What i thought is impossible to happen in the year 2008, especially now that Croatia is filled with high quality, world class award-winning design and marketing studios - happened. One of the oldest and strongest banks in Croatia, Privredna Banka Zagreb (PBZ), rebranded overnight. Well, more like inherited branding from their new owners, but for the common folks out there, it makes no difference. It all happened in over 1 night, one day old stuff, another day, *WHACK* in the head, new visual identity all over the city.

This is the old logo, still in our hearts:

And this is the new logo:

New logo represents Italy's aqueduct. And for a bank in Italy, this is seriously the coolest visual there is - entire Italy grew thanks to invention of aqueduct. Fresh water was being poured into city, and fresh water is fundamental for city growth. It keeps it clean, people can drink and bathe. Perfect for Italy. For Croatia? No way in hell.

I understand the will of new masters to force the new branding onto the general population, but this was done so brutally and so ... raw ... that design community of Croatia was left speechless. Let me explain this on few levels.

Level 0:
Here is what we think about the font used ( Trajan ):

And i quote: "Every single horror film made in the past 5 years uses Trajan". They could have at least reduce the confusion by keeping old font.

Level 1:

Gjuro will explain the sentimental value soon.

Level 2:

New brand has absolutely no connection to old one. They could have at least localize the brand, and make it fully red, or rounded corners or something, and then in few years, roll out this full color version.

Level 3:

Bank's interface is it's visual identity. The fact that interface is the strongest point, and i mean THE strongest point in any brand is well known. You recognize iPods by their scroll wheel, not by their music playing ability - scroll wheel is their interface. You know that feeling when you grab someone else's mouse, and it feels weird? Or when you drive someone else's car, and you absolutely cannot control it until you familiarize with it's interface? Yup, that is because interface, and how you use things, and how you connect with them - defines brand.

Bank's interface is it's logo. As simple as that. The most obvious example would be changing logo on the bank's building. Did my bank move away? Are the selling colored lollipops in this building now? What's going on?

Let's say you walk into a shopping mall. There are 10 ATM machines there. They are all the same, except they got different logo on them. If you change logo on your ATM machine, it's game over for people. I bet that PBZ call center is ringing like mad in the past two months, and will continue for some months. The confusion of people is staggering.

In comparison to this, we had Deutsche Telecom acquire our main telecom, and they rebranded instantly after purchase. However, their rebranding was led by some really smart brains, that for weeks kept this billboard on streets.

Orange was old color, T-Com magenta is the new color.

And then they added text:

This is my recreation of billboards, i cannot find originals anymore, but that is the general idea - show everyone what is happening in a clear and transparent manner. This was done so smoothly that since day 1 of rebranding people knew that magenta colored T-Com is what was recently their old telecom.

In the years to come, when you open up encyclopedia and look up word "FAIL" you will see PBZ rebranding case listed there at first point. But, that is what happens when bankers try to play designers, and completely ignore graphic rules, branding, logic, and common sense.

UPDATE:

The Agency ( Digitel ) that spearheaded rebranding campaign for T-Com sent us the original billboard. It says: "From the 1st of October | we change. Welcome to T world!". That's how you do rebranding.

Just to let you know - we have some new staff here.

Be afraid.

This one goes to all our foreign readers which would otherwise probably be left out from knowing news of the week in Croatia - Croatian National Television (HRT.hr) bluntly copied British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC.co.uk) website!

The shit hit the fan few days ago and whole Croatian web community got pretty pissed off. HRT spokesman said (in defence to accusations of stealing BBC's design) that HRT wishes to be Croatian BBC, and ok - I absolutely respect that. I also respect their understanding for the need to redesign the site. The old HRT.hr website was 8-10 years old and not something to look at.

But lets get one thing straight - I totally and absolutely disrespect the method of execution of their intentions. Whoever did the production of this monstrosity lacks the proper knowledge and experience... 10 years of experience in web development field at least.

Client is always right, but clients are not web designers (no matter how bad they would want it to be), and our sole professional and moral obligation is to notify client of possible breach in copyright laws, breach in functionality or any kind of possible side-effect that some of their ideas could do to harm the project, harm them self or harm web developers reputation.

Not once, but every time, we ask client - which websites do they like, who are their competitors, who is their role model in business... And based on our previous experience, knowledge, research, strategic planning and comprehensive user tests - we produce results. Results which are specially suited for our client. Not fake copy of website they wish to have.

As our friend Maratz nicely wrote, and I couldn't agree with him more: "This is the embarrassment of the decade for the Croatian web community.".

Compare and cry (tm):

More voices:

• http://www.mi3dot.org/forum/
• http://www.maratz.com/blog/archives/2008/05/15/croatian-hrt-rips-off-bbccouk/
  http://zytzagoo.net/blog/2008/05/15/hrt-vs-bbc/
• http://mcville.net/journal/archives/30
• http://marketingservis.com/internet/hrt-hr-i-bbc-co-uk/
• http://www.index.hr/vijesti/clanak/iz-koda-hrtove-stranice-najednom-nestalo-ime-tvrtke-koja-ju-je-radila/386937.aspx
• http://www.delo.si/index.php?sv_path=41,790,296704
• http://regionalexpress.hr/site/more/puleani-kreirali-web-hrt-a/

Updated 20.05. - Big up to our comrades in arms at BBC. And thanks to Alan Connor (co-editor of BBC Internet Blog) who linked to my article, and hey I really don't know how I missed this beauty - http://www.rtl.hu/. It seems that BBC was true inspiration for many "web designers". But, RTL.hu is light AGES ahead of HRT.hr. Whoever did the job, they did it well. There is just a small we-copied-bbc-design fact... but hey. :)

Unfortunately, it is my duty to report another Logitech G9 failure.

Before I begin, here is some sweet talk, just to put things in perspective. Now, generally I love this mouse; the ergonomics fit's my hand far better than G5 (harassed that one for years), looks like a 7of 9's breast implant - combining both sexy and super geek. The precision is noticeably better than G5, and the left mouse click just makes you want to ... well, click it. A winner on paper statistics for sure.

For those following our rantings, u should be familiar with Daemon's initial post describing the issues with trashy grip problem also known now as the „G5 skin disease affair“. I am sure many of you returned to more closely inspect the Hi-Res images, and documentation presented in the post.

As we expected, we where contacted by Logitech representatives, the mouse was replaced, and all was well (with a little help from some sticky grips).

4 months latter, the disaster strikes again!

This time the left mouse button stopped working and started irritating. Daemon says it is no surprise since he can hear me stomping on it in from the other room, but i know he is just sticking his head out for the love of Logitech. The truth is – there should be no excuse for a 6 month old Logitech G9 to cancel obedience.

I design, I click, I play Quake, I play TF2, and on average, Nivas Design crew spends 12 hours a day hard-core clicking, and yes.. I do believe the harder you press the button, the faster the bullets will fly (almost, a scientific fact, ask any gamer), but you don't buy G5 if you don't know your mice.

Fact is, my colleague is still pounding away on my old Logitech G5. The same G5 which passed a proper Guantanamo treatment in my hands for about 1.5 years, and now 6 months in his hands - and it is still working flawlessly!

What in the name of Christ and all that is holy and unholy, is wrong with this product?! Logitech G9 is seriously best mouse on the market while new. But durability of that mouse is just awful! How can they be called "Gamer grade" mice, when they cannot withstand hard core usage? Logitech PLEASE don't make me go out and buy Razor, 'coz we all know they look like a truck ran over a squid.

Daemon edit: to answer your question, yes, Nivas designers do work with Hand of Sauron

Goddamn, some things just throw me right off my balance. One of them is Current.com website, that no matter how good the idea is, and no matter how cool videos they have, details in execution just piss me off.

The logo - main visual identification on the site - is deployed to website so poorly that i spontaneously started to cry. The logo represents pixels, and there is no reason why designer didn't give that half an hour extra effort to make it look superb.

This is Current.com logo now:

As you can see, it looks blurry, and really unprofessional. Photoshop says this about it - 18 colors palette inside 1 kilobyte:

And behold now, with just 10 minutes of clicking, i made this:

Photoshop says - 4 colors palette inside 600 bytes:

For easier comparison and evaluation, here are the two logos together:

Why do lazy designers just get the logo in vectors, slap it into Photoshop, resize it, and think their job is done will never be clear to me. Monitors, especially LCD monitors which form majority of displays, require image optimization and tweaking in order to achieve polished feeling. Not to mention that lower filesize is an element too.

And also, as a side note, Current.com base-font is Helvetica. Can you designers working on Mac please take your head out of the sand and realize that 95% of users are on Windows, and most likely do not see Helvetica properly in their browsers? Read more about that in this post. I am sure that if base font was Arial, site would have at least 10% more visitors.

It's time for my usual rant on on the world of marketing.
It is pretty obvious to me by now that most of the Design studios and Marketing agencies read some books and saw some documentaries on how to successfully sell products. Mister Edward Bernays, father of „public relations“, with support of Sigmund Freud gave an observation that people will respond better if you sell them emotions instead of direct products (watch the great BBC documentary, "The Century of Self"). Using this method, he soon started marketing campaigns that sold Love, Freedom, Happiness, related or not related to some underlying product. Long story short – people will buy new shoes because „when you buy this shoes you will feel great and in love and entire world will smile with you“, not because „they are made out of quality leather and rubber“.

Selling emotions is currently the drive of entire design & marketing world.

In the start this was all cool, because those few products were really sticking out. Soon others followed, as marketing agencies caught the idea.

What we have now, are two typical examples (in Croatia, but there is a parallel all over the world).

Example one:

Telecom, VIP. Telecoms have loads of cash that they constantly rotate in the marketing. All the European advertising spaces (billboards, TV commercials, newspapers, ...) are flooded by telecom commercials. However they do not advertise the product or the product specs, they advertise emotions. VIP goes so far that their motto „All for you“ has nothing to do with telecom. On their homepage, there is no direct visual clue what they are about. Do they sell laptops?

One of my friends works for VIP, at sales for people, and he worked there since they started. His main issue is that nowadays people come into the sale point, and noone has a clue about options. Noone knows what plan options VIP offers, what phones are available inside those plans. Few years ago, while marketing revolved around selling product, not emotions, people came into the store, knew exactly what they want, bought stuff, and went out. Today, sales staff has to explain to every customer entire product range, since marketing is not communicating it. This leads to queues, too much workload being put onto staff, etc.

This is one of their billboards placed at very frequent locations in the city. It says "love". What the hell are you selling there? I know that this is supposed to help raise "brand awareness" and "communicate" something, and all that marketing buzzwords that actually have no meaning, but this is pure nonsense if you ask me. What, people in love are turning their backs to me? Is that what you are saying? Are you selling antidepressants?

Example two:

This one is a winner, when i saw their TV commercial i decided to write this. Croatian company „Dalmacija cement“ joined with Cemex, they produce cement and concrete. It does not get any more straightforward, should i say solid, than this. However, their TV commercial, pity i cannot find it on YouTube, is about people driving from capital city to the remote areas of the Croatia, in order to visit grandparents and stay happily connected with them. Invisible punchline is that they drive over the bridges and other road building-blocks that are made with their cement. What the hell? There is no talk about endurance of this cement, or about any of the qualities that would lure potential big buyers.

The logical conclusion is that within 5-10 years, all that will be on the market will be emotions. You will not even be able to buy matches at your local corner store without having a feeling that by buying those matches you will feel like champion, like king of the world. It does not matter is that t-shirt made out of quality cotton, as long as i feel some emotion related to it.

And i will take you one step further. Here is my prediction what will happen soon after that. One of the big players (Nike, CocaCola, T-Com, Apple, whoever) will launch marketing campaign where they feature their main product, display what materials are used to produce that product, and emphasize the quality of those materials. Screw emotions, this product is made out of top quality leather. Brilliant! Revolutionary! I bet some marketing agency will collect great money for this "new" idea.

I really can't figure out why they canceled this music video on TV across the globe. I feel like this all the time. :) Justice - Stress, directed by Romain Gavras from Kourtrajme Productions:

The no-bullshit, no visual clutter, maximum functionality, minimum system resource drainage Winamp skin is finally here. We do not believe in bloated pieces of software that eat up your eyes, system and screen real estate just to do simple tasks, like play music. Therefore, we made this black Winamp Classic skin. It's easy on your suffering eyes, with visible yet subtle buttons, and has that sweet neon glow. Also, being a Classic skin - it eats considerably less amount of memory, opposed to that bloated Modern junk.

To download and install just press the big button, and if you have Winamp installed, it should sort itself out one way or the other. Enjoy the Deep Black.