The logos to the right of the poster show the brand architecture that was implemented across their ads and materials. I have gotten a hold of their brand manual, which I cannot share since it is confidential. But what from what I can see it is labeled “interim” which might mean we will see more redesign in the future. And I must say the architecture and guidelines in implementing the brand was pretty tight. Hats off to Bonsey Design for the good work.

Notice the color combinations of the logos, they are always matched with the official SMART color. The brand manual even goes to the extent of naming the colors of the gradient used for each of the sub-brand, including the icons that are watermarked in the background: circular swirls for Smart Gold, talk bubble for Smart Buddy, the peso sign for Smart Money, mouse arrow pointer for Smart Bro. Below is another implementation of the same logos:

SMART Communications Inc. is, arguably, the top mobile network operator in the Philippines boasting of over 25 million subscribers.  I have written about the recent rebranding of their competitor Globe. Could this be their answer back?  I didn’t hear of any launch party like what Globe did, probably because it didn’t merit one.  It seemed like they just slipped this one passed us.  I only noticed the change when they had their new campaign for the launch of their SmartBro Prepaid product. (Which incidentally also had a logo redesign, see below) The new SMART logo change will not be very obvious to the untrained eye, and SMART will keep its brand equity.

Now what do I think with the redesign?  I actually think that this is an improvement from their previous logo.  The typeface change was necessary.  It makes the logo feel younger somehow, probably because the old logo really used an outdated typeface.  If you would notice the letter “A”, the slant of the inner bridge is no longer facing against the whole type, but now is slanted to the right, making it more unified with the rest.  The “rays” illuminating from the letter “M” also saw some improvements, no longer using another color plus reducing its total number.

I’m not sure if the number “rays” mean anything, but I thought they could still drop a couple of them… specially that one under the logo! Oh my, are we back in the 90s? What’s that swoosh doing there? I think that was an unnecessary “ornamentation” on their part, just additional fluff.  The base of most of the letters looks like it was taken from the old font, just narrowed down a bit and fixed here and there… although the “S” seems to be out of place.  I agree that the old “S” should be changed, but they could’ve used a better one… just feels a little sloppy.

Even with my negative remarks, I think it was a good logo redesign and will not alienate their millions of subscribers.  I’m also happy that these big companies are seeing the value of good branding and design.

But okay, I’m not writing about the other brands, but I’m writing about Globe. After that SMS from my friend I quickly went to their website to see if they changed it… and it did. I hate to tell you how unprofessional my response was, but I replied back, “first impression: mm… yikes!” More after the jump…

As a backgrounder, Globe did need a rebrand. In my mind they were the first provider of GSM here, but in a good number years SMART has been the leader in providing mobile services with 25 million subscribers and contributing a significant amount of 1 billion text messages being sent in the Philippines a day!

Globe’s brand impression, to me and some of my friends at least, is that it is the elitist mobile provider versus SMART’s “pang-masa” (mass market) appeal. This morning I opened the newspaper and saw 6 page sequential ad printed on book paper versus the normal newsprint. The ad goes like this:

“More than just calls and text messages, we’re about thoughts and feelings. And ideas in all their shapes and sizes. More than just building your business, we’re about creating partnerships for your future. Sino man ang nais mong kausapin… (whom ever you want to speak with) Anuman ang gusto mong iparating… (whatever you want send) Hangga’t nariyan ang Globe, Abot mo ang mundo.. (whenever Globe is there, you can reach the world)..”

That whole quote is broken down into 6 pages, with each page showing people holding a blue sphere with each of the icons inside them. In the end spread all the icons converge inside one sphere thus completing the Globe logo. “This is Globe life” according to my friend. Typing the campaign words brings a smile to my face… rebrandings should always be done this way. Giving an idea of the spirit of their brand and maybe an insight as to what they were thinking when redesigning their logo.

I showed the logo to my friend and fellow designer while I was talking to him over skype. His first reaction was exactly the same as mine: “yikes! ang pangit.” I guess the logo takes time getting used to. I thought that they tried to do a Unilever. Which is a very risky proposition if you ask me. It worked for Unilever, having so many icons that form a U, because they have such a diverse number of products in their portfolio. Globe cannot claim to have so many products, they are really just in fixed and mobile telecom. The icon seems to not scale well and maybe even doesn’t work well in black and white. But on the upside, it does look very “up and now”, following the lead of UPS and AT&T. It almost looks like a Japanese or Koren brand. Question is though if it sacrificed timelessness for trendiness?

The Globe rebrand was done by an foreign company, so that they can keep the rebranding a secret until the launch. They had also changed the typeface of Globe from Gill Sans to a friendlier, softer typeface. Thus projecting a renewed spirit and vibrancy. My friend tells me that there will be a new billboard up, I’m guessing it will be in the most prominent area in the metro: EDSA. In the end, no matter how bad the logo may be, if enough campaigns and repetition is poured into building it and stamping it in the minds of the consumers, it may still succeed.

So.. I guess first thing you might be wondering about is if the phone SIM works in Manila.. or if I replaced the SIM with a local one. The answer is NO and NO and damn I wish it did. So how did I activate it? I didn’t. The first time you open the iPhone there is a “welcome message” that says “Please Activate by connecting to your iTunes.” Of course I didn’t do that but instead connected it to my mac and ran some de-activation script. The iPhone gets an error message about the SIM every time you turn it on (not from sleep but from complete shut down). But after that it was smooth sailing. I was able to load up my tunes and videos and connect it to any WiFi network. So yes, my experience with it is really just as a glorified iPod Video with email and browsing capabilities.

Using WiFi was great. It had access to the built in Google Maps app allowing me to browse through the maps just like you would in the browser version. Except this was built for the iPhone and there are some custom buttons and interface elements. But I think Apple did a great job in choosing Google Maps as one of the first apps on the phone. It just looks great specially when you are using the satellite images. The screen resolution of this thing is impeccable. As my friend said, “not a pixel can be noticed.” Yup, its almost like looking at glossy paper… at 160dpi.. that baby is 10dpi better than broadsheet newsprints.

I passed it around the office for everyone to get a feel of the iPhone. People were taking photos with it like it was Brad Pitt or someone famous. I don’t blame them, it’s not everyday you see a gadget like this… not yet at least. I hear that Apple is looking at asia after europe hopefully it will arrive here in a year’s time or so. I also hear that only one carrier will be providing it in the Philippines.. and that they are bidding for rights to this already.

So what does it feel like holding one of these babies? Personally I find it too wide to fit my palm. An understandable compromise since they wanted it to have a big enough screen. But what people notice is that its actually thinner than it looks in photos. I agree, when I put it in the front pocket of my pants along with my other mobile phones I barely notice it. My Nokia N80 is so much fatter.

The photo above shows the iPhone side-by-side my Nokia N80, my iPod nano (1st Generation) and my wife’s Nokia 6300. From the photo you can see that the iPhone is the widest and tallest gadget of the bunch. But it’s almost as thin as the 6300 if not just as thin. This makes me curious about the rumored iPhone nano. It might have the same form factor as the 6300… making it just right for calls and music, but not for browsing and video.

I still really think that the iPhone is a bit too tall and too wide. It really is close to impossible typing with one hand, as most of us are used to when typing SMS. Plus, trying to go from the “home” button to the top of the screen takes quite an effort with one hand.

But my experience with it isn’t about SMS, but about browsing. And this is where the iPhone excels. It has a built-in full featured Safari browser. So no transcoding of websites similar to what Opera mini does. It still isn’t as big as your monitor so you have to zoom in and pan to read some of your favorite sites. But some sites are actually creating iPhone specific pages that work perfectly with the 320×480 screen resolution (portrait). And this is what Apple proposed developers to do when it was released, built your apps using the Safari browser. Which was a bit of a let down since it means you have to be online to use any of these 3rd party apps.

The site above is digg.com’s iPhone version. I was pleasantly surprised to see how the dropdown list used the iPhone’s interface, complete with sounds. If you go to the digg iPhone site using your desktop browser it will look like any dropdown list, so I guess it is Safari calling this behavior. This gets me excited at the prospect of designing sites fitted to iPhone.

There are so much things to talk about but I think this post has been a bit too long already. But before I go, I wanted to show you guys one last thing.. the photo above was taken by the iPhone’s 2 megapixel camera… in full resolution (I didn’t downgrade the image, just cropped it, so it might actually take long to load) It is actually decent looking, although it is a bit grainy. Yup that’s the iPhone box behind my 12-inch Powerbook.

The product seems to be Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s multi-touch iPhone, albeit a big clunky delayed copy one.  MS can debate though that multi-touch has been around for quite some time that no one really owns the IP to it.  I wonder if Jeff Han’s product influenced this one?

But I do like some of the scenarios they have on their website.  One of which shows users physical gadgets to sync seamlessly with Surface and share content with other gadgets. This reminds me of what Tom Stovicek’s (IDII classmate) Thesis that explores this possibility of sharing content of devices and networks.  Maybe that’s why he is in MS now? :)

Here are the 3 covers of time magazine as seen in the US, Europe, and Asia. I quickly browsed through our version and saw it wasn’t far from the spreads posted in Pentagram’s entries. I’ll have to get a copy to look at it more closely.

Thanks to the Geek for the sighting. Here is a link to an MSN article about it.

I assume that reinvigorate needed some buzz about their product which is why they invited me and they won’t mind me posting some screenshots of their interface. So after using it for a couple of weeks, here are my “first impressions.” I’ll try not to compare this with the slew of other tracking systems I’ve used.

All your metrics in one place. Reinvigorate allows you to track multiple sites. You can make your own categories or groupings. This is great, no more going to different URLs to fetch for each of your sites.

Mmmm.. graphs galore. If you are into information graphics, you’ll like the eye candy of these graphs. I am one of those junkies, but I still find some of them too abstract or sometimes too meaningless. But I haven’t been using the site that long, maybe these graphs may come in handy someday when my site has a billion hits and earning me thousands of dollars! Haha.

Lots of choices… lots to click. Gosh it does get too overwhelming at times when I just want to see how many people visited this week. There is an overview page, but it shows only active visitors and active pages. Good if you’re site is frequented by thousands a second. Bad if when you look at it all you see are Zeros! I would’ve wanted an option to customize my overview page.

Maps and Timezones. I love how they rendered the map and the timezone but I still feel there is room for some improvement in terms of what information it shows. By looking at a map, I want to know which country views my sites the most and how many people from that country visited at a certain period of time.

Referred Visitors. This is one feature I got pleasantly surprised with. I like how it shows where visitors come from along with the summary of their browsers and systems. As you can see here there are exactly 1 return visitors from my other site (noeluvia.com) Yes 1 is a sad number to see.. specially beside that zero!
Reinvigorate comes at a good time for me as my current analytics software (mint) just had an upgrade and I am not yet willing to shell out another $19 for it when I had just bought a $30 license last December.  There is no indication in the site if this is going to be a paid service or free one (oh please let it be free.. or let someone buy them to keep it free)

My wife showed me that BPI has finally redesigned their site. BPI is one of the local sites we use the most since we do most of transactions online like payment of bills and transfering funds. We were very frustrated the first time we went to the site a couple of years back. They did not have support for non-IE browsers, we were already using Firefox at that time. What ticked me off was the only reason it didn’t support Firefox was because they opted to use an IE only “drop-down navigation” system. I didn’t think it was a critical feature to alienate non-IE browsers. In time they added support for other browsers but still kept the design the same.

I’ve been wanting to do a redesign to their site and post it somewhere their people might see, and maybe eventually pay me for it. But I guess I was too late since they have their new site up and all and all its a good redesign. Great way to start the year. :)

What I like about their redesign:
This was a real step forward for BPI, the overall feel of the site is lighter and more user-friendly. There is some grid/structure to their layout. There is a clear separation of their different brands, but they keep their overall BPI brand. For example their “express online” brand has a different logo than their home site “BPI”, but you know that you are not in a different site all together.

What I don’t like about their redesign:
What? is that an i-frame I see? That doesn’t really help their usability. Their links within the page doesn’t work in firefox. And most of their links click to open a new tab/window. How come? The log-in page to their consumer banking area looks great and well balanced. But once logged in, you get the same page as before, except for the navigation area. And I think they are still using frames for that. I guess I can forgive them for the consumer banking part. It must take a lot of work to revamp that back-end heavy site.