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Redesign: Branding

Thursday 19 February, 2004 ( 2:46PM GMT)

One of the biggest and most immediately obvious changes that was made in the redesign was the establishment of a much stronger brand. The term 'brand' might sound a bit too commercial, but basically I wanted HTML Dog to be more recognisable and to do that I wanted to establish a firm identity, particularly through a good logo.

The 'dog tag' idea of having a dog inside a less-than and greater-than symbol has been around from the start - originally it was a collie. The collie tended to be in the background and not on every page. She was a shy bitch. But now the confident boxer has muscled in and demands to be prominent on every page. He's a strong dog and he's here to stay.

Usability is extremely important, but one of the criticisms of usability main man Jakob Nielsen, for whom I have a lot of time, is that he fails to recognise the importance of branding. There is an argument that any graphical elements (by which I mean images) impend usability because they are so big in file size compared to quality textual content, but the benefits of branding (usually long term) should, in most cases, lead to a more successful web site than a plain, unbranded, nondescript one (such as Nielsen's useit.com).

After saying how much I hate graphical text, the 'htmldog.com' at the top of the page is now an image instead of functional text. I think this is justified because of the very specific style I wanted to achieve that I didn't feel I could adequately replicate with CSS. It is not only the dog tag picture that makes up the logo, but also the text so it needed to be very precise for the same reason that the type in the Amazon and Google logos need to be precise - to establish a solid, unquestionable, lucid, instantly recognisable brand.

I saw no reason to use anything other than functional text for the tagline however, so this remains as it was. I did think about changing it to 'The Web Designer's Best Friend' though...

Comments

Comment 1

AHH! It blinks!
Be nice to IE users. It blinks for me. I'm using IE now, usually I use MyIE2 from MySoft, but I have a virus that's causing some kind of C++ error. *shrugs*.
Oh yeah, would you link to my SF History blog? If you do I'll link to you.

So said Dante Evans on Saturday 21 February, 2004 at 4:42AM GMT.

Comment 2

The collie tended to be in the background and not on every page. She was a shy bitch. But now the confident boxer has muscled in and demands to be prominent on every page。

So said JETFTY on Tuesday 29 June, 2004 at 10:34AM GMT.

Comment 3

you are doing GREAT WORK. Looking forward to your posts.

So said Coco on Tuesday 6 July, 2004 at 2:08PM GMT.

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