Persona

Posted at: 1:40 PM by Mark

As a designer, I find nothing more frustrating than seeing a strong brand I've helped to create slowly get pulled apart or watered down over time by poor application of all-important brand guidelines or outside members of staff with no creative nous. Logo's sitting in curious places on hideous backgrounds; typefaces you'd expect to see in a nursery; and entire pieces of "design" that bear no resemblance to the rest of a brand or its visual style are heart-sinking examples that I occasionally come across.

The need to involve your professional marketing agency when it comes to developing further brand assets and educating staff about the importance of adhering to the guidelines they have taken time to develop is an important process. Consistency and quality are key in retaining brand loyalty (from a visual point of view at least) and should be of paramount importance for a company who have wisely spent time and resources in developing a strong brand.

That's why I'm pleased to say that this month we've been working hard with our clients 'Growth Investment' and 'Ingenuity' to roll out assets that maintain their brand momentum as well as their integrity.

Having successfully launched their brand with the help of Persona from the very beginning, Ingenuity (a University of Nottingham initiative) has gone from strength to strength, enabling a growing network of business people, academics and public sector organisations to address "burning, real life, business questions". In October, the Ingenuity Programme will been launched, a new development bringing together The University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University and The University of Derby to offer a range of activities and opportunities designed to help local businesses access knowledge and resources. To accompany this launch, the client has asked Persona to help them publicise this new development.

With the intention of extending the Ingenuity brand having been considered at the initial design phase, the framework was already set in place for such a time as this, and so the process for creating the relevant event literature has been both seamless and enjoyable from both Persona's and the clients' point of view - the result being two pieces of printed literature that successfully extend the strong Ingenuity brand, reaching a new audience.

In a similar vein, the Growth Investment rebrand has been very successful for the organisation and the client has been keen to ensure the brand assets are used correctly just as much as we have. Close communication in developing artwork for literature, editorial spreads, web pages and this month a set of exhibition banners has meant that the brand visual style has been impeccably maintained. Take a look at one of the banners below.

Both Growth Investment and Ingenuity are benefiting from a good working relationship with their marketing agency, understanding the need to nurture and protect their brands to retain quality and loyalty. As a designer, I can only applaud this attitude and hope that more like them will realise the importance of good design, not forgetting that like anything else, you pay for what you get.

Labels: branding, creative, growth investment, identity, ingenuity

Posted at: 9:10 AM by Marianna

While finishing the first draft of a website's project wireframes; I noticed that one of the pages that troubled me most was the "Thank you" page. This wireframe can be just designed as a plain page with a simple "Thank you message" being polite to the user after accomplishing a purchase or an action.

On the other hand this page can be a lot more than that and I believe it should be designed with a lot of attention to detail:

• This page could have effective calls to action so as to bring the users back again to your website instead of saying goodbye to them and lead them to navigate away. If the message is "Thank you for purchasing a product", this page can be a great opportunity to advertise more products. Statistics have proven that a big percentage of consumers (39%) continue to purchase another product if they are prompted in the "thank you page".
• This page can also show some authority of your website by reminding the user that his card details were securely used. Furthermore it can inform the user that the details of the purchase will be send to him through an e-mail.
• This page can provide a signature or a photo making your website more personal for the user. As a result a trustworthy relationship will develop between your website and the user (Alexandria K. Brown).
• It is important to provide the customer with instructions in case something goes wrong with the purchase or if he requires any other help.
• Last but certainly not least, you should provide a path for the users to exit the "Thank you page" without having to close the web browser or navigating away from your website.

I am sure there are other reasons why we should carefully design "Thank you" pages for websites. I am looking forward to hearing your ideas too.

Good examples of "Thank you" pages:

Picture 1. "Adobe" website "thank you" message after downloading free trial software.

Picture 2: "East Midlands Trains" website "thank you" page after completing a form to receive ticket offers information.

Labels: experience, ia, theory, website, wireframes

Posted at: 9:03 AM by Hammad

We all have a love-hate relationship with IT and it's no different at Persona. Recently we've been victim of a few growing pains and so we're taking steps to ease the pain. In fact, we're not just going to ease it, we're going to flip it on its head and make it work harder for us!

Firstly, we're rolling out a new web deployment workflow, which will mean a faster, slicker and more robust process from development to staging and then live. The documentation and testing processes are also being vastly improved to give an even higher quality of output and service.

On a technical level, we're moving to Microsoft SQL Server 2008, upgrading our version control system to the latest Microsoft SourceSafe Server and integrating everything more efficiently with our Visual Studio development tools. By using integrated technologies make the most of our internal infrastructure and keep our costs low and efficiency high. That's what helps us stay commercially competitive as well as working to the best standards in the industry.

That's not all though. We're also trialling the growing emergence of 'virtualisation' technology for creating simulated production environments and also playing with Windows Server 2008. We've even been dabbling with some open-source CMS platforms on Java! - all part of our role to stay up to date and at the forefront of technology, so you don't have to.

Give us a ring anytime to chat about how these evolutions could benefit you.

Labels: cms, persona, servers, technical