We at Zane Benefits recently changed our entire branding.  From colors to logos to fonts to images, everything is new.  Companies do this all the time as a way to change their image, but that's actually not the original reason I came up with all the new branding.

Our old logo was sort of boring, as were the colors, but they weren't so boring that I really minded.  Only one thing bothered me and that was the logo font which was a traditional serif font.  Everything else on our site was, and always had been sans-serif and I really wanted to get the logo consistent.  I understand that having a different style of font for the logo is a good look sometimes, but this wasn't one of those times.

So I just made the change.  Same logo and everything, but a new font.  It seemed like a pretty minor change so I didn't even give it a second though.  Well, as soon as everyone else at Zane Benefits saw it, they hated it.  No one liked it.  Several different people couldn't even tell me what had changed but they knew something was wrong and it bothered them.

The problem wasn't that the logo was any worse.  The problem was that the logo was so similar to the old one that people weren't capable of judging it on its own.  I'm 100% sure that new visitors to the site would have responded positively to the sans-serif font, but there was no way to convince the Zane employees that were used to it looking a certain way for the past two years.

So I completely redesigned it.  It's radically different now.  While I was at it, I changed our entire brand.  Overall it's a huge improvement (in my opinion) but I think it's really funny that the reason all those changes came about was that I realized no one would let me make a minor change.  By showing everyone a completely new look and feel, I put them in a frame of mind where they were judging the design based on its merits rather than comparing it to what they were used to.

We all know how resistant people are to change.

So I guess the moral of the story is that you sometimes need to make major changes in order to push through something that should have been very simple.  If someone loves a certain brand of pizza, you're probably better off cooking some other dish for them instead of cooking them your style of pizza.  They won't be able to help comparing your version to one that they are already very fond of.

Why hello there.  As a way to get some graphic design practice, I've decided to start building an icon library.  

What's an icon library?  Well, Most web developers (including yours truly) need a lot of stock icons at their disposal so that they can rapidly develop new sites without having to draw out every single component.  These can also be helpful when making Powerpoint presentations, videos, etc.

So yeah, I'm going to try building one.  There are a ton of these out there so this is more for practice than anything, but I'm still interested in making things people might use.  If you have any need for designs, let me know and I'll give it my best shot.

The image you see above is my first crack at making a few people icons.  I'm going to try some different styles to figure out what the overall feel should be for this library.  I'll be asking for feedback as I go.

In case you're curious, unless I state otherwise, all graphics I add to the icon library are drawn completely from scratch using Fireworks.

Designing websites is a lot harder than it seems.  Most companies have a million things they want to tell visitors and there's only room for a few different items on each page.  Hopefully the few things that you pick to put on your homepage are interesting enough that the visitors click through and read more pages so that you can tell more of your story.

There's no right or wrong way to handle a landing page (the first page users see) but there's one principle that I think should always hold true:

Your existing customers are more important than your non-existing ones

From a business point of view, this is might not be true, but it's something that businesses should convey to all their visitors.  Even if I'm not a current customer, I'm more likely to trust your company if I see that you're focused on taking care of the people that got you where you are.

At work we were writing the phone tree that people navigate through to get to sales, account management, etc..  The decision we had to make was between making sales easier by making that the first item on the tree (press 1 to talk to a sales person) or if customer service should be first to reward our existing customers.  The answer was obvious.  Not only are our existing customers more important, but anyone calling for sales would want to hear that we give a priority to customer service above sales.

One main way that companies fail to cater to existing customers is by making their landing page completely sales oriented without making it obvious what existing users can do to access their accounts.

Credit Karma is a site that gets me with this all the time.  Sure they have a "login" link at the top, but every time I go to the site, it's to check my credit score (Why else would I go there?) and there's a huge yellow button saying "Get Your Free Credit Score".  Of course I click that button.  This of course takes me to a signup screen rather than a login screen.

When you go to gmail.com, you see a login area with a link to create a new account.  It would be pretty annoying if every time you wanted to check your email you had to click through a bright flashy screen that ignored the fact that you might already have an account.

I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking, "Tyler, you're really nitpicking here and this is a dumb argument."  Ok, I am nitpicking.  Of course companies want there websites to be sales tools, but I think this mindset infiltrates other more important aspects of how a company does business.  They lose focus of who is most important: Me.

A number of the design blogs that I read talk about typography a lot.  This is a field that I'm a complete novice in, but I feel like I need to start working on it because it's one of the main things holding back my graphic design abilities.

I'm slowly learning about font types, sizes and styles, but I'm not ready to write a post about anything too interesting.

What I can write a post about is a common problem with typography decisions.  The problem occurs when people don't define their priorities.  If you don't know what elements on a page should be the focus, you'll end up trying to make everything the focus which is a mess.

My dad has a Deep Purple cd with a section where they're doing a sound check and someone says something to the effect of, "Everyone turn up louder than everyone else."  This is exactly what happens with text and typography in a lot of design.

For an example, look at the text from this new Dos Equis ad campaign.  Maybe I'm a nerd, but the first time I saw these commercials, I was incredibly distracted by the lack of focus.  Every single word is either in all caps, or italicized.  Even worse is that there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to why a word is formatted the way it is.  I guess the important words are in all caps and the less important ones are italicized, but then how do you explain the main catch phrase:

"STAY THIRSTY, my friends"

It just doesn't make sense to me.  Italics and all caps are meant to emphasize certain words.  You can't emphasize every single word on a page.  You can't make everything bold.

The new Zane Benefits corporate page that I talked about earlier this week shows my attempt at emphasizing the important words.  I used italics on the words "solve" and "Health Benefits" because the main thing this page is trying to convey is that we offer a health benefits solution.  If I had italicized, bolded, underlined and used all caps randomly throughout the page, that would make the important parts blend in with everything else.

I'm not trying to say that I did an amazing job with the typography on this page.  Everything except for the logo is a relatively plain Arial font and I really don't know enough theory to do anything interesting.  I'd rather not be interesting enough than be too interesting (like Dos Equis).

Stay tuned for some real typography posts (hopefully)

I don't want to get in the habit of using this blog to give updates on my life.  After all, I have at least 5 readers and since only 2 of them are my parents, I'd be alienating three fifths of my reader base.  Today is a little different though.

This afternoon we officially launched the new Zane Benefits corporate page.  This site uses the new logo, color scheme and design that I came up with (with tons of feedback and suggestions from friends and co-workers).  Last Friday we launched a new reseller section using the same design.

We still have several live sites that are using a hybrid of old design and new design (old colors, new logo for example), but those will change over the next couple of months to use this new look and feel.

We also officially settled on some new business card designs today.  Basically, between Friday and this afternoon the company completely re-branded itself.  This is pretty exciting for me because this is the first time I've been involved in every aspect of this process and I'm really happy with the way things turned out.

I mentioned a couple days ago how I don't like planning too far ahead which means that this site is still a work in progress.  I'd love to hear what you guys think about it (I can handle a little criticism)  Also, for those of you interested in Zane Benefits (Tom), check out the new reseller section.

Ok, sorry about not having a point to this post.  I'll try to keep posts like this few and far between.