The web has always been prime experimental space for trying out new designs and interactions, whether purely expressive or truly functional. We’ve come a long way from the days of Netscape, blinking links, Flash load bars and animated 3D GIFs (or have we?). Browsers have evolved to let the imaginations of developers and web designers run wild. Google’s Chrome browser led the charge with Chrome Experiments, like Rome and The Wilderness Downtown, by showcasing what new browsers are (and should be) capable of today.
Like web fonts and responsive web design, the simple act of scrolling has seen great advances over the past year. Geared scrolling has become a trendy new way to experience a webpage (we used it when we released our Game Changers report earlier this year). Similar to sideways parallax scrolling from the old school video games of yore, geared scrolling allows multiple layers of a webpage to move at different speeds, creating a rich sense of depth from two-dimensional elements.
Nike Better World is probably still the most widely recognized example of this, with Journey being their most recent addition to the project. Since then many others have explored specialized scrolling.
As an exercise in visual language, our senior designer Mads Jakob Poulsen, recently decided to explore what it might look like if Anonymous ”went corporate.”
His website describes the project:
“With the group being more and more in the media they could need to button up and streamline their appearance to appear more professional whilst unifying the brand experience.
The logotype/mark is anti-authoritative and obviously completely illegible, to stick with the roots of the anarchistic group.”
This October, a report was published by McKinsey estimating that the Internet has contributed more than a fifth of the GDP growth in mature economies over the past five years. That’s remarkable, especially at a time when these economies are struggling to get their populations back to work––producing and consuming the domestic product. So if the Internet is our ace in the hole for economic growth, and you and I are the prospective producers and consumers of the product in question, let’s take a look at the situation in front of us.
At SXSW this year, I had the unique opportunity to understand “brand” from the perspective of a startup. I spent much of SXSW with two unique startups, Giftopera.com and Voyurl.com. Both of these are distinct products with quite different founders. Giftopera was founded by a developer I’ve known for years named Vineet Choudhary and his business partner Simon Tiemtore. It’s a group gifting application that, once built, will allow people to pool their money to buy a gift for a friend. Voyurl is founded by Adam Liebsohn who has seemingly scraped every dollar he has into the creation of Voyurl while maintaining a full-time job at an award-winning ad agency. Voyurl allows users to elect to be tracked as they move around the Internet with the trade off that they can then see their own stats and compare them with their friends’. The idea is to even the playing field against Google, Facebook and others who are tracking our online activity with every click.
Vineet, Simon and I rented a house from HomeAway for the week of SXSWi. They have been working on GiftOpera for a couple months now but the product isn’t online yet. Vineet, the quietly-social father of two, is able to build much of the framework for the product on his own, but has chosen to bring in some outside resources from India and Sweden to work on the development and design of the app. Simon, a magnanimous finance guy originally from Burkina Faso, heads the business thinking and sales side of the company. Over the course of 6 days, I watched them give out over 500 business cards, with Simon chatting up everyone he met while casually explaining the product to a captive sidewalk audience. Their goal for SXSW was simply to raise awareness about their infant brand and sign up users for a future launch. Both of them worked hard exploring and learning everything from the SXSW panels to talking with venture capital managers to make sure they were at enough events to make their presence known. This meant building brand awareness through fairly traditional means; shaking hands, passing cards and sitting with influential decision makers. Their brand is about bringing groups together who want to achieve a common goal, it is as personal a brand as the relationships they are looking to build.
On the contrary, Adam texted to tell me he’d be coming down the day before SXSW. Adam’s Voyurl.com application has been in private beta for over a month and has built up a solid following that’s garnered him several high-profile interviews with publications like the New York Times. (Private beta is where friends and friends of friends are invited to test the product while the dev team releases new updates. For the user it usually involves a lot of patience balanced with the trade off that they were “first”). At the conference, I first ran into him outside the convention center with his messenger bag pulled around over his military jacket. He was handing out printed tags and preparing to give out a couple thousand stickers in a traditional, but effective, guerilla marketing tactic. Like Vineet and Simon, Adam’s goal was also to raise awareness, but he had to go about this in a different way. His stickers, with the tagline “prove you weren’t looking at porn” found their way into nearly every available space at SXSW. His brand isn’t about shaking hands and handing out business cards, it’s about building buzz. It’s the kind of non-traditional product that wants to be promoted as something secret so new users want to have an invite.
These two startups say a lot to me about where the Internet has led us as branding professionals. We can’t assume all websites are the same. We can’t decide that just because someone talks “tech” that they fit into a single category. We can’t assume that simply because startups aren’t treating “brand” with marketing directors and brand managers that they don’t have just as much of a need for it. Brand in the startup space begins with the founders’ vision and then grows and defines the experience of using the product. The logo is both placeholder and promise that must encapsulate both experience and future growth. Voyurl and GiftOpera are different in their brand because the people behind them are different. Yet as each company evolves, their challenges will center around the traditional pressure points of any company; how to create growth and how to ensure the company doesn’t lose what made them succeed in the first place.
Our challenge, as brand leaders, is to understand this offer and redefine how we help these future companies achieve the growth they aspire to.
IFTTT is a free new service that automates the internet for you. Building custom triggers upon existing channels like Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, Google Reader, Email, Instapaper, Flickr, etc., one can create new automated commands to accommodate all kinds of needs. Some liken the system to the way Lego blocks work, while Linden Tibbets, Founder, likes to think of it as “digital duct tape if you will,” since it’s neither a programming language, nor a fancy new app building tool. It capitalizes on the capabilities of existing services and networks and combines them in original and unexpected ways. Basically, be your own online digital MacGyver.
For instance, you can call the service from your phone or Google Voice account and leave a message that will be transcribed into text and posted to your Twitter account. This can be accomplished via SMS too, although it’s available only in the US for now. IFTTT doesn’t target social media specifically. Can’t seem to remember your girlfriend’s birthday? Set up a trigger to send you a text message on that day to remind you. Or have the service send your workaholic friend a tweet at noon every day saying”remember to eat,“ so that…you know, they don’t forget to eat lunch.
With the internet already spawning many new ways of speaking, IFTTT further extends this continually growing relationship between communication and technology. Even the IFTTT Ideas blog (a blog where users can share new tasks generated through IFTTT) begins to speak a strange kind of internet generated programmer poetry of its own.
We’ve come a long way from Angela Bennett ordering pizza from her PC. Over a year ago, I was walking up Polk Street in San Francisco with my good friend Jesse Tane, now co-founder of IFTTT, as he explained to me Tibbet’s idea of a project still in its primordial state. From my vague recollection it was something along the notion of tagging (in a digital sense) everything you own and being able to access it through the web. I probably nodded my head and said, “Hmmm, interesting.” Suffice to say, my little brain didn’t have to go far beyond the idea of “everything on the internet” before it stopped working. But with more people (and “things” in general, devices, etc.) becoming part of the internet, you can envision a time not far away when the core idea of IFTTT is just a part of every day life. Having a hard time waking up during the dark winter mornings? Just make sure your web-enabled bedside lamp is synced with local weather feeds so it can turn on gradually and simulate sunrise at the right time. Left the air conditioner on during a hot summer day with no one home? What about logging in to your house with your smart phone, and turn down the internet-equipped thermostat? Everything on the internet. The internet on everything.
IFTTT is still in private beta right now, with many more invites going out every day. It is a fun thing to play around with, if you can get your hands on an invite. Now if only there was an easier way to say “IFTTT”…
I’m getting old. When I first started making stuff with technology and the Internet, things like Internet Explorer didn’t exist. In the insane calendar of Moore’s Law, it was an age ago. A little later I worked in places that called themselves ‘web design’ or ‘Internet agencies’. We built web sites, and other exciting stuff for things like ‘Interactive TV’ and ‘mobile’ using WAP 1.1. Driven by new technology, anything seemed possible.
Fast forward to say 2006, suddenly, everyone is talking about Digital. Digital referred, not to one’s and zero’s, but primarily to the Internet in its many fixed and mobile forms, the things living in it and connected to it. It was a term coined to describe new things that certain business didn’t quite understand, and were scared of…
Now fast-forward again a little, but only a year or so: did I hear you say Post Digital? Post digital was coined as a term to describe the fact that the Internet, or vague ‘Internet connected digital thing-a-ma-bobs’, were now so prevalent, normal and accepted in business and society that we are living in a ‘post digital age’ amidst an ‘Internet of connect things’.
Stop. So we went from Digital to Post Digital in a couple of years? I know technology moves fast, but here’s the rub: for many businesses, being digital was and is hard. Embracing technology in and outside of an organisation is not easy. But what if we can adopt the notion of post digital? That sounds easier! It implies we got digital, then moved on! Or rather, back to business as usual.
Sadly, there are more problems with this term. I give you Exhibit A – The Nabaztag. So post-digital is all about digital being so normal right? Well The Nabaztag is a Wi-Fi enabled, Internet connected, talking, white plastic Rabbit. Say that aloud: A Wi-Fi enabled, Internet connected, talking, white plastic Rabbit. A Wi-Fi enabled, Internet connected, talking, white plastic Rabbit IS NOT NORMAL!
Exhibit B – Access to the Internet and technology outside of the developed world. I wont bore you with the stats, Google them. But if you don’t believe me, travel to a country where people have to charge their Nokia via bicycle power, then look at their blank faces as you show them your Nabaztag. I rest my case.
So where are we? Somewhere in the early to mid 90’s the basic technology foundations of the Internet we know today were laid, lets call it Web 1.0. In the mid naughties, everything got standardised and connected into a web of open data, Web 2.0. Today, we approach Web 3.0, an Internet of connected ‘applications’ underpinned by a web of semantic data. Exciting enough on it’s own, but now there’s a difference: Internet access devices and interfaces are finally beginning to meet expectation and deliver on the promises envisaged for them back at the beginning. Technology now works, and it works well. If we can work on equal access then we’ll hit ground zero, the beginning.
Post digital? Bullshit, we’re just barely getting started. Lets do some awesome stuff…
(Nathan Williams) @nathanawilliamsNathan Williams is a Strategist in Wolff Olins London. He likes technology, and delicious cake. Photo courtesy of Lisamarie Babik via Flickr Creative Commons License.
