketing. Now things are starting to get interesting! Imagine the possibilities for images and brands that visually bring the holidays to life. Asking group members to show how they use a product during the holidays, with the most “favorited” photo winning, is an obvious way to connect with Flickr’s users.

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With summer winding down, merchandisers are beginning to focus their efforts on the two top retail seasons that lie ahead — Halloween and “the holidays.” Because consumers are inundated with many retail options during this time period, it is essential that you optimize your in-store brand presence. But this can be tricky: a retailer may require you to adhere to its seasonal brand guidelines during these times periods. So how can you make that work to your advantage?

A few things can work in your brand’s favor during this busy time of year. Retailers’ seasonal events are starting earlier than ever, allowing more time for seasonal promotions. An early start also provides consumers with gift and decorating ideas weeks or months in advance, thus planting seeds for when they are ready to make their purchases. Both of these can work to your benefit: your brand will be in stores longer, gaining more visibility and awareness. This can be key to success during this season, especially when the channel’s seasonal and/or permanent graphics take precedence over your brand.

As we have learned at Go East, as you work with a channel over time, you will be able to gauge how strictly you need to follow the channel’s guidelines. However, clear, concise merchandising efforts year-round will help to ensure that consumers recognize your brand whatever the season, but especially during the busiest times. And if you develop your seasonal merchandising campaigns early in the season, you will be able to hit the shelves as strongly as possible. As a result, you’ll likely be top of mind over other brands that didn’t join the effort as quickly.

What are some key factors you deem important when creating artwork for seasonal periods of the year?

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Many of us spend a good portion of our discretionary dollars celebrating the holidays. The Christmas season, particularly, is filled with items specially designed, by people like me, to prompt your impulse to purchase a little something new for the holidays.

Buying something new is a holiday tradition that draws upon fond memories of Christmas fairs, window displays, fanciful dioramas and visiting the department store or mall to see Santa. Picking up a little something special for this Christmas is one of life’s little pleasures.

As designers, we take into account contemporary design and holiday trends, visual nostalgia hooks and our own memories when creating new products for the season. Whether we are creating point-of-sale or impulse purchases, designing specifically for the holidays has its own special set of demands. The temptation to resort to clichés is strong. Clients often ask us to clearly communicate Christmas without religious imagery. Creating new characterizations of familiar holiday figures without overstepping copyrights is a constant concern.

At Go East, we try to create new takes on the holidays. Creating contemporary, fresh imagery and new ways of saying “Happy Holidays” are key to the success of a holiday design. When we worked with Amy Cartwright on the holiday illustrations for Post-it® Notes, we sought someone with a fresh style that would be a perfect match for the brand. The topics are nostalgic — Santa, Snowman, Penguin — but the style is fun and functional.

My recommendations for holiday designs:

1. Embrace the traditions but push the design. While we celebrate the holidays in the present, the past is always top-of-mind, and the designer needs to take both into consideration. How can you recreate the North Pole? What’s a new way to say “Happy Holidays?” I like to mash up new trends and old celebrations, so I imagine a lot of Twitter tags on presents, Facebook holiday cards and “Bing” White Christmas take-offs.
2. Red and green have been done. Use other colors for a Christmas design that really say “21st-Century celebration.”
3. Know your audiences’ tolerance for “Christmas” versus “holidays.”  Some audiences are OK with Christmas trees; some want you to stick to snowflakes. The retail channel will have a lot of influence here and it is best to communicate any limitations early on in the project.
4. This season, it really is the little things that will count. Whether the gift item is small, the wrapping paper is more minimal or the cards are homemade (or just look that way), look to the small to say something big. From a design perspective that means simple by design, which is a Go East design principle. However, this season it’s more meaningful than ever — and isn’t that what everyone is looking for anyway?

What is your plan to socialize your brand this holiday season? Where will you be and what do you think your customers what to see? Let me know and I’ll friend/follow/group/contact/yelp/link-in you and see what you’ve come up with. I’ll be keeping tabs this holiday season and report back with my favorites at the end of the year.

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Designing for an upcoming season, whether it’s the holidays, back-to-school, a particular sport’s season or any other season, is a little tricky and sometimes nerve-racking. The cool thing about designers, though, is that we have the power to determine how the future looks.

Figuring out what the upcoming season will look like is a combination of observing the past, then combining or modifying those ideas and concepts, given current and other  forecasted trends. Back in 2008 you may have thought it was strange to see mushrooms on that back-to-school header, but in 2009, you’ve seen them everywhere; those mushrooms are hot, hot, hot! (In furniture design, too!)

Businesses spend millions — probably billions — of dollars and countless hours researching and forecasting trends. At Go East, we take that information, put it in the context of a client’s brand and let the two bounce around in our heads for awhile before creating our concepts.

The process should start as early as possible: six months to a year before the targeted season. We want an early start so that we have time to research what’s going to be “hot,” develop our concepts and have time to execute them well before they’re needed. I’ll admit that it is little strange going to work in June humming carols and dreaming of sugarplums when it’s 90 degrees outside, but it’s worth it in the end.

Remember, design is a process that takes time, sometimes more than you might think. In the meantime, take a break from the present and see what’s happening in the future at these sites:

• Trendcentral
• Smallbiztrends
• Trendwatching
• Google Zeitgeist
• Yahoo Buzz Index

What current trends are you crazy about? Which ones could you do without?

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Tilt-shift is a photo manipulation technique that makes a real scene look like a miniature reproduction. I found a large collection of tilt-shift photos on Flicker and was happy to see how many ways photographers are using the technique. I love a good optical illusion, and this one really helps us see our everyday world in a new way.

I really liked this example by Kenneth Hynek. The bridge could easily pass for someone’s model train set, yet the amount of detail makes one realize, “Hey this is real.” Given the large array of photography out there today, it is nice to imagine all the optical techniques available that, like tilt-shift, help us look a little more closely at a shot.

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Perusing this year’s photography trends, there’s nothing to shock or delight: The woman is the hero, the product is the hero, green is the hero, the almighty buck is the hero and … the hero is the hero. It’s about what you’d expect in — yes, I’m going to say it — this economy.

1. Microstock Photography. Driven by a need for affordable, royalty-free stock photography for Web use, many brands are choosing microstock over other royalty-free and rights-managed stock photography agencies. Major stock houses are marketing photos at lower, affordable prices in hopes that designers will become enamored with the quality and move up to more expensive photos. But beware; chances are that direct competitors may be using the same image you just bought for the low, low price of $1.

2. Belief, Spiritual Heroism and Sanctuary. As outlined in this Getty Images report, the testimonial trend in portraiture is shifting to accommodate ideas around “belief,” “spiritual heroism” and “sanctuary.” Consumers are hoping to obtain a sense of control in an age of information overload.

3. Women Subjects. A different Getty Images analysis reveals that 36 percent of all advertising tear sheets picture individual women, compared to only 5 percent that picture individual men. This makes sense; women buy for themselves, their partners and their family. Additionally, women are beginning to revolutionize the image space in advertising, particularly in business imagery as companies start to develop leadership models based around female values.

4. Green. From bugs to trees, lifestyle to industry, “green” will become the default position for clients and advertisers. The trick here is not to make photography choices that are too cliché.

5. Packaging: Show, Don’t Tell. Much packaging sitting on store shelves is loaded with bullet points, copy bursts and lists of features and benefits, all of which ends up confusing the customer. Let simple, eye-catching photography show the consumer what’s in the package and, if possible, the product’s benefits. Designers can achieve this by depicting a solitary, sharply focused product on a white or colored background or by using a shot that evokes a mood or feeling about the product and that illustrates the benefit to the consumer.

Photo courtesy of Getty Images

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