adding bling to brands
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
Ever since increasingly simple and powerful image and video creation applications hit the big time, it’s become increasingly fashionable to drop simple design in favour of shinier, more polished and ever more complicated visuals. Prime examples for this bling effect are logos, leaflets, banners, even website design.
This strikes me as a prime example of form before functionality. It may look pretty, it may even wow potential customers, but if it does so at the expense of the message being communicated it’s useless. Worse still is when adding eye candy becomes such a priority; it actually stops your business being noticed by the customers you’re trying to reach. Take for example flash videos, which are increasingly popular and are in a huge spectrum of websites. How many of them are actually needed? Ours was introduced to communicate our brand values, but what are Scott bikes trying to communicate with their website?
Annoying and time consuming
They say you should only be three clicks away from the information you want on any well designed website, I lost count with Scotts! annoyingly all interspaced with huge delays caused by fancy imagery and embedded flash videos. Another factor to consider is compatibility, how many customers won’t be able to see your website the way it was meant to be displayed? What will the effects be on your websites search optimisation? Often embedding flash knocks you way down Googles ranking if poorly implemented.
There are definitely lessons to learned here people!
-dan