Langton Cherubino Group

Langton Cherubino now at the itunes store!

david — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:44:29 +0000

Visual communication is the topic on the WGCH Greenwich radio program featuring David Langton Co-founder of Langton Cherubino Group. Find out how Norman and David began their business…and learn about the often misunderstood value of designing effective communications. Greg Skidmore, President of Belray Asset Management and David Lehn of Withers Worldwide are the hosts of this weekly program about entrepreneurs which you may listen to below…or download for free at the itunes store.

Langton Cherubino Group Wins 2010 Communicator Award

david — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:54:46 +0000

2010 Communicator Award, Award of Distinction, Internal Communications

Langton Cherubino Group along with Mercer Human Resource Consulting created a poster campaign for the employees of Unilever that highlights their employee health and welfare programming.
The Communicator Awards is the largest and most competitive awards program honoring the creative excellence for communications professionals. The awards are judged and overseen by the International Academy of the Visual Arts (IAVA), a 450+ member organization of leading professionals from various disciplines of the visual arts dedicated to embracing progress and the evolving nature of traditional and interactive media.

Making it Right as Rain: Part 2.

david — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:45:09 +0000

Sarah Dale Olvera and Gavino Olvera joined us to see the initial logo concepts for their charity: Right as Rain. Meet the Olveras and take a sneak peak at the initial design presentation in this video clip.

Langton Cherubino logos win TrademarksUSA competition

david — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:43:37 +0000

Logos we designed for IPRO and Koinonia have been selected for inclusion in TradeMarks USA a logo competition and digital resource developed by legendary designer and author David E. Carter — one of the founders of the American Pixel Academy, and serves at its Executive Director. Carter is a multiple Emmy® and Clio® winner, and has a long history of media innovation. He is the author of 100+ books on logo design, serves as editor of the Creativity Annual, and is the founder of the Telly® Awards.

IPRO
IPRO is one of the nation’s largest independent, not-for-profit health care consulting organizations. The logo was developed to express the breadth of services and national reach of IPRO which has outgrown its roots as a small county-based organization. Click here to see more.

Koinonia
Koinonia is a center for spiritual renewal and leadership development, providing retreats, camps and conferences for families, youth, adults and church groups.

Your website is key to social media success

david — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:06:07 +0000

We know what media is and we know what marketing and networking mean, but what is the “social” part that is so revolutionary? Anthony Bradley, from Gartner Research, defines it like this: “Social media is a set of technologies and channels targeted at forming and enabling a potentially massive community of participants to productively collaborate.” Social media becomes the place where people connect, relate and communicate which in turn affects their perspectives, judgments and choices in how they spend, save or invest money and ultimately influences who people choose to advise and manage their money.

Website as primary tool
Your website is still your most important communication tool. It serves as the portal to your company, it’s services, it’s people and it’s mission. “You shouldn’t be committing staff to Facebook if you don’t have a decent website home page or can’t email supporters,” says Katya Andresen, COO of Network for Good. If your website is not inviting and engaging your clients and prospects, how can you expect your social media tools to do any differently? The way that you communicate with your audience is how you will express your brand in the tools of social media, the website is still the most powerful tool in your repertoire. Get the website right, and the Facebook Fan page is a lot easier to build.

1. Making it Mobile
The website should be redesigned or maximized for smart phones. These devices are now the primary mode of communication for most of your clients. Making it mobile does not just mean making it smaller. You need to re-think the workflow of the website, minimize tabs, shorten links and offer content in a smart and accessible manner.

2. Blogging with comments
Beside making your content relevant, you need to offer frequent updates, new perspectives, and reactions to real world events. Many of this can be done on a blog. Your blog can archive commentary and link stories and demonstrate your unique approach to investing. You can add new blog posts very quickly and easily offer new content on your website. This is where you may add a “comments section” and begin real dialogue with clients and prospects.

3. Linking to Social Marketing Tools
Add ShareThis or Add This plug-ins to your website and blog so users may promote your website using their own social networking tools. For your email blasts use a social media link that adds a tiny little tag that simply grabs your email’s subject line and creates a tiny URL using bit.ly to share a copy of your email to the world. Social media links help people share and open emails more often. The “Email Marketing and Social Media Integration Report” found that email messages including a social sharing option generated 30% higher click-throughs than emails without any social sharing links. Messages with three or more sharing options generated 55% higher click-throughs. Emails with a Twitter sharing option returned 40% higher click-throughs than messages without any social media links.

4. Using Video and podcasts
You should begin using video clips and audio clips (or podcasts) from press appearances, or conferences where you or one of your executives are speaking. Post them on your blog or on your website. A simple Flip camera for $149 makes videos that you may instantly upload to your computer, edit and post. See our first Flip video.

5. CMS-Based
Your website should have a Content Management System like WordPress or Drupal that allows you to easily update the content on your website and blog…and to accept comments and feedback from your users. The days of static brochureware websites are over.

Conclusion:
Your brand encompasses the personality of your company, products or services. You must build your brand across all platforms and be especially aware of how your website relates to your Facebook page, your Linked-in profile as well as the language of your Twitter feed. Learning how to best use the new tools of social media may enhance your public image, but if handled poorly these same tools may dilute your brand and confuse your audience. Start getting “social” by getting your website right.

Making it Right as Rain, Part 1

david — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:18:51 +0000

Meet Sarah Dale Olvera, founder of Right as Rain. Sarah started a nonprofit where artisans donate their artwork to raise funds for people who encounter unexpected tragedies. See the video (at right.) This summer we will begin sketching new logo concepts and we’ll share our progress in a series of brief videos.

Web vs Webb wins best of Web

david — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:56:01 +0000

Play the game that proves you are a baby-boomer!
Our interactive game won a 2010 American Web Design Award from Graphic Design USA. The award celebrates the power of well-designed websites and online communications. Web vs Webb is a game based on the style of an old-fashioned quiz show that challenges players to distinguish between words from the “World Wide Web” and phrases that might have been uttered by Dragnet’s Jack Webb. Play the game here.

Color My World.

admin — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:46:12 +0000

Choosing by Color

The colors we use define us, from our walls and clothes to our cars and pets. How do we decide what colors things should be? Hans Hofmann said, “The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.” What if we used color to help us make our decisions? Here are examples of websites and apps that let Color make the decisions for you.

Etsy.com
Etsy sells crafts from independent artists around the world and they’ve developed a color system that lets you pick out a color, then see what craft is available in that color.

Idée Labs
Perhaps you’d like to pick your images by color? The Multicolr Search Lab is a part of Idée Labs’s technology playground for visual search. With the Multicolr Search Lab, you can browse through 10 million images on Flickr and choose up to 10 colors from a palette of 120 different shades.

ben Color Capture iPhone app
And what if you see a color you like and want to start there? Benjamin Moore has the app that can do that. The ben Color Capture app for iPhone lets you capture any color that catches your eye and instantly select its match from Benjamin Moore’s thousands of paint colors. Just snap a picture of your color inspiration, tap on the image, and instantly reveal the closest paint color. Download your free ben Color Capture app at the iTunes App Store.

Choose Your Color, Change Your Life
What do your color choices say about your personality? Can color lead you to your next career choice? Take the Dewey Color tests and see how your color selections may color your career choices. This non-language test gets beyond your preconceived career notions to recommend additional occupations.

Color your trip abroad
Journey to the center of the color universe at the Pantone Hotel, a new boutique property in Brussels that invites you to experience the Belgian capital “through a lens of color and a spectrum of comforts.” Designers Michel Penneman and Oliver Hannaert selected a distinctive palette for each of the hotel’s seven floors (which range from “daring and fiery” reds to “captivating, esteemed, silky” shades of violet) and upped the contrast with clean white walls and the saturated outsized photographs of Victor Levy. Pantone consultants are on call to assist with any color crises. Our favorite touch? A rooftop bar serving color-matched cocktails. Choose from Pink Champagne (Pantone 12-1107), Lemon Drop (12-0736), or Daiquiri Green (12-0435).

A or B? Test and See!

david — Fri, 14 May 2010 17:05:17 +0000

It’s important to keep evolving your creative executions, but it’s not always clear which direction will resonate best with your customers. So next time you’re presented with several options, instead of going with your gut, select your favorite two or three and test them. A/B Testing is a great tool to determine which of your new designs or subject lines will really ‘wow’ your audience. Our email marketing partner, OpenMoves offers a platform that automatically splits your mailing list into multiple segments, and sends your different creative options to each group. After the mailing, the system will show you the results of which version performed better. If testing subject lines, you should measure which line generated the best open rate. When testing creative, the click through rate will reveal which look got more people to visit your site.

Case Study

Our client Hanover Fire & Casualty Insurance Company recently tested new subject lines and creative layouts, in an effort to drive higher response rates and sign new policies. Starting with subject lines, they tried the following:
A: [Name], Do you care about protecting your Home or Apt. from fire?
B: [Name], affordable renters insurance
The first employed an emotional tone, while the second was based more on a value proposition; in this case, A was more successful.
The results of your split test results can easily be seen on the email marketing dashboard:

Hanover also tested two different visual designs. Both related to the company’s branding, but organized the space within the email differently:

The A layout performed best, and throughout the campaign, Hanover leveraged the same template but substituted in several different images to make each mailing feel fresh.
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Conclusion
Throughout the testing phase, Hanover learned which combination of tone and style would get them the best results. As a result, they are more in tune with their customers’ preferences AND are able to drive more business.

Where do logos come from?

RD — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:55:48 +0000

NYC Designer shares a guided process for developing a new brand.

For a printable version of this blog entry, click here.

I have one of those minds that doesn’t do well on standardized test. I question the questions too much. I read into them and scrutinize the many ways that each question may be interpreted. I once flunked my driver’s test renewal in New Jersey when I was in my late 20s. The question that did me in was one that asked what to do when you come to a steady yellow light. The correct answer — in New Jersey — is to slow down and prepare to stop. I consider a yellow light that is about to turn red as not in a “steady” state. To me, a flashing yellow light that consistently flashes is doing something “steady.” I selected, “Proceed with caution,” and had to wait another 30 days to take my exam again. The kind of thinking that interprets things differently may not excel on standardized tests, but it does come in handy when brainstorming a new logo concept. Seeing things from different angles presents the client with new perspectives of their brand.

Research and discovery

A new logo design begins with research. Who is the client? What type of service or product will the logo represent? There are two reasons to do this: 1. To make sure the logo concepts are relevant to that company and its industry and 2. To make sure you don’t do something that’s already been done.

Key decision-makers should be part of the research process. It’s important to get everyone on board from the beginning. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to try to do a logo for a company and show it to the CEO later. It’s not about impressing the leaders with your cool design—it’s about engaging the leadership in the process of developing a logo. We interview the key executives in the company – especially the CEO or owners–– and glean information about the current state of the company, its past and more importantly, its future.

Logo as Group Therapy

Examining what works in a company’s relationship with its public and its employees and taking a hard look at what doesn’t work is like a therapy session. You look at where a company is going and try to identify the images and themes that embody the aspirations of a company, product or service. We always caution our clients: we can make you look really good, but you must live up to the promise of your brand.

Once we were working on a new Internet investment account. The two managers of the company came in to discuss their new identity. One manager insisted that the investment philosophy should be long-term while the other wanted to capitalize on the potential “dot com millionaire” growth. They began to argue about the logo, but what they really were discussing was the direction of the company. We took a lot of notes. We asked them who was buying their mutual fund. They told us they thought it was entrepreneurs, silicon valley investors, young investors who wanted a piece of the action in Internet and technology investments. We asked them to go back to their database and tell us who was really buying their mutual funds. And they came back and told us that it was not who they expected. In fact, the biggest group of clients were dentists. Dentists? This information was crucial. Dentists were small business owners who had money to invest, wanted a piece of the Internet excitement but not necessarily the high level of risk. A mutual fund that invested in Internet stocks was exciting and was a safe bet. We used that to inform our design solution which positioned the fund as the authority on the “Information Highway.”

The Research and Discovery phase of work sets the stage for the brainstorming and creative exploration. We submit a Marketing Objectives Report to our client for review that defines the key words and themes for creative exploration. Then we begin the Design Exploration phase.

Design Exploration

There’s a lot of truth that not thinking about a problem may lead to a solution. While you are thinking of something else, your brain is subconsciously working out concepts. In Wired magazine, Brendan I. Koerner goes as far as to suggest that Facebook and Twitter time can stimulate creative thinking: “Humans weren’t designed to maintain a constant focus on assigned tasks. We need periodic breaks to relieve our conscious minds of the pressure to perform — pressure that can lock us into a single mode of thinking. Musing about something else for a while can clear away the mental detritus, letting us see an issue through fresh eyes, a process that creativity researchers call incubation.”
If you can tap into your subconscious and access those buried thoughts you may be able to improve your ability to brainstorm. We use a “Working Together/Working Apart” process where we meet as a team to discuss the marketing objectives and themes for an assignment, then go away to our private spaces to develop concepts and sketches. Then when we come back and share our work we are exposed to each other’s ideas and that usually opens up more possibilities and creates new directions to pursue.

Here are a few categories of exploration that we often consider:

Typographic solutions:
Just about every logo has letters in it, and unless you have the marketing budget and can just do it like Nike, you are most likely going to have to spell out your company, product or service name in the logo. Becoming familiar with how the letters in a name look in different typefaces is a great way to begin a design exploration. We will typeset the name in various styles and weights and begin looking at all capital letters vs upper and lower case. This simple exercise can lead you along a path of the unexpected. Jim Keller, our Design Director, was recently experimenting with the letter “K” in the name “Koinonia” which is the Greek word for being “in community.” Koinonia is the name of an upstate Lutheran spiritual center for Christian leadership. The new logo was intended to embody the peacefulness, spiritual renewal and community connections. By putting the “K” on its side, Jim was able to create a new inspirational logo that resembles a dove in flight, an open book, a newly plowed field, or a growing plant.

The answer may be blowing in the wind.

I love walking around the city or in my neighborhood and encountering unexpected letterforms and shapes. I’ll see letters in the trees or in the drains along the side of the road. I’ll stare at patterns in the landscape or find a strange shape in the reflection in a puddle. I’ve heard the songwriter Randy Newman talk about how the cacophony of found noises in a traffic jam of car horns or something blowing in the wind may reassemble themselves in a musical composition. In the same way, “found” objects might trigger new visual solutions that turn into a logo. Louis Pasteur once said that “In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.” When themes are on a subconscious level, your mind is prepared to take advantage of the visual hints and clues that surround you.

Louis Pasteur: Always preparing for great discoveries.

There are no bad ideas.

There are plenty of bad ideas to go around, and sometimes you do just have to get them out of your system. Writer Anne Lamott says you have to just write that first “shitty draft.” Once you get it down on paper, then the real writing begins. Every once and a while a really strange idea will make it to a final presentation, but most of the time the silly and crazy concepts free you up to think about something in a new and unorthodox way. Your bad idea may be the germ of a new idea that influences your next thought or the thoughts of your team of brainstormers.

The Team Approach

Some people generate a lot of ideas and some people need to react and respond to ideas. Both skills are important and the most exciting brainstormings are when one idea inspires another. We bring our team together and share ideas. We put the sketches on the wall and discuss the concepts. Then we move them around and regroup the sketches, not by who drew them but by categories that go together or share certain characteristics. One of my favorite sessions involved creating a benefits communication campaign for a consulting group. The consultants at this company were young and on-the-go, they spent most of their time on the road in other people’s offices and rarely attended on site meetings or connected in a traditional way to their home office. We had to break through the clutter and catch the attention of a population that wasn’t concerned about their company’s resources from health benefits to long term retirements plans.

One member of our team was working on a series of sarcastic sayings: “Look before you leap and you will lose.” Another was drawing cartoon characters like “Ask Jeeves” who would serve up advice in a Miss Manners/Dear Abby style column while one of us just thought we should feature a cute dog, because everyone likes to look at dogs, right? None of these ideas were resonating in and of themselves, but in the world of brainstorming, the dog was named “Benny” and he started offering advice which in turn became these sarcastic saying that captured the attention of our target audience. It was one of those times when all the crazy ideas combined make a distinctive marketing campaign that went on to the capture over 85% of the employees in a successful enrollment program that garnered acclaim and won awards.