http://de-war.de/eurekacarpark.html
Amazing, award-winning car park signage by Axel Peemoeller.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgYwTELj-fs
Growing creatives! A very funny video on YouTube.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1823766
Font conference, another amusing video especially if you are a font geek.

http://adaptivepath.com/aurora/
Adaptive Path’s ‘Aurora concept’ - a look into what the future of web browsing may be like.

http://www.formfiftyfive.com/?p=1720
Khoi Vihn’s slideshow on the difference between designing for the web and designing for print. A really insightful presentation.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3191/2723090810_6501c93ae2_o.png
Calvin and Jobs - one for the Apple geeks! Very amusing.

We also regularly post links up on our delicious.com account at
http://delicious.com/vgroupbrighton so check it out for more stuff that we like.

Those with a bit more knowledge on the subject might also be aware that JavaScript can be used to get data from a web server without refreshing the page - a technique dubbed Ajax that enhances many of today’s web-based applications and makes the whole web experience a bit smoother.

But what not many people know is that JavaScript is actually quietly taking over the world.

The fact is that JavaScript, (the standardised version of which is called ECMAScript) which was hurriedly released around 1995, is now more prevalent than you might imagine. And equally importantly, it is cropping up in different places and in forms that people never thought of way back in it’s early years.

The traditional area for JavaScript is on the web, and here it has matters pretty much sewn up in terms of market dominance. Yes, there is Adobe’s Flash, which competes for the web application/ interactivity slice of the pie. However, unlike Flash, JavaScript does not require a plugin, is supported by the W3C, and is considered an integral part of the ‘web standards’ trio of frontend web development languages. And the scripting language that powers much of modern Flash development today, ActionScript, is actually a subset of the ECMAScript standard and is closely related to JavaScript.

All of the major mapping applications such as Google Maps, Yahoo maps etc are powered by JavaScript, as are almost all of Google’s other web offerings, such as Google Mail and Google Docs. Apple’s new MobileMe service gives a desktop application-like interface whose UI is created using a JavaScript framework called SproutCore, and the extremely impressive 280slides.com online presentation-maker application is written in Objective-J, a port of Apple’s Objective C programming language to JavaScript. The growing popularity of these JavaScript frameworks is making the language more accessible to novice developers (although not without bringing their own sets of problems) and removing most of the cross-browser issues that were the bane of developers lives in the early years of it’s implementation.

These applications all make use of client-side JavaScript. However it is now showing up on the server-side (1) as well, with pure solutions such as the Aptana Jaxer project bringing the power of JavaScript to bear on server architecture, creating solutions optimised to today’s heavy use of Ajax in web sites an applications. It’s ‘embeddability’ means that it can also be easily embedded in other server side languages such as PHP (PHP-JS), Java (Rhino), and Perl (JE) amongst many others.

But that’s not ‘taking over the world’ - that’s just taking over the web. Where else does JavaScript feature outside of websites?

Lots of places, as it happens. Still on a web-related theme, Mozilla’s Firefox browser uses JavaScript to power its Graphical User Interface (GUI), and developers can create extensions for the browser using JavaScript. On the desktop, Mac OS X’s dashboard widgets are all powered by JavaScript, as are Microsoft’s Vista Gadgets, Yahoo’s Widgets and Google’s Desktop Gadgets. Adobe released the 1.0 version of AIR, their cross-platform runtime environment for creating desktop applications, in February this year; this allows developers to use web technologies such as HTML and JavaScript to create rich desktop applications.

JavaScript is also showing up as a way for people to add functionality to existing applications, as companies build scripting capability into their products to allow for greater customisation. For example, Adobe’s ever-popular Photoshop application allows users to write scripts in JavaScript, a plugin for Illustrator allows JavaScript to be used to create and manipulate images and tools, and PDFs now support JavaScript scripting and interaction.

This use of JavaScript outside of the web browser looks set to increase - through web development many people already have the skills needed to write the scripts, and it is a language that is well suited to manipulating graphical elements in the interfaces that the modern desktop operating systems provide. There is also a good sense of convergence here: As more and more applications are becoming web based (or at least are offering web-based versions of their desktop software), the desktop is starting to become powered by technology that was born for use in the web.

So it looks like we are going to be seeing a lot more of JavaScript in the coming years, both on and off the web. Not bad for a language that has be derided over the years by ‘real’ programmers, who considered it an ‘amateur’ language because of its unstructured nature and early use to provide whizzy effects for web pages. You’ve come a long way, baby.

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(1) The web is based on a client/server model - there are lots of web servers being run in the ‘cloud’ that process requests from the ‘clients’, the browsers that we use to view the web. Traditionally JavaScript has been run on the client side of this equation, processed by the browser.

This is great news for us web developers - finally we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, the day when we can stop spending our time and our clients money on workarounds to correct for what is essentially a very broken piece of software.

The latest browser statistics from thecounter.com website shows IE6 market share is down to 36%, above Firefox at 17% and below IE7 at 41%. Microsoft’s ‘auto update’ has meant that a large number of IE6 users were upgraded to the newer IE7 unless they specifically opted out. And as that number dwindles, more and more sites are opting for either a policy of ‘progressive enhancement’ - where less capable browsers such as IE6 get show a subset of the sites functionality - or are just shutting out IE6 altogether, as they decide that the cost of supporting the browser exceeds the loss in revenue from not supporting it.

Apple’s new MobileMe exchange-type service was probably the first really big name to drop all support for IE6 - and following on from that 37Signals (who make the popular web-based project management app, Basecamp) also announced that they would be going down this route. As time goes on, I’m sure we will see many others doing the same.

If you are not a web designer/developer, why do you need to know this? Because if you are still using IE6, you need to upgrade to a more modern, safer, faster, less broken and more standards compliant browser as soon as possible - or you are going to start finding yourself locked out of many sites or served up a watered down version of the site in keeping with your browser’s limited functionality.

At VGroup we will not be dropping support for this old, outdated browser for the frontend of our sites just yet - it obviously still has a large (though dropping) market share. But we will be working hard to ensure as many of our clients upgrade to a better browser as possible. If you are looking for a new one, we highly recommend the excellent Firefox - it’s fast, safe and secure and will improve your online experience online no end.

Printing has come a long way since the first woodblocks in 200AD. Lithography eventually came along in 1796, with offset printing (where the inked image is transferred from a plate to a rubber blanket, then to the printed surface) following in the 1800s.

The digital press first made an appearance in 1993. Whilst offset lithography is still, by far, the most popular form of commercial printing for large volume work and quality print, digital has seen subsequent growth in recent years and is getting closer to the benefit and quality of traditional print.

More excitingly for us however, is the possibilities digital opens up past the former restrictions of traditional print. Unveiled at Drupa 2008, the world’s largest exhibition for the printing and media industry, is a host of new digital flatbed machines which offer the potential to print onto a variety of surfaces such as wood, glass, metal, leather, fabric and plastic and at a much larger size.

So whether you want to inject some colour in the office with some funky glass partitioning, want an unusual metal invitation or wooden exhibition panels, you are now - budget aside, as always! - limited by imagination, not technology.

Canis lupus familiaris

The domesticated wolf. The dog. Man’s best friend. There are an estimated 400 million of them in the world, all shapes and sizes and different kinds - companion dogs, working dogs, rescue dogs, stray dogs, hot dogs…

And then you get office dogs! What could be nicer or more calming than a dog sleeping under your desk, or a soft head to pat when you go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea?

It’s scientifically proven animals have a therapeutic impact on humans, lowering our heart rate and increasing the production of endorphins. A cat in a rehabilitation centre or a budgie in a retirement home can do wonders for the two legged residents; someone who’s always there for a chat or a pat.

For the last few weeks, we’ve had the pleasure of our own little VGroup studio dog – Teddy. And he’s definitely lowered the heart rate on some of us and brought out a soft touch. He could do with improving his tea making skills though …

Since 1994, Natures Way Foods have been supplying washed and ready to eat salads and fruit to major multiple supermarkets and leading companies in the food sector. With a vision to be the best prepared produce supplier in Europe, their award-winning growth has been driven by continually striving to exceed their customers’ expectations.

The rapid growth over the last 5 years has seen the business grow to a major high-street player, supplying Tesco, Morrisons, Pret and McDonalds among others. NWF could see that the continued growth of the business needed to be reflected in their brand, and that updating their brand identity was paramount.

As part of the company’s internal “Good to Great” strategy, key objectives of the rebranding project were to create a stronger brand identity to reflect their growing business. It was a natural progression, following VGroup’s rebranding work for other companies in the Langmead Group. The new identity brings the brand in line with the “family” or “suite” of identities also created by VGroup for Langmead Farms and Wild Rocket Foods.

The new NWF logo clearly reflects their fresh, friendly and passionate ethos and also visually communicates the essence of the business – fresh produce – with the leaf/seedling motifs.

The completion of the new logo triggers the beginning of a carefully considered roll-out of the brand across marketing collateral and both on and offline communications.

Related branding and design projects have also included the NWF Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) logo and the identity and design for the Field to Fork programme, designed to engage school children with fresh produce through farm and factory tours.

The new Natures Way Foods website, also designed and developed by VGroup Interactive is due for release next month, as part of the brand implementation. The website has been designed to promote the company to business partners, consumers and the local community and features engaging interactive animation as well as the content-rich functionality of the VGroup CMS. Watch this space!

Audio branding, or sonic branding, as it is sometimes called, is the use of sound to reinforce brand identity. Increasingly, audio branding is becoming a vehicle for conveying a memorable message to targeted consumers – currently over 70 of the UK’s top 200 advertisers use some consistent audio branding as part of their corporate identity.

Audio branding can be particularly effective because of the powerful stamp on the human memory that sound can make, in a way that either reinforces visual images or makes a mark without visuals, e.g. on the radio, or when people are out of the room during television ad breaks.

Elements of audio branding include sung or spoken tag lines, jingles, short piece of music, and functional sounds, such as the Windows start-up sound. Other examples include MGM’s ‘lion’s roar’, McDonald’s ‘I’m lovin’ it’, and the famous ‘Intel Inside’ sound logo.

The sound logo is a key part of audio branding; usually a short distinctive melody or other sequence of sound, mostly positioned at the beginning or ending of a commercial. It can be seen as the acoustic equivalent of a visual logo, and often a combination of both types of logo is used to enforce the recognition of a brand, culminating in an audio-visual logo.

Why does your brand need audio branding?
‘Because you’re worth it!’ or rather, your brand will benefit from it. In an increasingly competitive media market, more multi-sensory branding can give your brand a memorable edge. But it’s not just about who can shout the loudest; it’s also crucial to have audio that elegantly represents your brand.

Communication via audio branding can utilise many media: TV, DVD, radio, websites, mobile phones, phone on-hold audio and ringtones are fine examples. Executed correctly, audio branding will not only raise your brand’s profile, it will strengthen it.

A recent study on audio branding conducted by GDR Creative Intelligence and Other Lines of Enquiry ranked the Top 10 ‘audio branders’ in the UK market, based on combined rankings for recognition, brand recall & likeability.

1. Kit Kat - “Have a Break, Have a Kit Kat”
2. Hamlet - “Happiness is a Cigar Called Hamlet”
3. HSBC - “The World’s Local Bank”
4. Danone - “Mmm, Danone”
5. Motorola - “Hello Moto”
6. Asda - Asda theme music
7. Garnier - “Garnier”
8. Frosties - “They’re Grrreat!”
9. Coco Pops - “I’d Rather Have a Bowl of Coco Pops”
10. Microsoft - Windows start-up sound

Want one?
Audio branding is one of the many new services VGroup is now providing for clients, as part of our integrated Communications Performance™ approach.

Our Branding and Interactive departments combine expert brand strategy, market research and analysis with technological wizardry in compositional technology, audio processing and psychoacoustics.

Talk to us about creating audio branding elements that, combined with a strong visual identity, will make your brand stand out from the rest.

Any current RSS subscribers should amend their RSS reader to use the new URL - http://feeds.feedburner.com/vgroup to ensure that they continue to get our blog updates correctly in the future.

Not sure what we’re talking about? Have a read of our introduction to RSS post to get an overview of this great way of keeping up with all the news from your favorite sites.

Natures Way Foods supply prepared salads and fruit to leading companies of the food sector and major multiple supermarkets. They are located in Selsey, West Sussex, and take on a positive and active role of CSR (corporate social responsibility) within the local community.

As part of Natures Way Foods’ CSR programme, we have been working with them to create a ‘Field to Fork’ initiative to enhance the profile of Natures Way Foods in the local community. Field to Fork is aimed at school children aged 7 to 14 years old, and local schools will be invited for tours around NWF’s fields, factory and new Product Development Facilities.

The tours will be educational and focus on explaining the agricultural journey of how salads and fruit end up on their plate. The children will be given nutritional information and taught what insects may be harmful to the crop.

VGroup were asked to provide concepts and ideas for the Field to Fork tour – including what the children could be given upon arrival. The material needed to be eye catching, fun and colourful as well as educational and was designed to work alongside the National Curriculum Healthy Schools Award programme.

VGroup’s concept was to give each child a Field to Fork goodie bag with fun and educational content that could be used both during and after the tour. Having developed a highly distinctive visual identity for the initiative we then looked at ways to leave a lasting impression.

Ideas included: The Field to Fork goodie bag – a branded drawstring back pack, printed and with a button badge attached. Inside the back pack they will find a clear salad bag holding recipe cards for different salads and fruit with nutritional information. The recipe cards are to be taken home to encourage healthy eating. There will also be a NWF Environmental Fact Sheet – a leaflet showing the journey of the seed from being planted to ending up on your plate; a Bug ID card with magnifying card for the children to look, read and learn about insects and bugs that can be harmful to growing salad.

This has been a really fun project and one that we’re hoping will be both educational and practical for young people as well as communicating the interest Natures Way Foods has in ensuring people know more about what they eat and where it comes from.

As I client, I would never even entertain the idea of using different agencies to work on different parts of a campaign. Not only is the result never as holistic and “integrated” as it can be, it costs more and causes way more project management. Not to mention the politics of dealing with multiple agencies and third parties etc.

But even when the one agency/integrated approach is used, there are some pretty flakey ideas out there on what integration actually means and how to make it happen.

This definition (below) of integrated marketing I found pretty much sums up what many brands are still doing. It’s about as lack-lustre as the results this approach produces, in my humble opinion.

Apparently, integrated marketing is “a combination of two or more forms of marketing used to sell a product or service”.

Woohoo! What do you want – a medal?!
Newsflash: merely transferring an idea conceived at design or branding stages into a digital medium does not make your communications integrated.

Unfortunately, this is where so many clients - and agencies - are still at. They view the development of communications in a linear fashion, with offline/above-the-line leading, and digital following. A lot of this is historical, due to this being the way the communications landscape has evolved, and it being the order people learned things in. It’s also to do with agency models, and above-the-line agencies traditionally being given the lion’s share of budget, and trying to ensure it stays this way.

A better definition of integration is “all aspects of marketing communications working together as a unified force”. Convergence is a fact of life. Get with the programme, people!

The place of digital in the integrated mix
So now we’ve established that integrated is the way forward, what is the place of digital in all this? Even now that Google and Facebook run the world (I’m sorry, is there a world outside this Mac?), digital is still most often in a pretty sad position in the running order. Last. Bottom of the food chain, like an afterthought.

Imagine for a moment you work in digital. (Yay, how happy are you?!) The client briefs someone, someone does some branding, some creative, writes some copy, and then gives it to you to “do what you think” with it online.

Wow, cheers. It’s like getting a box of stuff that someone else chooses, and having to make it do stuff it was never made to do. (How happy are you now?) Let’s think inside this box for a minute. What if they asked you what you thought should be in the box? What if you got to decide what was in the box and then they had to make their billboard/brochure/press ad/TV spot out of that?! (It would probably still work, probably be in 3D, but might be a bit weird, and a bit low-res, for sure!)

Too often digital designers, animators and developers are just given a set of functional objectives to complete, without having any idea what the actual goal of the exercise is. Who’s to say they don’t already know a better way, or have seen something that’s really cool and would have really benefitted the creative thinking in the initial stages?

Often, the last-in-the-food-chain-web-team come up with some fantastic idea that is nothing to do with what they’ve been given to work with, but nevertheless outstanding. The peeps at the top of the food chain go “oh cool, I wish we’d thought of that earlier …”
Newsflash 2: You can’t be expected to. But don’t beat yourself up. We live, breathe and sleep digital. You’re a marketing manager. (No offence …).

Then it’s always too late.

Holistic communications
Maybe it’s a chick thing, to see things more holistically. The super-clever girl geeks at She Says.org have plenty to say about it, which I must go along and raise my glass to some day. The title of their recent event on integration in advertising says it all; “Another resize is it?”

Involving all channels right from the beginning is absolutely crucial to arriving at a truly integrated solution. And it’s only fair - not to mention logical - that all parts of the machine are working with the same proposition at the same time.

Meanwhile, back in the real world … this isn’t always possible. In the studio we don’t always know who will be working on a project, and in the interests of keeping costs down for clients, we can’t always have every designer and his dog at every meeting. But a key representative should always be there, and everyone should be issued the original brief.

As a producer, nothing makes me happier than watching designers, copywriters, developers, and flash animators huddled together trying to get their head around what others want to achieve, and along the way dreaming up new ideas that turn the original solution on its head and take it to a new level.

Sure, it’s all about “the big idea” and making it work across all channels – but the big idea can come from anywhere. A designer’s doodle, a marketing concept, an animation idea, a piece of copy … when working on a new brief, everyone has something to offer.

More and more, I wonder … what if the big idea started with digital and was then transferred into print? Is the transfer of ideas different or better one way? I know that transferring an idea that’s been conceptualized for print into interactive media as an afterthought is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, or a round peg into a square hole, because basically nothing fits and there are hugely missed opportunities.

Recently, while working on a branding and through-the-line pitch someone suggested we develop an online symbol that could be used, in a similar way to the RSS symbol, to indicate the availability of the client’s service. Conceptual work on the brand identity was in progress, but it soon came to pass that this digital symbol, which was a very small part of the big picture, became the mainstay of the new identity and brand proposition.

I love the way that often at VGroup when we review an awesome idea, campaign or website we’ve come up with, we can’t even remember who came up with what, just that it works. This, to my mind, is the sort of integration I’m on about … a seamless flow of concepts across channels, and concepts that have evolved organically out of multi-disciplinary collaboration.

We sit back and admire this thing that has emerged, a sum greater than its parts, and know it’s gonna exceed the client’s wildest dreams.

So next time you need something doing, forget everything you’ve ever known. Forget above-the-line, through-the-line, below-the-line. WHAT IF THERE WAS NO LINE?