Yesterday, while waiting for our car to be serviced at Reliable Imports, we sat in a lounge with computers for product info, surfing, and game playing, and WiFi for our own mobile devices. Misty photoshopped the image for her last post, and I planned for this one. I don’t know if it sells cars, but it made the wait seem shorter.
Misty continues to tweak the Mobile Edition plugin, so you should see even better rendering on your internet enabled mobile devices. Is this a great world or what?
We drove up to Springfield to get Big Blue serviced, and while waiting we walked up the street to grab a bite. The sign caught our eye, nice black letters on yellow, very readable. It sounded a little like the FSBO scene that’s gotten recent attention. It wasn’t instantly readable that the logo was a website address, but we got the idea. We looked closer and found that 1. a car seller drives up to the lot, 2. inputs his VIN number at the self-service kiosk, 3. enters a price and prints a window decal, 4. goes to the photo bay to shoot multiple pix, 5. parks in an assigned space, and 6. waits for buyers to find the car at the lot or on the website and contact the seller to haggle. AutoSaleByOwners.com charges a $100.00 registration fee (Act now and they’ll waive it!) and $35.00 per week to park in the lot.
To us, it seems like there is some sort of good idea here, but that the Process Design isn’t quite right. We’d suggest drop the parking lot and weekly fee, do just a one camera attached to the kiosk panning shot of the car, and let people register online with there own pictures. Any other suggestions about how to make this work better?
Here’s a number from Holiday Inn. It shows that sometimes doing what you’re good at to please someone doesn’t work. And then trying to do something else doesn’t work either. The moral of the story is keep your sense of humor and keep going. Or don’t worry about pleasing others. What’s your opinion about it?
I love watching old movies at Christmas time! One of my favorites is Holiday Inn with Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, and a score by Irving Berlin. The movie introduced the song White Christmas, spawned the later movies White Christmas and Easter Parade, and still later inspired the name for the Holiday Inn hotels.
So the process was take two established brands — Astaire and Crosby — join them with a musical score by another established brand — Berlin — and then use popular feedback to spinoff new products to start the brand cycle over. And that’s why we have The Santa Clause 3!
From the front steps of the Unity Church of Fort Smith you can see two churches nearby. What each church needs is Decommoditification! What unique story can any of them tell that makes them not only stand out, but separates them from the crowd. That is where Brand Design comes in.
When your building has a steeple, stained glass windows, and is made of stone and brick, most people in the Western World will know that your building is a church. When your architecture tells your story, you don’t need much of a sign.
Today we went to a wedding in Ft. Smith, AR. Outside the church, I spotted this water meter box cover with the Arkansas Razorback Logo. It turn out that the Ford Meter Box Co. turns 108 years old next Wednesday. Their website doesn’t use a logo on their homepage, but they do have a logo celebrating their hundredth birthday. It seems they made it past a hundred years by using their customers logos instead of their own. Now that’s user centered design for you!
The mystery lives on! We continue to get many visits from Tyler, TX, and now for the search term “ninja tattoos and drawings” on Yahoo. Although I’ve had a longterm interest in tattoos, and we are Design Ninjas, it just doesn’t make sense.
To clear up one mystery, that’s Sandy Duncan on TV’s Omnibus, from the Broadway revival of Peter Pan in the clip, who was born in Henderson, TX and grew up in Tyler.
Driving south on AR-5 yesterday, Misty shot this clip from Calico St. past Walnut St. to Railroad St. before crossing the tracks and bridge over the White River in Calico Rock, AR. The first thing I noticed was the lack of sign pollution compared to Mountain Home. The town is about 27 miles southeast of here and has a population of about 1025. Then I noticed that the east side of the street had awnings covering the sidewalk, reminded me of some streets in Santa Fe, NM. Maybe in a town where everybody knows your name, you don’t have to shout it out with your sign.
Misty and I are geeks, we even had a Geek Dinner last May by Lake Norfork. Misty is more of a puzzle solving geek who likes to put the pieces together to come up with the big picture, while I’m more a big picture geek who likes to drill down to the details. And we like Hugh MacLeod’s advice to Fenderkicker: “The more geeked-out your blog, the more frickin’ yachts you will sell.”
