Giant's Project Refresh

My brother called yesterday morning. "I've got a blog suggestion for you. Comment on the new Giant logo. I read the Post article about it and it sounds like a load of crap to me." While I respect my brother's opinion, I disagree.

I had seen the new branding; in fact, a postcard urging "Come celebrate our fresh new look!" was propped up against my monitor. Frankly, the coupons on the back are what caught my eye. Like everyone else, my food budget is stretched thin and I was drawn by the coupon for $1.00 off Rotisserie Chicken. But I had also read the Washington Post article, "Giant Puts on a Fresh Face For Its Supermarket Upgrades," that describes the rebranding.

I think Royal Ahold deserves high praise for reworking this tired brand. I grew up at the White Oak Giant Food; my mother hauled me there every Saturday to buy the family's groceries. Giant was THE place to shop for food in the DC area - until a few years ago when the house that Izzy Cohen built was sold to the international conglomerate, Royal Ahold. The store's venerable brand then slipped because of lackluster customer service, higher prices, poorly laid out stores, and more.


This serves as another reminder that a brand is NOT a logo. A brand is the feeling customers or clients have about your product or service. To use a very hackneyed analogy, creating a new logo for a mediocre company is like putting lipstick on a pig. Royal Ahold knows this and "is planning to expand its selection of prepared foods and private-label offerings. It also is instituting a family checkout lane that bans tabloids and candy in favor of yogurt, animal crackers and bottled water. Hand-held scanners soon will be available for shoppers to ring up groceries while they browse the store." New logo + improved service and products = renovated and resurrected brand. Smart, too.

The old Giant logo is just that: old. As the Post article states, the brand was created in 1963. Just like me, it needed a facelift (just kidding - in my case anyway). Royal Ahold needed to breathe life back into the stores, and in a market that includes exceptionally well-branded companies like Bloom and Trader Joe's, Giant needs to be able to compete.

My nomination for the next brand that needs refreshing? Safeway. It's looking a wee bit weary and boring in the now-more-vibrant grocers industry. It will interesting to see how the company reintreprets this household-name brand.

Before and After: TSpec

Julie & Company has just finished up a website for a long-time client, Technical Specialties, otherwise known as TSpec. The good folks there have been good to us for years; we first started working with them in 2001 when we rebranded and renamed the company. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of the original logo, but as I remember it was pretty lame. Everyone was happy with the updated logo and website when it debuted seven years ago.

Fast forward to 2008. A lot has happened since then - especially on the web. What was an innovative site in 2001 now looked, well, nearly ridiculous. It was difficult to navigate, impossible to optimize for search engines, and was just plain old worn out.

BEFORE


So Patrick Carter, TSpec VP, called me to the rescue again. We've just launched the revised site and once again, everyone is happy with the face lift. We kept the logo as it is because it still looks fresh; this also allowed the company to avoid reprinting everything in its marketing arsenel. But Julie & Company greatly updated the homepage, adding a Flash animation, rollovers, and pop-up navigation. We also created sections for TSpec's major markets, allowing the company to provide a targeted message to a targeted audience.

AFTERAll's well that ends well - for now anyway. It's likely that within a decade TSpec will be hiring Julie & Company for another new website design. Why? Because the web will have continued to evolve and grow, and what looks great today will again look obsolete.

However, if we're lucky, both Patrick and I will have won the lottery, paid off all our bills, and be living like royalty someplace warm. From my lips to God's ears! Until that time, thank you, TSpec for being such a great and loyal client.

Colour My World

For all the colorphiles out there, I've found a fabulous new blog: ColourLovers. This inspired masterpiece of a blog offers fascinating stories about color. Today's entry, for example, discusses and displays naturally occurring, opulently colored salt evaporation ponds. These man-made pools take on the color of the microorganisms that inhabit them, producing every hue from peach to emerald. Fascinating - and beautiful.


And then there is ColourLover's discussion of brocken bows, something that I'd never heard of before. According to the-font-of-all-knowledge Wikipedia, a brocken bow is an "enormously magnified shadow of an observer, cast upon the upper surfaces of clouds opposite the sun." Brocken bows occur on foggy mountain tops - which explains why I haven't heard of them. I haven't spent ten minutes on a foggy mountaintop since I was a Girl Scout in 1967! These specter-like occurrences bring to mind pictures of Jesus; perhaps he experienced a brocken bow? That would have been quite a sight - enough to start a world religion (especially if you're the Son of God - as we all are, INHO).

Kudos to ColourLovers. Keep up the great work!

Worshipping Crayola crayons

As a child, just about my favorite thing to do was look at color. In kindergarten, my teacher passed me a prism and I was simply rapt. Nothing was more beautiful to me than standing in the sun, twisting around the triangular glass, and watching the rainbow dance on the sidewalk. Stunning.

I got my first lesson in color from this prism, and although I could not then have drawn a color wheel, I understood intrinsically that the colors in my Crayola crayon box should be ordered:

Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Purple
Brown
Black

And they always were. My personal mantra encompassed these colors. Others might pray with a rosary, but my prayer beads were wax cylinders placed in perfect order in a small gold and green box. Honestly, I could rattle off these color names faster and easier than my home address.

Now, you might wonder what about all those really cool colors like Magenta, Raw Umber, and Carnation Pink. I never got those colors, dammit. My mother insisted on buying me the mega-cheap, eight-pack Crayola crayons. My best friend, Janice, however always had a fresh 64-color Crayola crayons box. I was perpetually Pine Green with envy. (Or was it Sea Green???)

The 60s Crayola tagline was "They work on brains, not batteries." What a message for today's kids! Watch this Crayola ad from back in the day.

According to Wikipedia, the original color line up for Crayola's 1960's 64-color box was: BLACK, ORANGE, APRICOT, AQUAMARINE, BITTERSWEET, BLUE, BLUE GRAY, BLUE GREEN, BLUE VIOLET, BRICK RED, BRILLIANT ROSE, BROWN, BURNT ORANGE, BURNT SIENNA, CADET BLUE, CARNATION PINK, COPPER, CORNFLOWER, FLESH, FOREST GREEN, GOLD, GOLDENROD, GRAY, GREEN, GREEN BLUE, GREEN YELLOW, INDIAN RED, LAVENDER, LEMON YELLOW, LIGHT BLUE, MAHOGANY, MAIZE, MAROON, MAUVELOUS, MELON, MIDNIGHT BLUE, MULBERRY, NAVY BLUE, OLIVE GREEN, ORANGE-RED, ORANGE-YELLOW, ORCHID, PERIWINKLE, PINE GREEN, PLUM, RAW SIENNA, RAW UMBER, RED, RED ORANGE, RED VIOLET, SALMON, SEA GREEN, SEPIA, SKY BLUE, SILVER, SPRING GREEN, TAN, THISTLE, VIOLET, VIOLET BLUE, VIOLET RED, WHITE, YELLOW, YELLOW GREEN, YELLOW ORANGE.

My whole life would have been different if I could have had another 56 colors. I swear it.

And then there's this: British artist Jamie Shovlin's whirling dervish of a Crayola color wheel. According to David Rainbird, Slovin has sorted his crayons by "hue in an attempt to form tetrads - combinations of colours from four equidistant points around the circle that when combined create perfect greys. There are 720 possible tetrad combinations with this many Crayolas and although Shovlin started the combinations, he gave up after trying out about twenty or so."

What a wonder! I'd love to have this hanging in my office offering daily inspiration. I couldn't find a better mandala if I tried.

So thank heaven for Crayola crayons. But most of all, thank God for color - all 64 of them in the elusive box set - and every other hue besides.

Brown and the Starbucks Effect

When it comes to fashion trends, I'm no Carrie Bradshaw - I'll take a pair of navy Crocs over some fancy Manolo Blahniks anyday.

But I've always been fascinated by color trends. I grew up in the age of avocado refrigerators, burnt orange AMC Gremlins, and brown everything else. Dateline 1970, land of the recession, home of the earthtones. Everything was inevitably some shade of brown.

So when I ponder the color brown, I instinctually think of moldy basements with dark fake wood paneling; maybe that's because my stepfather concocted a nasty, grasshopper-infested den using that reprehensible paneling in the house in which I grew up. Brown inevitably conjures up thoughts of UPS, dirt, and excrement, too (no offense, UPS).

Brown also brings to mind the old Baskin Robbins logo, back when having 31 different flavors was a big deal. (I worked at that ice cream parlor between high school and college. It was located just inside the Hecht's department store in Silver Spring, and I had to wear this god-awful pink and brown polyester uniform. I would come home every night with ice cream in my armpits - no lie. I've never looked at ice cream the way same since).

But apparently brown has been reborn. I came across an interesting article about jewelry design this morning which claims that brown diamonds set in pink gold is the latest thing. According to Pantone color guru Lee Eiseman, who spoke at a recent Las Vegas jewerly show, the latest trend features “delectable chocolate browns are accented by tempting pinks.” Eiseman says this trend will continue until at least summer 2009.

Eiseman claims the resurgence of brown is due to the “Starbucks’ Effect.” As the article states, "Before the coffee shop industry gained such prominence, people tended to react to the color brown in a negative sense, calling it earthy or dirty. Since coffee drinking has become such an integral part of everyday life, consumers now see brown hues in a much more positive light, regarding them as rich and robust. 'They have,' said Eiseman, 'a new respect for the color brown.'"

So I'm rethinking brown. This is probably a good thing, given that I have dark brown hair and eyes. I also look great in pink. Maybe the Starbucks Effect will improve the self-esteem of brunettes around the world. Works for me!

Grief

A lovely poem from the May 5th issue of the New Yorker.

Grief

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside,
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she’s coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known,
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don’t ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,
crying in the checkout line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead,
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? she says,
reading the name out loud, slowly,
so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other

Go get 'em, Luke

As I blogged yesterday, I am in love with Tim Russert and always will be. This evening, I watched his beloved son, Luke, being interviewed by Matt Lauer and remembered what it was like for me losing my mom at such a young age. I don't think I could have been half as gracious and articulate as this young man. Saying Luke is a credit to his parents is an incredible understatement. I look forward to watching Luke take the stage - whatever that stage is - because no matter what he does, he will be a success. What a great kid. In case you missed it, here is the interview.