But this wasn’t the one that got me hooked. If you go in deeper and look at the other ways they present information, you’ll find 2 other views: using your camera or using your mic. With the camera view, you can flash colors into your camera and the website reacts by showing you the same color on screen with the news inside it. Or with the audio input, you speak into the mic and it blasts out the boxes as your audio gets louder. Excellent! “I gots to hav them killa flash skillz.”

Pictured above is not the much talked about Google Chrome OS. It is, in fact, just one of the windows inside the Google Chrome browser. While browsing, I right-clicked inside the screen to reveal a menu and saw “inspect element.”

When the announcement of Google Chrome OS came out, it did cross my mind on how it would look. So far I like the implementation of the browser and as you can see it does look more like a Mac OS interface rather than a Windows one which it is running on. Yey!

It’s flattering to see people wearing your design. Even though it was a gift, I saw that the people genuinely liked the shirts that we handed out to them. Although I was just limited by 3 colors, I had the freedom of designing what the shirt would look like. I made the logo of Novare act like a sports brand and did my liberties with the circles and lines.

Pattie Maes of MIT Media Lab Fluid interfaces presented a demo of their Sixth Sense project at TED recently.  The project is about bringing more information about anything at your fingertips, literary.  

‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

Pranav Mistry, who is spearheding this project, is shown during the demo with a camera/projector necklace which captures images that your fingers point to then projects more information about that image.  For example, when you are at a grocery, while deciding which product to buy, you hold up that detergent then your necklace gets information from the web and projects it into the box.  Now you know if the detergent is really as environment friendly as they say it is.  Although it is slightly clunky (you wouldn’t catch me wearing colored rings at the ends of my fingetips) the concept is very solid and very likely to succeed.  I hope to see this in the market in a couple of years.

My concept was simple but I thought was solid: There were 2 landmark spots and I thought that they should work to support one another.  My concept was to make icons out of the Philippine flag.  The result was the 3 stars of the flag will be on the smaller landmark, while the Sun will occupy the bigger one.  I had submitted an elaborate essay on the materials, the idea, even the interaction of the landmark.Time passed and the promised date to announce the finalists have passed.  I thought, I didn’t get in the top 10 which is why they didn’t contact me.  Below is the model I submitted.  I used SketchUp to draw the model.
 

A month after the deadline, I got an email saying I was part of the top 10, but only on the bigger landmark part.  I guess this was the start of the breaking of my concept.  Alone, one landmark might look weak.  Still, I was happy to get in the top 10.  Now all I had to do was to come up with a scale model in 2 weeks! It was an exciting time, I worked with my uncle who is also an architect, he referred my to a scale model maker.  They said it would be hard to do, but it is possible.  Below was the result:

I was very happy with it.  I could already see its 8 storey granduer glowing from a distance as people drive to the airport.  I told myself, this is what great artists, designers, architects do.  This will immortalize my name.  I shall build my design empire with this iconic work.  I shall be the next great national artist.I was sure that I would win.  Family, friends and colleagues were also giving me confidence that I would.  But alas, I did not. Today, an awarding ceremony will be held in the airport.  I was invited, but I won’t attend, not because I am bitter but because I have to go back to little bites of work.   So it goes, I lose but live to fight another day.  I am still looking for that day… someday.

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:

That was a mouthful.. and so is what it represents.  One of the difficulties I encountered working with Novare is trying to explain what Novare does in one sentence, or in this case, one glance.  The graph below will never see the light of day, but I still think it is worth showing.  The graph represents what Novare Technologies do, or rather what services they offer to their customers and partners.

Here is the circle in more detail.  Why a circle? I think it is appropriate since it also gives some reference to the Novare logo.  The innermost circle represents the customers of Novare.  The circles outside represent the six services of Novare, differentiated by a color.  There are overlapping circles since some of the services cover more than one customer.  For example, the yellow colored ring which says “OSS/BSS Outsourcing Solutions” can be offered to all the customer segments, where as the grey ring, “NWARE” can only be offered to “consumers & enterprises.”

To make it clearer, I added an additional explanation to the right.  This explicitly says what Novare offers to which customer segment.  I enjoyed working in this abstract / conceptual level.  I thought that it was successful in illustrating the point.  But others didn’t agree, so Novare went with another one, which I shall post someday.  So do you think it is difficult to understand?

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.