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Design


Wishing You a Lite & Brite Holiday Season

This holiday season, we wanted to shed light (or in this case, lite) on our abundant holiday spirit and illuminate all that we hold dear – playfulness, bold design, teamwork, creativity, and a desire to make all brands glow with promise and purpose. We hope this video adds a bit of brightness to your day. Call us lite-brite fanatics or nostalgic kids, but we believe in the little bit of promise held in each single peg. The promise of light, of building something new, of fresh beginnings. This holiday, the world is yours. Dance in the light. Blast music. Build things. Play games. The holidays...
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How Brand Strategy Can Meaningfully Improve Product Design

How Brand Strategy Can Meaningfully Improve Product Design

We’ve noticed a product trend, especially with technology companies. Products can suffer growing pains if they are conceived, gestated, and born into the world without the guiding hand of the brand. On the flipside, brand strategy can have an enormously reassuring influence on the design of a product. In fact, our brand strategies exert positive influences on the product designs of most of our clients, in direct and indirect ways. Here’s how. Empathy Brand strategy always starts with a thorough study of target audiences, which means understanding what makes them tick. Their needs,...
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Brand Strategy and the Value of Creative Design

Brand Strategy and the Value of Creative Design

At Emotive Brand, we are keenly aware of the symbiotic relationship between brand strategy and creative design. In the traditional model, the company leadership team aligns on a new brand strategy and design brings it to life. You know the drill: new logo, new color scheme, new typography, new website. But there’s a deeper relationship between strategy and design that yields more meaningful, more memorable results. Creative design is not an appendage of brand strategy. Fundamentally, design IS strategy and strategy IS design. At least that’s how it works at Emotive Brand. Design in...
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What is Emotive Design?

What is Emotive Design?

Emotive design is a component of emotive branding that engages people in a focused way that strives to evoke the specific feelings the brand seeks to own. Using color, lines, shape, form, texture, light – and nothingness – designers create both passive and interactive experiences that resonant with the brand’s emotional space. Emotive design is not overtly emotional design. Operating at a subtle and subconscious level, these design cues work to reinforce and enhance other dimensions of the way people interact with the brand. From the highly tangible experience of using a product to the...
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Bad Blind Graphic Design Date

Bad Blind Graphic Design Date

One of the new constants of modern life is graphic design. It was with us before, in newspapers and magazines, bus billboards, and the whole gamut of corporate communications. Now the web and mobile have splashed graphic design everywhere we look – but we seem to be looking with half-closed eyes. Plenty of people have written (not saying “complained”) about how the web and mobile have degraded language. Blogs, email, and texting have made us all writers, so we’ve stopped making much of a distinction among ourselves in that regard. We’re in a hurry, we don’t have editors and proofreaders, and...
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When Businesses Truly Matter, Logos Don’t Matter At All

When Businesses Truly Matter, Logos Don’t Matter At All

Brands are much more than just a logo. We spotted this great report at Fast Company about Virgin Group’s new global HQ in London. The theme was how Virgin cleverly managed to convey the brand’s values through workplace design, without using the “brand” as so many people think about it. That’s right. Take a look, there’s no logo proclaiming the “proud” owner. Virgin has inspired us for years by their way of building meaningful bridges between their business units and their employees and customers. We believe they are vanguards of an idea...
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Emotional Design Principles Build Meaningful Brand Interactions

Emotional Design Principles Build Meaningful Brand Interactions

Emotional Design We recently came across an older, but interesting article about the use of emotion in design. The piece takes us through the premises of two books on website user interface design, “Emotional Design” by Don Norman, and “Designing for Emotion” by Aaron Walter. We were drawn to this recap of Norman’s 3-level approach to creative design: The visceral level – the appearance of a design The behavioral level – how the product works The reflective level – the long-term impact of the design By combining these three levels in the right...
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