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Cartype
We just wanted to take a moment pass along another cool site aimed at folks that love automobiles and have an interest in brands and design. If that describes you, you’ll love Cartype. Cartype bills itself as a “museum of car typography” but it’s really more of a museum of all automotive design.
Curious to know about the history of the Ronn Motor Company? They’ve got you covered. Want to see what the hood ornament looked like on an old-school Maybach? No sweat, seek and ye shall find. They’ve even compiled an archive of car cut-away images and gauge clusters…you know, just in case you ever wondered what the gauge cluster looked like in the Land Rover LRX concept vehicle:
They also keep up a pretty good automotive blog that’s worth a visit or an addition to your RSS aggregator.
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Add A Button, Make $300,000,000
I recently stumbled upon a pretty great article written by Jared Spool from User Interface Engineering and was compelled to pass it along because I think it’s a great read for anyone who owns, manages, uses or builds websites. If you qualify, then by all means read on!
The article was Jared’s recount of one specific situation in which a slight change in the design of a form made a noticeable difference in business. In the case of the site he wrote about, the change was a little bigger than noticeable—it was $300,000,000. Whoa.
The issue with the unnamed site was that in order to purchase the items that you had placed in your shopping cart, the site required you to register with the site. The thinking behind doing this was that it would make return purchases much easier because the site could remember all of your payment and shipping information, as well as your preferences. Pretty smart, huh?
As it turns out, the answer is an emphatic no. After conducting extensive usability testing, the interactive team realized that for many first-time shoppers, being forced to register (which involves picking a username/password) was a huge annoyance. As one respondent said, “I’m not here for a relationship – I just want to make a purchase.”
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Citroen, All Shiny And New
Citroen makes a distinctly beautiful vehicle, although most Americans don’t know much about them unless they’re into rally racing. That’s because Citroen, a French manufacturer, has never been officially imported into the US market.
They recently refreshed their global brand identity in order to modernize the brand and to ensure that it has appeal to style-conscious auto buyers. As you’ll see from the before/after image (graciously borrowed from Brand New), the French brand has ditched the hard lines and standard sans serif typeface for a new futuristic typeface and a rounder, softer, more 3-dimensional chevron shape (thanks Brand New for the image).
What I like so much about this brand identity update is that they took an existing identity that had remained unchanged since 1985 and redeveloped it entirely while still managing to preserve the brand equity by taking cues from the old one, including the trademark red, white and silver color scheme.
Here’s a video that Citroen produced to introduce the new brand. I don’t know French, but it’s interesting nonetheless. And I learned that vroom is the same in English and French:
Blimpie Identity Deflates
I was catching up on some reading this past week and came across a post on Brand New, a great site that showcases major identity redesigns, about the sub shop Blimpie. If you’ve spent much time in the good ol’ US of A, you’re probably familiar with the chain. They’re everywhere – over 2,000 of them from coast to coast. In fact, they’re the second largest submarine sandwich shop behind Subway according to Wikipedia.
Recently the Blimpie brand underwent a makeover, and the results were…not so good. It has been a really long time since I’ve seen an identity change that has headed so far in the wrong direction. Here’s the before and after:
What do you think? To me, if there’s one thing the Blimpie brand has always stood for in my mind it was a sense of fun and light-heartedness. Who could really take themselves seriously with a name like Blimpie anyway? And hey, they even have a “Fun Zone” section on their website – although admittedly there’s not much “fun” there. For the most part this “fun” was something that both of its major competitors (Quiznos and Subway) lacked, so Blimpie had a real opportunity to claim that position in the consumers’ minds.
With the redesign, the rounded, fatter logo has given way to a straight forward sans-serif Futura typeface, virtually personality free – they even settled on a duller color. And they didn’t stop there with the blandness. They chose “America’s Sub Shop” as the tag line. I’m really not sure what they were trying to accomplish with this tag, but they certainly don’t appear to further develop this patriotic idea in any of their materials online or otherwise.
Identity redesigns usually present a huge opportunity for an organization - they allow creatives to harness the energy of a company and make the branding match the actual brand. What Blimpie did with this redesign was to in effect tell the American public that there’s really nothing interesting going on at Blimpie. Somehow I doubt that was the strategic goal of this exercise, especially considering the millions of dollars it will cost to roll this new identity out to 2000+ retail stores. Yikes. I can’t help but think this might have been the result of a design by committee process gone wrong.
NOTE: Hey Blimpie, if you’re having cold feet with the revised identity, I know a talented group of creative communicators that would love to come up with something that’s actually reminiscent of a sub shop rather than an IT firm. ; )
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Love
It’s true. I have fallen in love…with an automotive website. It’s a beautiful thing when engaging content collides with stunning design, and GoTryke accomplishes just that. It is billed as “where culture and transportation converge” and it delivers on that promise with daily news about the advancement of all different types of vehicles and the role they play in our culture. On top of all the great content, I think this is one of the most well-designed and intuitive sites in terms of user experience. It’s clutter-free and organized appropriately - and the advertising that pays for the site is organized in a way in which it’s not intrusive or obnoxious.
If you’re as interested in and intrigued by the automotive industry as we are, I highly recommend this as an addition to your RSS feed reader. You can add it by clicking this LINK.
You can also follow GoTryke on Twitter HERE. Tell them @garretohm sent you.
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