Lauren Nelson, Author at crowdspring Blog

Best of 2016: Logo Redesigns

Lauren Nelson — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 15:36:13 +0000

Here are some of the most compelling logo redesigns of 2016.

Best of 2016: Mobile App Design

Lauren Nelson — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 15:20:56 +0000

In today’s world, where roughly 80% of American adults own a smartphone, companies know the significance of investing in a mobile presence. And given that 90% of time spent on those phones takes place within apps, it’s not all that surprising that there are now more than 2 million options available for download in Apple’s app store alone. Though some argue that the app boom is dying off, what we see is that consumers have simply become more discerning about which apps they’re willing to download, increasing the significance of mobile UI design in making an app successful. Here are some of the folks who killed it with mobile app design this year. Habitica It’s goofy. It’s useful. It’s gorgeous. Habitica is a role-playing game app intended to help users start and build habits. You accrue rewards and punishments in the game for the real-life activity you log. The graphics hearken back to older graphics from the early days of role play computer games, but the interface itself is sleek, colorful, and intuitive. Marline Not all of us may have a need to know what the tides are up to at any given point in time, but if you do, Marline is a stunning solution. The interface is simple to navigate, and the designs are elegant. Marline is a fantastic example of how keeping things simple is often the best choice. Dials Calendar Don’t think you need another scheduling app? You might reconsider once you take a look at the Dials Calendar interface. It’s a distinctive visualization of your day that eschews the traditional vertical display of upcoming appointments and dates. Plus it syncs with a wide variety of other scheduling apps, so you need not start from scratch. That design, paired with the visual elements, makes this one of our favorite innovations, even if it does seem startlingly simple. Pokemon GO We’ve written before about this standout 2016 app and its potential value to marketers, but it’s also worth showing a little appreciation for the ability of its designers to elegantly compose something so complex. The pretty graphics, paired with an easy to explore menu, spread out over a global map was no small feat to create, and the reaction of the users speaks to just how well they did their job. Ongoing integration of changes that add to without disrupting the experience show just how versatile the app design really is. Prisma There are hundreds of photo apps out there fulfilling a wide variety of purposes. Titans like Instagram and Snapchat are unlikely to be unseated anytime soon, but Prisma’s launch this year proved the space is not yet saturated. The photo alteration app allows users to turn basic photos into full blown works of art. They keep the interface very basic, instead offering filter design that far and away surpasses what any other app out there is doing. The ability to quickly share the images to the platform of the user’s choosing makes it..

Best of 2016: Web Design

Lauren Nelson — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 16:18:34 +0000

There are only a few more days left in the year, and it’s been a huge one for web design. Companies have started to understand how crucial a strong user experience is to maximizing conversion with their online audiences, and have invested accordingly. As they’ve done this, web aesthetics have exploded in terms of creativity, making picking a few of our favorites exceedingly difficult. Even so, these stood out from the pack. JK Rowling The beloved Harry Potter author’s website was due for an overhaul, and this sprucing up was just the ticket. The custom, distinctive background nicely encompasses the value Rowling provides through her writing, community engagement, and social media presence. It’s a great example of a website design that neatly aligns with the unique value proposition of the brand it represents. Hemp Meds We wrote earlier this year about the exploding branding scene inside legal cannabis consumption, and this fresh look for Hemp Meds exemplifies exactly what so many legal cannabis brands are aiming for: legitimacy. The prominent featuring of a happy family and the framing of the product’s value as a solution instead of a form of entertainment were deliberate choices, and give the site the look and feel of a pharmaceutical or healthcare company. This is a fantastic case of a brand understanding the necessity of positioning in a field where expansion is more akin to a game of chess than sales game. RocketBuilder.com Ok, we’ll be the first to admit that the ask here — $109 million for a custom built, fully functional rocket — is more than a little fanciful. But this ULA site’s design almost makes the offer seem accessible to even the lowest of us plebeians. The interactive setup makes it seem like you, too, have the ability to place an order for your very own rocket ship, and the clean, futuristic aesthetic makes the experience engrossing. We might not be in a position to click “buy” anytime soon, but if we had that much money laying around, this website design would more than tempt us. avidxchange When your company grows, it’s important that your image grows with it, and this website redesign from avidxchange is exactly how you do that. The Charlotte-based provider of accounts payable and payment automation solutions had acquired three different companies over the past several years, and it was finally time to unify the brands under one umbrella. This website redesign not only accomplished the goal by creating a sharp image for the unification, but it did so while paying homage to the process that brought the company to this place with intersecting angles reflecting the composition of the company’s ultimate value. iFly 50 Ok, the screenshot does not do this design work justice. Go to the website. Just do it. Now. iFly is the in-flight magazine for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. To celebrate the anniversary of the publication, KLM launched a stunning website highlighting 50 fantastic travel destinations, expertly weaving artistic design,..

Best of 2016: Book Cover Designs

Lauren Nelson — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 15:39:21 +0000

It's been a great year for bold book covers. Here are some of our favs.

13 Ways Your Brand Can Get in the Holiday Spirit

Lauren Nelson — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 14:34:26 +0000

The holidays are around the corner. Is your brand ready to celebrate?

Psychographics: The Key to Effective UX Design

Lauren Nelson — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 13:30:25 +0000

Demographics might do a good job of answering "who" your customers are, but psychographics hold the key to "why."

Why Brands Should Ditch Pinktober

Lauren Nelson — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 14:05:59 +0000

Brands are all about the pink this month. They're also getting it all wrong.

Should Your Company Develop a Mobile App?

Lauren Nelson — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 20:08:23 +0000

Everyone is saying that mobile apps are the future of marketing. But is the right future to chart for YOUR company?

SMS Marketing: The Neglected Engagement Goldmine

Lauren Nelson — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 15:02:15 +0000

The largest companies on the planet are already using SMS marketing. Is your business taking advantage of communication medium with a 98% open rate?

Is Canva the Company That Will Disrupt the Design World? Not Quite

Lauren Nelson — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 14:36:58 +0000

Could the right logo transform your business? Uncover 15 insights with our free quiz! Canva, the graphic design platform promoting itself as tool that empowers the world to design, is not new. It launched in 2013 with $3 million in seed money from American and Australian investors, and offers a series of templates intended to make good design easier to execute and more accessible. It’s a nice concept, which is probably why it’s grown astronomically. As Forbes reports: Canva, the Sydney, Australia-based online graphic design platform, raised a new $15 million round of funding, the company announced on Wednesday. The latest funding valued the startup at $345 million, more than double the company’s $165 million valuation a year ago. Canva’s latest round was led by Sydney-based Blackbird Ventures and Silicon Valley-based Felicis Ventures, the same firms that funded Canva’s separate $15 million round a year ago. To date, Canva has raised about $42 million, the company said. Among Canva’s investors are actor Owen Wilson, Google Maps cofounder Lars Rasmussen and 500 Startups founding partner Dave McClure. Impressive stuff, right? But the question surrounding Canva has been whether or not it has the potential to disrupt the design world in the way it intended. Part of its origin story was that CEO Melanie Perkins was teaching graphic design and realized that her students were struggling to understand basic concepts. This tool was her answer. But is it the answer for those seeking to do design on their own? And what kind of answer is it in the end? Recent statements from Perkins regarding the direction of the company provide context: Canva cofounder and CEO Melanie Perkins said the startup hasn’t used a cent of the $15 million round it raised in 2015 because of strong revenue growth. Now, the company plans to use its two latest rounds to spend more heavily on expansion over the next 12 to 18 months with the goal of becoming a mainstream workplace tool employees use to create any document, presentation or marketing material needed for work, competing with more broadly known tools like Microsoft Office. Did you catch that? Go back. Reread. Microsoft Office. Canva might have started out as an attempt to disrupt the world of design, but that has not been its function to date, nor does it seem likely to rise to that level in the near future. Though Canva and Microsoft Office might provide clean solutions for those with minimal resources, they fail to provide what professionals need out of design services: customization and innovation. How much is a great logo worth to your business?Answer 5 quick questions & gain 15 valuable insights to drive customer loyalty and business growth.Start the free quiz now! Yes, those stock invitation designs might work now and then, but if you’re a startup looking to make a brand-centric splash, they’re not going to cut it. There is always going to be a role for design professionals in branding and marketing. It might take some brands time..

crowdSPRING Community Gives Back with Branding for Global Sanitation Non-Profit gather

Lauren Nelson — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 15:07:36 +0000

At crowdSPRING, we feel very fortunate to participate in such a vibrant community of talented creatives. It’s the work we do as a collective that makes the greatest impact. But we also value our broader, global community, and feel it’s important to make an impact there, as well. That’s part of why we launched our Give Back program back in 2008. The crowdSPRING creatives agreed to offer up their services on a voluntary basis to worthy non-profits and charitable groups at no cost to the organizations, while we agreed to waive all fees and assist in the setup and promotion of their projects. The idea was that if branding and marketing matter and these organizations are doing good work, we wanted to contribute in the best way we could. Thus, the Give Back program was born. And we’re thrilled to announce that the crowdSPRING community’s next Give Back project is to brand UK non-profit gather. This group is working to make sure underprivileged communities across the world have access to something folks in many Western nations take for granted: a toilet. An ever-growing health crisis In many developing nations, sanitation systems are in a woeful state at best and entirely absent at worst, particularly in more remote areas. It is estimated that 2.6 billion people — more than one-third of the world’s population — do not have sufficient access to a working toilet. This is often directly linked to lack of infrastructure and clean water sources, and the consequences can be dire, particularly for children. As many as 5,000 kids worldwide die every day from diseases and conditions linked to this inadequacy. Example of a Kenyan shared pit latrine Image Source: wsup.com Luckily, great strides have been made in technology that is bringing access to clean water and toilets to areas. It’s becoming more affordable and easier to build. But the problem has been scaling. As communities consolidate and grow, their sanitation and waste management needs are growing, too, in both size and sophistication. And while rudimentary solutions are certainly an improvement over no access to all to such resources, the more efficient and effective solution is one that provides for long-term and far reaching access. In order for that to happen, the brilliant minds tackling the issue need access to data. And that’s where gather comes in. Build a strong nonprofit brand.Apply to see if your nonprofit qualifies for free design services from crowdspring's Give Back program. We just emailed you info about the Give Back program. Email Address Enabling sanitation solutions The non-profit launched earlier this year with the goal of finding an effective way to build toilets and waste management systems to serve the most marginalized people. As they got down to business, though, they found that a lack of centralized information on existing infrastructure and resources was a major handicap to durable progress. “In March, we met with more than 25 sanitation providers in Kenya and Uganda, and discovered that this lack of data was a universal problem,” explains..

5 Ways to Tackle the Tricky Business of Measuring Branding and Marketing ROI

Lauren Nelson — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 15:37:24 +0000

One of the major benefits of the digital age is that marketers now have far more meaningful metrics by which to evaluate the success of their initiatives. It’s no longer just about creative swagger and assumptions regarding your audience. We have an avalanche of data on consumer preferences and behavior, website usage, content engagement, and more at our disposal. It’s enough to make ya giddy. With this data comes the ability to quantitatively evaluate the performance of our efforts. A landing page, for instance, can be analyzed relative to conversions. Your display ads can be scrutinized according to cost per lead. Your social media posts can be compared on the basis of impressions and engagement. But is that really enough to demonstrate ROI on an overall strategy? How do you calculate the dollar value of a shared meme from your Facebook page? How do you determine the expected RoR on a newsletter subscriber? How do you assess the impact of a prominent retweet to your bottom line? How do you nail down the contribution of a new logo to your profits? This conundrum is particularly relevant to those making a case for a specific budget or allocation to a marketing initiative. This data glut has created an impression among those not directly involved in marketing that everything can be boiled down to decimal points. But what about all of the peripheral marketing and branding activities taking place that push your audience to convert? How does one explain that to the powers that be? 1. Whenever possible, give the people what they want — namely, hard numbers that take into consideration short and long term impact. There are those who have come up with creative ways to make such determinations. Data segmentation, in particular, can help you do things like measure cost per lead relative to customer lifetime value by channel. It’s not possible to do this for every aspect of your strategy, but delivering where it is can help your credibility. Want a free brand review?Answer 5 short questions and we will send a custom report with actionable insights and specific actions you can take to build a stronger brand. We just emailed the info to you. Email Address 2. Even when metrics are not tied to dollar amounts, collect, organize, and analyze trends in performance. Maybe you don’t have a way to definitively say how much an article share on Facebook is worth to your organization, but if you can demonstrate improvement in engagement, it shows that the strategy is working the way it should. 3. Contextualize all available data relative to aggregate spend. How much are you spending on your marketing as a whole? When possible, tabulate marketing-specific salaries, service provider expenses, ad spends, contract work, new technology acquired within the given time period, and any additional expenses accrued through planning and execution. Hold that relative to the overall performance of the company during the same time frame, and focus specifically on improvement in associated metrics. Is this a perfect form of analysis? Of course not. But..

Battle Royale: Evaluating the Marketing and Branding Efforts of Clinton and Trump

Lauren Nelson — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 13:10:46 +0000

If you’re a fan of the musical Hamilton, you know elections weren’t always this polarizing. It wasn’t until 1800, when young upstart Aaron Burr chose to break with tradition and openly campaign against favored Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson, that the idea of directly attacking an opponent and speaking on your own qualifications became a thing. Admittedly, things have… intensified… since then. The 2016 election cycle spend blew past the $1 billion mark in April of this year, well before the final candidates in the general had been decided. Now that both the Republican and Democratic conventions are over and done, things are about to kick into high gear, with a high dollar budget to match. Where do all those dollars go? The most expensive branding and marketing campaigns in the world. That’s what a campaign is, at the end of the day. It might have started with Aaron Burr talking at social clubs, but campaigns today include millions dumped into advertising, social media strategy, promotional products, and more. And just like any other campaign like this, some of it’s good… and some of it’s awful. So how are the branding and marketing efforts of the candidates stacking up to date? Round One: Logo Design The Clinton camp rolled their logo out at the beginning of her primary campaign, opting for a flat, simple design. The use of an arrow to punctuate the structure of the “H” was reminiscent of the arrow used in the FedEx logo design, and was chosen to represent a march toward progress. It didn’t escape Millennials that the rightward facing logo also aligned with “swipe right” on Tinder. Though some really liked it, others were less than impressed. There were concerns that the most prominent and active element of the logo was red, which is a color primarily associated with Republicans in terms of logo design (to be fair, she’s since rectified this). It also seemed exceedingly basic following the somewhat revolutionary logo designs featured by the Obama campaign in 2008 and 2012. It was so simple, in fact, that applications were developed allowing anyone to turn their picture into a Clinton-esque logo. Trump’s logo, on the other hand, has always been… well, boring. Say what you will about Clinton’s weird arrow, but Trump’s initial logo showed absolutely no creativity. Simple and traditional fonts, paired with the most subtle of accents, made it utterly forgettable. No. Seriously. We forgot it existed. And when he tried to get frisky after picking Pence as his running mate, the campaign totally missed the mark, leading to a whole bunch of NSFW mocking. They realized their mistake after an onslaught of ridicule and changed course, but the newest logo is just as dull as the original. There also doesn’t seem to be a high quality image file for it anywhere. The upside? No more gay sex jokes about candidates for whom that kind of thing seems to matter. Verdict: Clinton, mostly by default. Want a free brand review?Answer 5 short questions..

22 Ways Brands Can Use Facebook Live Video to Drive Business

Lauren Nelson — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:57:41 +0000

It’s a well-established fact that video can drive major engagement for a brand. As Gary Vaynerchuk pointed out last year: The single most important strategy in content marketing today is video. Whether it’s video on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or Youtube, the content you need to be thinking about creating and marketing on social for your business is video. Period. No matter what you’re selling, no matter what your company does, if you don’t have a video marketing strategy for the biggest video platforms, you are going to lose. And in case you haven’t noticed, the platforms of distribution for video content online have shifted drastically over the last 18 months. Facebook is getting more daily minutes watched than YouTube, Snapchat’s daily views are now in the billions, and video on Twitter has taken listening and one to one branding to a whole new level. What could be better than that? Live video. Apps like Meerkat and Periscope shook up the market in this respect, but other social titans weren’t far behind. Facebook, in particular, realized pretty quickly they were going to have to evolve in that direction to keep their user base engaged. Initially, they introduced the feature to their platform last year for verified accounts, but eventually, they expanded access to the general user base. Though demand for the service had been demonstrated by smaller players, Facebook live video feeds didn’t catch on right away. Celebrities like George Takei have been more likely to use it than others, allowing the feature to function like a video-based version of a Reddit AMA, but most users were either unaware of its availability or unsure how to use it. That’s begun to shift over the past couple of weeks. Following the live feed from Philando Castile’s girlfriend that was broadcast right after her boyfriend had been shot by an officer, a slew of people took to the live platform to express their frustrations. Suddenly, Facebook’s live video had found an audience, with one of many applications in the spotlight. Want a free brand review?Answer 5 short questions and we will send a custom report with actionable insights and specific actions you can take to build a stronger brand. We just emailed the info to you. Email Address As the live broadcast option gains greater visibility, it’s anticipated to become a more frequently used feature. In acknowledgment of potential growth, Facebook recently updated the look and feel of such video experiences. As Design & Trend reports: Facebook announced that it has begun rolling an update to its live video platform that would allow longer live broadcasts. People and Page administrators will now be able to broadcast Facebook Live up to four hours per session, according to VentureBeat. When Facebook Live first launched, it only allowed users to broadcast live videos for up to two hours. The social media site said that people have requested to make livestreams longer and so the company has done just that by doubling the limitation. Facebook has also..

Six Reasons Your Logo Might Need a Makeover

Lauren Nelson — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 15:11:44 +0000

Despite the cautionary tales, there are times when a brand refresh and a new logo makes a whole world of sense for companies.

Lessons from the New Netflix Logo

Lauren Nelson — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 13:00:53 +0000

What your business can learn about building a brand identity from the Netflix logo redesign.