Must Design

Paul & Shark's new flagship store demonstrates how design can refresh a brand...

Rejuvenating a brand speaks volumes about the brand identity, its USP and its projected future, all rolled into a single wholesome experience. When B+H Architects were asked to work on the new flagship store in Hong Kong to augment the launch of Paul & Shark into the Asian markets, they capitalized on two aspects: fine craftsmanship and innovative spirit of the brand.

Marty Note
Appreciate India Art & Design sharing this post. The post is about how Paul & Shark used design to rebrand their stores and it gives us a chance to discuss one of our favorite aspects of web design.

All the world is a stage.

When team Curagami (http://www.Curagami.com ) helps design an ecommerce website NOTHING is left to chance. In an ideal world we TEST everything before we pull triggers.

Ideal world's rarely exist, so we model many core details based on other similar tests or intuition (influenced by thousand of tests, reading and stealing from those we know test a lot lol).

NOTHING is left to chance.

Just as a store wraps around its shoppers websites wrap around visitors. Great ecommerce websites such as REI.com or Threadless.com understand HOW they set the stage frames the play. Websites as stage are far from a passive communication medium.

When you walk into a store the store's stage communicates a million messages to our "shopper brain". One day standing in Nordstrom I looked UP. Thousands of lights carefully directed reinforced store as stage. Nordstrom's display team must spend HOURS directing those lights (look up next time you visit a big box store).

Web designs use COLOR as "light". Color is a web designrer's klieg lights. Images come and go, but color is forever (lol). Online color creates excitement, awareness, a desire to take an action and chances shoppers will join, buy and share.

Look HARD at how B+H used color to reinforce Paul & Shark's "Brand Ideals", Unique Selling Propositions (well articulated in the article) and what we call Unique Customer Aspirations or UCA (how customers want to use a brand to actualize their aspirations and dreams for themselves) and ask yourself, "Does our web design do that too?".

Marty Note
Red is an IMPOSSIBLE web design color except when it isn't. There is an excellent comment at the end of this post sharing the best red websites:

Ashley Pajak Comment

There is no doubt that choosing the right colors for a design is a very important step of the creative process. We need to think about the message and the style

Marty Note
Great HuffPost roundup of several important infographics and psychology of color studies. Which ones surprised you? Problem is every website wants ALL of those emotions, but not all at once (lol). Key is picking right color for right content / place on your site.

RED may SUCK as a homepage because it chases people away, but red could ROCK as an accent. Red "buy" buttons have only been beat ONE TIME in thousands of tests we've run. So find the right color conversation and have it at the right time.

At Curagami (http://www.Curagami.com) we think of colors as ways to help tell stories. We try to "match the hatch" of the story we are telling to colors in our images or within supporting graphics such as icons or widgets.

When our story is EXCITING we like RED or variations of it. We may also isolate the red by using black and white. Isolating red makes its power SHOUT in just the right minimal way sometimes. Too much red makes you want to RELAX so we may follow a RED with a soothing green or blue.

Websites are hub and spoke so it van be impossible to map stories to color in sequence. BUT if you match the PAGE to your colors you can win and be sure to daisy chain content telling the same story with enough similar colors and scenttrail to create a sense of connection. If you tell a GREEN story and suddenly smack your readers with too much red they RUN.

Win the page, link the page and win the psychology of color battle in your web design.

And YES I'm breaking my Big Blogs curation rule for the 3rd time in a day (lol). Soon as you state a stupid rule like that you break it and that is a definite RULE (lol). M

Color & Texture
This share bucks the flat monochrome color trend being driven by mobile, but its hard to deny the sensual impact of just the right color and texture as in Paid to Exist and other examples here. Brilliant.

istock approached creatives from around the world and collected the strongest trends in colour and design: Pantone's Color of the Year and Top 10 Hot or Not.

Just like every other element of web design, color palettes follow fads that are constantly evolving. This year’s color trends are as diverse as they are

It’s vital to move beyond the standard logo and tagline and take a holistic approach to evoking emotions among potential customers across all of your marketing channels — including social media sites.