A Color Trend With Traction

In the past few years, a keen observer might say that green has made its way to the top of the color power list. Anyone keeping up with the news will find green philosophers waxing poetic about the environment, corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainability communication, greenwashing, and green tea. The combination of new environmental mindsets and corporations positioning social responsibility efforts under a green label has raised the profile of the color green.

In a recent corporate social responsibility and sustainability Google alert, I saw a listing titled, “RED is the new green.”¹ Intrigued by the possibility that red may be scooping the trendiness of green, I did a Google search on the phrase—45,000 hits.

Further research suggests that we may be experiencing a red revolution. The semantics of red have shifted back to positive, and there’s evidence of a trend with traction. Give it to the Pantone execs who predicted the strength of red and in 1998 tagged it as a favorite for the century.

Nearly 10 years later, Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute®, said “Whether expressing danger, celebration, love or passion, red will not be ignored…nothing reflects the spirit of adventure more than the color red.” In 2007, Pantone named Chili Pepper as the color of the year and for 2010, PANTONE 18-1661 Tomato Purée was in the top 10 colors for women’s fashion.

Companies Known for the Colors They Keep
Red, with blue in a close second, inspires and dresses some of today’s most celebrated icons. These colors are important to corporate brand recognition and commerce color coding.

An analysis of Interbrand’s top 100 brands’ logo and corporate colors reveals a preponderance (70% of the total) of red and blue logos. Thirty-six of the 100 logos were entirely red or paired red with other colors. Thirty-four of the 100 logos were blue or paired blue with other colors. IBM, affectionately known as “Big Blue” for its official corporate color, ranked mostly in the second position for the nine year period. (Green appears in no more than 4 logos in any given year).

Many larger US corporations have red logos: CNN, TIME, LIFE, Business Week, ExxonMobil, Verizon, Xerox, and others. As for consumer awareness of red logos, ask 100 people what company is best known for its red logo, and it’s likely that at least 90 percent of them will say Coca-Cola. Not surprising, from 2001 to 2009, Coca-Cola maintained the #1 position in Interbrand’s Best Global Brand’s List. Coca-Cola knows the power of red and banks on the color’s bold simplicity and authenticity for its packaging and designs.

The Red/Blue Debate

Coke – red. Pepsi – blue. IBM – blue. Xerox – red. Red state. Blue state. The two colors are pervasive in advertising, politics, and politicians’ tie colors. Which is stronger? A new University of British Columbia study, reported earlier in this year in Science Daily, reconciles the marketing and psychology debate on which color, red or blue, most improves brain performance and receptivity to advertising. Both, but, it depends on the task. Red enhances our attention to detail, while blue boosts creativity.

Is Red the Color of Business?

Red attracts attention
Large phone companies use red. Verizon’s trademark check mark/V and typeface are red. In a major rebranding and renaming effort, Vodafone Ireland Limited, the largest mobile phone company in Ireland moved from deep purple to a trademark shade of red and adopted a new tagline: “Red is the new purple, Vodafone is the new name for Eircell.” They also created the Mission Red website, a forum for customer communications.

Using Red for Good – Creative Capitalism at Work
Today companies are selling (RED)-branded products and donating a portion of their profits to Bono’s Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. It’s been reported by Time that the companies participating in the (RED) campaign drew in new customers and that the corporate socially responsible action was the tipping point they needed to choose those products over others. The color prominence contributed message, meaning, and visibility.

Red is power. Red is prosperity. Red (and blue, but mostly red) will always be important to high-stakes business, graphic design, results of elections, and tie colors…for politicians, like President Obama who wore only red and blue ties in his first 11 days in office.

While Donna does have one pair of red shoes and a red blazer, she favors purple (a Vincent Roa Group, LLC and Purple Pony Websites corporate color). Admittedly, she was pleased with Pantone’s 2008 Color of the Year announcement: purple (blue iris), a color that “satisfies the need for reassurance in a complex world, while adding a hint of mystery and excitement.”

In today’s business climate, design is a critical part of product lifecycles. Changes in design and manufacturing processes to support sustainable packaging, for example, and working to ensure that product design meets downstream concerns can favorably affect a company’s triple bottom line.

Companies are adjusting business processes to ensure that design innovation is in line with sustainability principles and are developing metrics and guidelines in the design and development processes to stimulate awareness for and focus on environmental issues.

The majority finds that examining environmental pros and cons up front ensures that the design doesn’t undermine the market success of the product, whether it’s a magazine, product packaging, or a consumer product.

Packaging Innovations Good For The Environment

Wal-Mart—Recently, Walmart asked General Mills to replace curly noodles in its Hamburger Helper with straight noodles because straight noodles take up less space and require smaller boxes…same weight, less packaging, but good for the environment.

Coca Cola Company—In May of this year, the Coca-Cola Company announced the PlantBottle™, a first generation recyclable PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic made partially (30%) from plants (sugar cane and molasses). In mid-November, the company delivered beverages in PlantBottle™ to select markets throughout the world.

Touted as a sustainable packaging innovation by Muhtar Kent, Chairman and CEO, the move positions the company to rely less on a non-renewable resource (petroleum).

A Coke-sponsored life-cycle analysis conducted by Imperial College London revealed that the “PlantBottle™” reduces carbon emissions by up to 25 percent, compared with petroleum-based PET.

HP—The technology company that operates in more than 170 countries around the world recently reduced packaging on their Pavilion Notebook by 97 percent. Designers and engineers follow stringent packaging guidelines to minimize environmental impact.

Recently, engineers reduced PC packaging by 20 percent for units shipped from China and were able to increase the number of PCs per pallet from 28 to 40 units resulting in a 40 percent decrease in energy required to ship each unit. They rely on an in-house designed Robust Orientation Size effect (ROSe) calculator to develop packaging designs that minimize the amount and cost of materials used.

Are You Sitting on Soy?

Ford—Ford leads the industry in the use of soy, a renewable bio-material. Soy-based seats (backs and cushions) can be found on more than 1.5 million Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury vehicles, decreasing Ford’s use of petroleum oil by one 1 million pounds and reducing its carbon dioxide emissions by five million pounds annually.

“Natural fiber-reinforced composites and polymer resins made from plant resources provide positive environmental impact by utilizing renewable resources, reducing CO2 emissions, by being entirely compostable and—in some cases—reducing weight, which helps improve fuel economy,” explains Debbie Mielewski, Technical Leader, Ford Plastics Research.

Ford’s innovative use of environmentally friendly, soy-based foam has earned six prestigious awards to date, including the including the 2009 R&D 100 Award which honors the latest technology developments across numerous industries that are designed to meet societal, scientific, or business challenges.

Design Innovations Can Contribute to Sustainability

Responsible and sustainable packaging and product design innovations have a favorable effect on the environment, reduce costs, save space, and accrue benefits in product transportation. For many companies, the changes have resulted in improved efficiency, life-cycle effectiveness, and eco-innovation.

Adopting and acting on sustainability principles give consumers tangible evidence of a company’s commitment to the future of our planet.

In the rush, any strategy seems to have been lost in a lot of cases. For example when using Facebook or Twitter, many peoples default mode of thinking is very casual and that colors the content posted to those media. It’s surprisingly common to see what I would deem as personal info, posted to media outlets that are in theory, for a company.

While there’s nothing wrong with a blog/Facebook/Twitter being more casual than a corporate site, and it is a great way to engage customers and colleagues on a more personal level. There still needs to be plan to the casual nature, the business blog is not the place to talk about an employees child’s 1st birthday party.

The problem is a ‘casual’ strategy is difficult to develop since planning to be unplanned seems rather antithetical. To be honest, we’re struggled a bit with it recently. Every individual in a business has different levels of comfort with lifestreaming and how much is personal/private vs. public. So beyond any content strategy, those concerns must be part of the larger strategy.

Some of us sat down and discussed which outlets we want to tackle and their uses. Content ideas were bandied back and forth (yes the 1st birthday was a real mention) and finally some of the rules were decided upon.

No private lives –Everyone has their own outlet for their private lives, that they can filter as they see fit. It’s not the place of a business blog to talk about what folks do in their off time. Also, in my opinion, much of the personal traffic on a business is just noise. I will always favor any source that has a better ‘signal to noise’ ratio.

Keep it work related – Of course this is open to interpretation. In our case, we decided work related events outside the office (awards, conferences, teaching, learning etc) were fair game. Beyond that, was determined to be the personal life border

It’s not just about us – Well it is, but the core meaning is that the medium is not just going to be used to promote things we have done. Of course, items like that will appear since we’re proud of the work we turn out. But we want any streams to be more. Interesting things we find, useful resources and thought leadership are all items on tap. Looking back at the 1st rule, it’s a reaffirmation of the high signal to noise concept.

Add value – This works hand-in-hand with the previous ‘rule’. Though 100% of posts can’t add value, it should be something you actively pursue. Adding value can be as simple as linking to that cache of images or an intriguing article that was found. By adding value you’ll attract more interest and followers. If all that’s ever posted are no, or very low value items no one will listen to you – you’ll just be shouting into the void.

So, hopefully these rough rules, and just the thought of outlining a real strategy will help your forays into the social media sphere. Or if you’ve plunged in headlong with no set plan, perhaps they might cause a little reflection on what you’re putting out.

But then 2008, came and Twitter exploded onto the central stage.

In 2009 it’s seen continued growth in the public eye. As such, it’s being touted as one of the top tier social media tools – which it has become. And as time has gone on a culture and etiquette have evolved – it’s gotten past those initial growing pains that turned me off that first time around, so it’s time to look at it again.

For this article, we’ll just be looking at business use. A lot of businesses use it – some well, some poorly. But how do you use it as a business?

If you’re in the promotional business, it’s pretty simple. But for other businesses the picture isn’t so clear. So here’s a small list of things to help you get started.

Don’t go in without a strategy. Are you thought leaders? Trendsetters? Focused experts? Is this a customer service tool? Plan out your Twitter persona and stay with it.

Do be responsive. If you are trying to encourage dialog, or using it as a customer service tool, you MUST be responsive. Don’t leave people hanging –that’s the fast track to getting people griping. Also, do make use of direct messages if you don’t feel a question/topic is of use or appropriate for the public at large.

Don’t follow everyone who follows you. If you are taking the position as a thought leader, trendsetter, etc., then you should think of yourself as a thick branch on a tree. In theory, you follow some people, bigger branches, and then have a much larger number of followers, your smaller branches.

Do post quality over quantity. If you want to be seen as a thought leader, large volumes of low quality items are the anathema. Maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio.

Don’t tell people ‘What are you doing?’ – Do tell them what has your attention – It might be your project (though be wary of too much self promotion) but should be something in line with your strategy/position. Of course you can always go off topic or off persona at times to keep things personable. Just don’t make that the bulk of your traffic.

Do use Twitters search to see if someone is talking about you. If appropriate, participate in that discussion.

Do be interactive. Besides being responsive to items put to you – put things out there. Ask questions, start discussions if appropriate.

Obviously this is just small amount of food for thought, but hopefully it will help you develop a plan on how to use (or not use) Twitter.

Web site Content Management Systems (CMS) – if you’re not familiar with that term it might sound like some ponderous technological beast, and well, they can be sometimes. But really, despite their name they can make creating and posting content to the Web quick and easy.

In a nutshell, a CMS is a system that allows relatively quick and painless publishing to a web site and organization of that site. CMS are all over, from the Microsoft and Apple corporate site to The NY Times, to your blog – they are all using a CMS.

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of CMS available. Some are free; some cost tens of thousands of dollars and everything in between. Depending on you needs, budget and technical facility, there is a system out there for you.

Though any given CMS can do a million things, one of the most important is helping workflow. Any CMS worth its salt will allow for multiple users in the system and those users rights can be specified. It’s possible to have a large number of contributors who can add content, but do not have the ability to publish the content to the public. Those contributors’ articles can be reviewed, edited, published or passed along to the next level by the managers. No question, if you are managing a Web site with a lot of content going up on a regular basis, a streamlined workflow is very important.

Equally important is the ease of adding new content. Besides just managing the content, a CMS adding content to the stream more accessible. Before CMS were common, it usually fell to someone on staff with the appropriate skills to code the new content and add it to the existing site structure. If that person was too busy, on vacation, etc. the content sat in limbo due to the seemingly insurmountable barrier of converting text to HTML and adding it to the site. Now, with a CMS, one doesn’t need to know any special code to add content – all one needs is the ability to run a word processor.

Now that we understand some of the value of a CMS, we can talk about how to take advantage of that value in the context of a magazine.

Let’s assume that your CMS is set up and ready to go, just lacking content. To create new content one just needs to log into the system and get to work. At the most basic level you can just copy and paste into that editor. If there are images for an article, those need to be uploaded, which is usually as simple as uploading to flickr or FaceBook. Once that’s done you can start adding content. The same tool that lets you add an article to the site, will let you insert those images, tweak text, add links, and more. Once you are finished with the content, the article is saved to a database and ready to be posted to the Web site. For most, the process isn’t any more complicated than creating an MS Word document.

Keeping this regular stream of new content to the site is a prime way to take advantage of the value a CMS-based site offers. Though you could put up an “issue’s” worth of content in one fell swoop – there’s no need to. In fact there are incentives to generate a constant stream of regular updates. Search engines rank sites that have a constant stream of new content higher than one that does a monthly bulk update (for a bit more on this you can read about SEO). So if you keep the right content coming, you can elevate your position in searches – which drives traffic to your site – which can increase your ad rates.

Previously we talked about how one can create an online edition of a printed magazine using PDF viewer systems. Using a CMS-based Web site is a bit more of a leap of faith in some ways. Creating a PDF version that goes out as one whole package, with all its pages in the proper order is more familiar for traditionally print minded people. This free-form content production can seem chaotic to those who are used to planning out a block of content for a month or two all at one time, over the span of a year – but really it’s the same. One should still have an editorial calendar, production process, etc. – it’s just scaled differently.

Of course with a more flexible schedule there are more chances for missteps – but that same latitude can used as an advantage by focusing on hot topics, relating and linking new articles to older ones – even editing older articles to reflect more current developments. This sort of fluidity is difficult to achieve with a more traditional issue-based model, like we see with the PDF viewer.

Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t follow up on a comparison I made in my PDF viewer article. If you’ll recall, I mentioned how MAKE magazine used a PDF viewer service to offer their subscribers an online analog of the printed version. Each issue was its own, and required a login and password to access. So whether it came in the mail or via email you got your paid-for issue. In the CMS camp, we have WIRED – they put all the content from each issue on their site and even add to the articles by posting photos and rich media not seen in the printed edition. All the back issues reside online, and it is all FREE. Obviously this is about as opposite a method from the single password-protected issue as one can get and might freak some people out – “They just give it away?!” Well yes, and no. That openness drives a lot of traffic to their site, which boosts their ad rates. Also this constant stream of content means that Google and other search engines are constantly combing their site, and their potential search position is high.

Though CMS-based versions of a magazine require some more thought, consideration and initial set-up than their PDF viewer counterparts, they offer many of the same advantages and open a number of other avenues for publishers to reach their audience.

Previously we had a quick overview of two ways to bring a print document to the Web – the PDF viewer and the content-managed site. Now for a more detailed look, since there are too many companies in this field at this time to list, so for the sake of discussion, any production details following will be from the Zmags DIY process.

We’ll look at the PDF viewer first, since it’s the most ‘print like’ of the two options. There are a few methods that companies are using to bring the content to the Web, and many tout that their viewer replicates the page-turning experience of a printed product.

As you have probably already assumed, the whole process begins with a PDF. Of course this means that the document has to be designed and converted before it ever makes its journey to the Web. This means there’s a cost to get the content to look its best, but if you’re looking at a hybrid solution of traditional printed versions plus digital editions like MAKE did, then the design costs are already part of your production process.

So all of that is nice – but how much does it cost?  Every project is different, but here are some thoughts on the two most common price models.

The most straightforward price model I have seen is the per-document, do-it-yourself (DIY) license. Very simply, you pay a flat rate per document you have online; the more documents you have, the less you pay per document. You handle the creation of the document, uploading, linking, customizing the viewer, etc. You incur a labor cost on your end for doing that work, but because you control it, that cost is generally lower than if the service provider handled those tasks. Also, if you are very particular about the look of your product, doing it yourself gives you direct control over that look, as opposed to handing it off and hoping it comes out right.

The other common model is the service bureau model. This price model is a lot more convoluted and harder to nail down. Here, the service provider handles all the dirty work for you.  You hand off the PDF and they take care of it all… at a price. Generally these are priced per page of content and items like rich media, links and any other extras are charged à la carte. Also, any future edits, changes or page swaps may incur fees. As you can see, this price model might distress those trying to layout a budget. Though the initial creation prices were similar between DIY and service bureaus, any changes could get expensive under the latter. Also, if you want a lot of control over your document, this might not be the model for you. You have to hand off your PDF, supporting art and some instructions to the service provider and let them create your online edition.

Once the PDF is ready, you upload it to the PDF viewer service for processing. It takes a few minutes for their system to go through the PDF and make a searchable index of all the text. This index is important since it’s not just user-searchable in the viewer, but also searchable by Google and other search engines. Once that processing is done, you can put the PDF on the Web for public consumption with just a couple more clicks.

From starting the upload to publishing to the public, you might spend 15 minutes if you’re not using any of the available extras. Such a quick turn is definitely enticing, allowing a minimum time cost and the ability to stick to tight deadlines.

The look and feel of the final product varies a bit from company to company. Many of the companies in the field have developed (Adobe) Flash based page-turners. The best looking of these allow the user to grab the page corners with their mouse, lift it up and peek at the next page, pull it around, etc – like one might do with a real page – making the effort to mimic the real experience as much as possible. Some of the Flash-based page-turners use a more simple click-to-turn interaction with canned page-turn animations and varied levels of adroitness.

Another facet of the PDF viewer is image-based. The service processes your PDF and displays your document as a series of flat images.  Though this isn’t as immersive as the ability to turn pages, its advantage is that it doesn’t need the Flash plug-in to work. The vast majority of people on the Web have the Flash plug-in already but it’s not a given. Also, an important emerging market – iPhone users – cannot view Flash… at least for now. But everyone with a computer, iPhone or BlackBerry can view flat images. So you trade some of the look for the ability to hit a broader audience.

Now, to discuss those extras mentioned earlier. The Zmags system offers a number of ‘canned’ viewer looks and layouts to choose from as part of the creation process or change later on if the mood strikes. If you have an established brand, however, you’ll want to have a custom look. This can be accomplished through the Zmags administration tool. You can create a customized viewer that allows you to tweak colors, background art, button positions and a number of other details to suit your brand, and all these settings can be saved for use in any current or future documents you create.

Some of the other allow the user to create internal and external links, insert rich media and other interactive elements, and offer a comprehensive analytics suite and even e-commerce abilities. Things like analytics, rich media, interactive elements and links are standards for the field; many of the other services share a lot of these features.

Though we’ve covered a lot of information in this article, due to the number of different providers for PDF viewers there’s really no way to give a comprehensive review of them all, or even just a handful of them.  We have an in-house document that explores the main points for just 4 viewers in table form and we had to shrink it to fit on an 11×17 sheet of paper!

We hope this gives you a better idea of what to expect from the page-turner genre.  Next time, it’s the CMS on the block.

Abandoning Print – digital editions

Over the last few years, a certain publication trend that has been gaining momentum. And now it’s on the verge of changing from a being cool trend to the way ‘it’s done’.

I’m talking about magazines going online. Not just online with a web site to entice you to buy the printed edition, but soup-to-nuts 100% of the content online, without ever creating paper version. Ink and paper replaced by HTML and PDFs.

As we all know, the Web is getting faster, prettier to look at and easier to use, whether you are an information consumer or producer. Though all that is great, there are two other big factors that are in position to put this trend over the top into common practice. Or depending on point of view it’s already over the top and these factors will just cement this practice in place for the foreseeable term.

The two big factors I see driving this are the ‘Going Green’ movement, and the real 800-pound gorilla – money.

It’s simple economics really. If you print 100,000 issues in a run, you’ve spent tens of thousands on your printing alone. Let’s not forget shipping, storage and all the other little fees that add up really quickly. In any economy, expenditures of tens of thousands of dollars per issue are serious business. But as we all know, the economy is suffering and people are looking to save in any way they can. It’s pretty easy for the budget hawks to home in on several hundred thousand dollars of printing costs in a year and to look for less costly ways to get the information out.

Though not as pressing as the accountant saying you must cut X from your printing budget, there is a very real pressure towards greening in the print world. Recycled paper and ‘green’ inks help to reduce the environmental impact of printing. But really, nothing could have less impact than not every actually printing something.

The confluence of these social, economic and technological changes have unearthed lots of organizations looking to do away with their printed materials. I’m not some doomsayer proclaiming ‘Print is dead!’ and the magazine section of the store will be deserted, not at all. But I am saying there’s a new sheriff in town, and a new way of thinking taking hold.

Of course, dispensing with a printed edition is a pretty radical decision and not without its own pitfalls. Many people are looking towards a hybridized approach. MAKE magazine offered their subscribers the choice of receiving a hard copy or digital version of each issue. At that time, 10% of their subscriber base opted out of hard copies, which obviously represents a significant and immediate reduction in production costs with no loss of subscriber revenue.

So what’s best? Kill your printing altogether? Offer up both? Which solution is better? Of course there is no blanket answer for that. For each instance there’s some many variables that it needs to be taken case by case. But it is certain is that the number of magazines using digital editions to augment their print versions, or doing away with printed editions, will increase over time.

‘So how does one make the digital conversion?’ you ask. There are a few ways that have various strengths and weaknesses. We’ll start to investigate them in my next article.