Design Sojourn | Strategic Industrial Design Blog

A warm welcome to you dear reader! If you have not already, why not subscribe to my RSS feed, or get my latest thoughts on Industrial Design in your Email Inbox for free?

Thanks for visiting and please keep in touch? ~ D.T.

Know thy enemy and know thyself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know thyself but not thy enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not thyself, wallow in defeat every time. ~ Sun Tzu

Well in our case it’s not really the enemy but our competition. From our last article, we know a little branding goes a long way. But it’s not only about differentiation, which means to be different, what we need to now is to have distinction, which means to be better. So we need to study our competitors in the web 2.0 world and their branding standards they subscribed to.

Thanks to Uniquely the epitome and The Font Shop.

This is an absolutely amazing collection of all the best web 2.0 logos out there. Well it looks like the Design Sojourn logo still needs a lot of work, or does it? At least now we have a much better idea and direction on where to go.

The big question really is to follow or not? Its seems the Web 2.0 logos today all have a similar feel and you can easily create your own if you follow this list:

1) Bevelled edges



2) “Chicklet” or rounded corners



3) Bright colours or a range of complimentary colours



4) Glossy highlights



5) Clean fonts



6) Drop shadows



7) Ground and horizon reflections



8) Gradient fills

So do you want to differentiate or have distinction, follow or innovate? I’ll leave that to you to decide.

I always though that Tom Peter’s “Brand You” idea was a great thing to do especially if you want to get ahead in today’s ultra competitive work environment. I do know the power of a brand and know what it can do for you. Thus I like to encourage you to consider branding yourself as well things you touch and activities you are involved in.

Imagine creating a good looking resume that stands out? Imagine personal name cards so interesting that it the keeps you at the top of somebody’s memory tree? Imagine creating a personal website that gives a visitor in a blink of an eye an idea of everything you stand for?

In today’s blogging environment, a blog is often viewed as an extension of yourself and thus should be branded as well. Furthermore having an atrocious MySpace layout may be acceptable for a teenager, but it’s a big no no for a professional.

So what can branding do for you?

I’m not an expert in branding, but by branding you or your blog is about creating an image that can go further and permeate into more places than you can imagine. Think karma, think soft selling, and think of what comes to your mind when I say Coke, Apple, or IBM?

As you can see “branding” yourself can go a long way. So now what exactly is a brand?

A brand in our case, modified from Wikipedia:

“A brand is a symbolic embodiment of all the information connected to you. A brand serves to create associations and expectations among products made by you. A brand often includes an explicit logo, fonts, color schemes, symbols, which are developed to represent implicit values, ideas, and even personality.”

Right so how do we do it? One good and simple way is to create a personal saying, logo or symbol and market it. To do that you need to first create a personal Mantra. Like Guys Kawasaki’s “Corporate Mantra” from his book “The Art of the Start“, you need to come up with a sentence, in less than 10 words, to describe what you are or what you do.

For example at this Design Sojourn Blog our Mantra is “How to do good design and create clever products”. Now that this is clear the next step is what is that one keyword that describes everything you do? What is brand essence of yours? Ours is simply “guiding design”.

So now we need some way to communicate this. Well in most situations you could just use the Mantra or even your brand essence as your end point. But in our case, as we are about design, we have decided to turn it into a logo.

“Guiding Design” is also really about a process and a sojourn, a journey. The design process is not only chaotic but its also has a narrowing objective of finding the right solution for your set of problems.

Also we opted not to create a symbol but settled on using just a word. This is because in reality a process is intangible and we felt no symbol could represent it best but the word itself. Thus we used the text in a chaotic freehand font that is modified to taper into an “end point”.

The logo is not perfect and I’m still working on it, but I hope this post illustrates my thinking process and helps you know how to do it. This is really because all these authors of business books tend to talk too much about the “why” but very little about the “how”.

Good Luck on your branding adventure and please do leave me your thoughts!

I’m back. Had a good afternoon of sleeping and am now feeling a lot better. The meds have cleared my sinuses and my brain! So much so that I realised that to improve my visiting experience, I need to make it easier for you, my dear reader, to get easy access to Design Sojourn content.

So if you just scan over to the right of this post you will find my new reorganised sidebar.

First off, there is my brand spanking new email subscription to get fresh Design Sojourn content directly to your inbox. Really for those of us that should not be surfing the web but reading emails! Oh, I personally promise that I will never sell, reveal, share, trade, reveal, or market your email address in any shape or form. Even at gunpoint!

However if you are still worried about spam, you can use the Orange Square RSS feed on the right as well. Click on it and save the new page formatting it as a “live book mark” or add it to your feed reader. It’s a little more complicated, but it does give you more control.

I’ve also added a list of “Design Resources” which includes the best of Design Sojourn and my most popular posts for your reading pleasure.

I hope the new jazzmatazzed sidebar does improve your visiting experience!

Ping.sg is wonderfully clever meta-blog and blog aggregator for Singaporean bloggers no matter where they are located. What’s even better is that it’s designed and implimented by a local Singaporean.

Much better in my humble opinion than Sigg or I dare say Tomorrow.sg? Well lets see, my main concern is often such services may get cluttered by spam blogs or sblogs. Currently its all automated so this could be a problem. At least the requirements to register before you can use the service should control things.

Regardless uzyn you are going into my “Links to clever people”!

Is blogging all about an online personal diary of rants about disabled toilets, your cat or how fugly a celebrity is? I believe not. I believe blogs are a great source of credible information, often bringing information to the viewer faster than traditional news channels. At work we use blogs as a source of research on the latest and greatest trends in the design world.

Fellow SGEntrepreneurs blogger Bernard Leong talks about this thorny issue, Blogging 2.0 and Citizen Journalism at The Singapore Angle.

I have been subscribing to Yaro Starak’s Blog Traffic mailing list and highly recommend it as its a fantastic read. Unlike the other gazillion sites out there on blogging, Yaro’s blog and mailing list focuses on the most important in a successful blog how to increase blog traffic.

In his latest mailer, Yaro talks about smart, effective and focused blogs. He encourages bloggers to state clearly their blog’s objective for both themselves and others. So as I’m committed to being a better blogger, I shall learn from him so here is mine. This will also go into my new “About” page.

V1 Blog started: November 09, 2005

V2 Blog started:May 25, 2005

Frequency of blog updates: 3-4 times a week.

The Design Translator (D.T.) currently lurks in Singapore. During the day D.T. is a design manager in a consumer electronics company. At night, he blogs, changes his son’s diaper, dabbles in design-entrepreneurship, practices investing, and swings from building to building righting wrongs.

The Design Sojourn blog is his story and journey that focuses on…

1) Him wondering why there is nothing much done to educate the masses about design? Thus D.T. will attempt to translate what he sees, knows and learns about Industrial Design, Design Strategy and Design Management into a language that the man on the street can understand.

2) Not only that, he realizes that there are TONS of blogs and websites that talk about design or showcasing the new new, but nothing on how the budding designer can lean to rule the world. He will attempt to do this in an easy to read, nonsensical way. Hints, tips and suggestions that a budding designer can find insightful and experienced designers find refreshing.

3) His trials and tribulations of his recent design cum social-entrepreneurship experiment the Firmwareproject.

Keep in touch and see you all online!

At least in the design of a clean layout. Further from my last blog “There must be a better way?” I’ve discovered THE minimal clean theme blog.txt by Scott Wallick that is both visually ergonomic and easy to use.

I have become a convert of the school of #fff (i.e. white)! I’m not a web designer but a product designer so I’ve decided to drop the color and graphic heavy theme of past and use this clean and minimal one. Less distractions allow more focus on the work I always say.

Together with the wordpress widget plugin you will never have to type another HTML code again. Well at least not that many.

Download blog.txt here. Do check out the barthelme theme here as well.

Thanks Scott and you are going into my “Links to clever people”!

HTML is something that I have been bitching about for the longest time. I am not the only one.
While Guy Kawasaki struggles with HTML, he quotes Steve Jobs

“There must be a better way.”

I nod my head in agreement. Thats whe main reason I waffled from Xanga to Blogspot to Xanga to Blogspot and now finally settled with Wordpress. I just could not handle HTML.
With Wordpress is a lot easier but I’m still faced with this HTML and like Guy, I feel there must be some way to figure out this thing? Even this CSS is total garble to me.

I mean would it not be a great idea to write code in plain simple English?

I tell you it’s a conspiracy in the deepest ranks of computer programmers. I just don’t get it. Why can’t we type a simple code like:

Paragraph = width 2/3 of window resolution
All Links = black color, don’t underline

Anyways I discovered this cool plug-in called Web Developer 1.02 for most of you who I’m sure are using Firefox. This little plug-in is a tool that allows you to open the CSS of your page and tweak it and modify the page layout on the fly till your hearts content. After that download the CSS style sheet and upload it to your server. Its got a lot of other stuff too which are beyond my simple understanding, but this little feature is just priceless!

Direct firefox link

Homepage link

PS: Anybody know how to create that cute little logo next to your URL on you web browser’s address bar?

Well as expected the following happened:
The domain name was down for 24 hours awaiting DNS migration.

I had to reinstall Wordpress for the 5th time. However this time I was smart enough and figured out how to backup the database so all my settings and posts were not lost!

Got the file management sorted out and now I can upload images and post cool stuff.

So back to regular programming! I am the laughing man! Well almost!

Edit: Check out the sidebar “Pimping”! ——>

1) Still have to get my domain and server sorted out. May have to reinstall wordpress to get the domain thing to work properly. This will be the 5th time…

2) Cant seem to upload images, i can only link to other sites.

3) I have problems connecting to feed burners, technorati and other stuff to drive traffic to my site.

Did i say travelling off the beaten track is tough?