Ever since a Ukrainian friend mentioned them I regularly drop in on the website of Art Lebedev Studio, Russia’s leading design studio.

Whether it’s their constitution, product design (see Optimus Maximus Keyboard, GLONASS Satnav) or their diversity of work there is always something inspiring to browse. Of particular interest is the process section that accompanies each project.

Their less than common approach (”The only principle we follow is just two words: No bullshit.”) has not hindered success or size. A team of +200 work with the country’s largest corporates including Yandex (largest portal and most popular search engine) and Gazprom (largest company in Russia).

Both sites proudly display Art Lebedev’s logo and link at the bottom of their pages. I like the way these projects sit equally alongside fridge magnets or an identity for a baby club in their portfolio.

The studio founder has clearly succeeded in passing down and maintaining his design ideals and approach to running a company. I’d like to know how they juggle their approach with client’s differing views on online marketing. The only interview I could find points to a negative attitude to SEO and marketing.

Most recently I was drawn to a website design for a luxury hotel, the Felix Zawojski. The site has been crafted with wonderful attention to detail.  Take a look at these sketches and renderings, view panoramas or watch footage of The Great Train Robbery in every room.

The identity creation points to guests feeling as though they belong to a royal family – the website design certainly serves up a luxurious experience. However, you won’t find an online booking facility, e-newsletter sign up or special offers.

Perhaps that lends itself to the exclusivity. Although, with such care taken to educate and pamper the visitor, surely these features would further help retain and convert site prospects?

(“Design Will Save the World” is the studio’s motto)

Ask someone for memorable mascots and they may mention the late Jeeves from Ask Jeeves, before his departure and resulting search engine rebrand.

Or the annoying paperclip from Microsoft Office.  Another is the kangaroo used in the Australia logo.

Emotional engagement or eye candy?

Far too many sites and web applications lack a personality in copy and image selection. I recommend this video presentation at Vitamin to highlight the importance of copy in building a likeable web application.

Evoking positive feelings can be particularly important in web applications where they are intended to be used regularly and often at length by their audience.

Mascots aren’t going to work in all scenarios. They usually work best as animal or human-like creatures – as cute, fun creations.

We created a mascot for a Visit Britain campaign to promote a new B2B online service. The character, Mrs Pink, helped reach the audience in a friendly, innovative way and she is now used on offline material and e-newsletters.

The cute dog is a mascot we intend to use on a new site helping daytrippers find the best visitor attractions. We’d like to give name him, please send on any suggestions!

The new logo (’Visit London’ and the body’s website address in red type) will replace

and the Totally London brand will be no longer.

And I’m sure you’ll agree, a tad less polarising than the London 2012 logo. The official launch will coincide with the Olympic handover in August.

The Webbys were first launched back in 2007. Here is a list of all the past travel and tourism winners:

2006

Tourism
www.newzealand.com/travel – Webby Award Winner
EarthCam – People’s Voice Winner

Travel
Expedia.com – Webby Award Winner
TripAdvisor – People’s Voice Winner

2005

Tourism
www.newzealand.com/travel – Webby Award Winner
Yellowstonepark.com – People’s Voice Winner

Travel
Flightmaker – Webby Award Winner
LonelyPlanet.com – People’s Voice Winner

2004

Travel
Igougo.com – Webby Award Winner
LonelyPlanet.com – People’s Voice Winner

2003 & 2002

Travel
Lonely Planet Online – Webby Award Winner
Lonely Planet Online – People’s Voice Winner

2001

Travel
Expedia.com – Webby Award Winner
Frommers.com – People’s Voice Winner

2000

Travel
Outside Online – Webby Award Winner
Discovery’s Travel Channel – People’s Voice Winner

1999

Travel
biztravel.com – Webby Award Winner
Travelocity – People’s Voice Winner

1998

Travel
CitySearch New York City – Webby Award Winner

1997

Travel
TravelMag – Webby Award Winner

I alluded to this in my comment in a recent post regarding the recently launched boo.com and that I felt the implementation of certain AJAX functionality had detracted from the user experience. Mr Nielsen also comments “They should get the basics right first,” and “Sadly most websites do not have those primary things right.”

Funnily enough, although, not particularly suprising, the writer cites a reference to the original boo.com regarding Mr. Nielsen’s warning of a return to the dotcom boom days, as an example of a site that looked great but was not easy to use.

AJAX is a development method for creating interactive web applications and can lead to more reactive browsing and contextual content. The prime examples are the multitude of flight fare aggregators that use AJAX to provide a fast user experience when sorting through flights without the browser reloading.

Implemented well and the enhanced user experience may well be a factor in a site visitor switching loyalty to a different travel company, however, it is important not to lose sight of the principles of usability design.

There are plenty of views expressed on designer’s sites and on the whole they are negative. The attention is hardly surprising given the wide ranging views people will have surrounding how a country is represented by a symbol.

Prodi comments that Italy should have “a graphic symbol which delivers a message”. What message does the symbol portray to you? How important is a logo in determining the success of a country’s brand? Does the green shape remind you of mini golf, the shape of Italy or something else?

I came across the new logo yesterday afternoon and after a second look today I’m perched on the uninspired side of the fence. One of my main criticisms is the use of four fonts, differing weights and mixed cases. It emotes a tired, complicated and inconsistent feel.

For a short while, I wondered if the green shape symbolised the Italian land mass, however, the intended meaning of the soft lettering is to represent “movement, flexibility and imagination”. This may be the case nonetheless it instilled a degree of confusion.

The long and the short
The logo above is the full version and the abbreviated two letter configuration to the right will be the primary identity, a practical approach bearing in mind the country’s top level domain is .it.

How does the logo reflect my view of Italy as a potential visitor?
I’ve been to Italy on only one occasion, a week backpacking through cities and tourist attractions on a much forgotten but fondly remembered train trip. The hustle and bustle of Rome certainly ties in with the manic like feelings stirred up by this logo. Art and design, culture, history and fashion are areas that come to mind as Italy’s key strengths. These elements evoke sophistication and craft not apparent in this logo.

Italy is already one of the world’s most desirable tourist destinations, coming third in the second global Country Brand Index of 2006, therefore does it matter that much if the rest of the new Italy brand is strong? Not really.

However, I don’t think that’s the point – I believe an opportunity has been missed to create a more unified statement.

A poster comments that the ‘it’ mark as a standalone works well with the three elements and certainly the shortened version is not as convoluted. He makes a point that the green shape may intentionally be shoeless, to go in the face of the boot cliche and that it emphasises the more accessible north, where more major tourism destinations are located. Not sure of Italy’s tourism statistics but I would think areas such as Tuscany and Sicily, amongst others, make up a high percentage.

Leaving aside the inevitable, insatiable demands of designers, creating a logo for a country must be an incredibly difficult and challenging exercise and time will tell how the logo supplements the international and wide ranging branding efforts that will follow.

Links

• Italia: Like you’ve Never Seen it Before – Opinions on corporate and brand identity work.
• designerblog and SocialDesignZine – Italian design blogs discussing logo, recommend Babelfish for translation.
• Ansa.it article covering the launch of the new logo and slogan.

I enjoyed the virtual experience and I recommend you do the same, the 3D landscapes are certainly impressive and it is easy to navigate – let’s take a look at a few screenshots and see how things work.

Background

From the story on Travelmole today, the line’s head of brand marketing Philip Price says “Ventura is a very different kind of ship so we needed a very different way to communicate her contemporary feel. www.virtualventura.co.uk allows people to get a feel for what it will be like on board.

“When a ship is being built, it is a challenge to convey to potential passengers the standards, innovations and facilities that will be on board. Today’s technology allows us to bring the Ventura concept to life.”

The ship can be explored in two ways, either through the standalone virtual tour application or by exploring more traditional HTML pages that contain animated elements and links to the relevant sections of the virtual tour.

The standalone virtual tour and introduction

The virtual tour opens in a separate, custom sized pop up window and took about 60 seconds to load on a 2mb connection, not too bad considering the media content to preload, although it would have been a nice touch to have an image or slideshow. Still, a preload bar is displayed to keep you updated on progress.

Once loaded, Nick introduces you to the ship and gives you the choice to run the tour in self or auto mode. Having returned to the virtual tour more than once I wouldn’t mind the option to skip this intro.

Help and iconography

You are then presented with a help page, that can be accessed at any time during the tour itself. The tour is divided up into Ventura’s six onboard experiences covering Eating Out, Nights Out, Ventura days, Spa time, Child’s play and designer rooms.

Ventura Days

I’ve chosen the Ventura Days section and it currently houses five rooms to explore. Each room is represented by intricate and impressive pixel graphics and hovering the mouse gives you the lowdown on the room and pinpoints the location on the ship.

The Atrium

In any particular room, in this case the Atrium, you can use the arrows to navigate to other rooms. As you move through the onboard experiences there is a short pause as the background, interactive and animation elements load.

Other features on the site include an image gallery and virtual tour of the shipyard to keep up to date with the build progress.

Read more about the ship itself and key stats but I recommend taking the virtual tour!

All too often the image selection process is not carried out with enough attention. They are often thrown in at the end and with little regard to the accompanying content. Sure, not everyone has access to a quality internal image bank or the budget to employ a professional photographer. However, in addition to a number of low cost stock image sites, there are a great number of excellent images out there that can be used for free through a Creative Commons License.

What is the Creative Commons License?

The basic function is to enable copyright holders, such as photographers, to grant some or all the rights of their creations to the public while retaining others and is an alternative to full copyright.

The best way to illustrate this is to look at an example. Yahoo’s Flickr is the well known photo sharing application used by millions to share their images. If we take this example image of a shot of Trafalgar Square you’ll see on the right hand side a link called ‘Some rights reserved’. The link displays the license attributed to this particular image, and in this case, one is free to share and remix the image as long as the work is attributed.

The different licenses determine how a piece of work can used and this image of the same London Square can not be used for commercial purposes. Flickr has a brief definition covering the main license types and includes a search filter to only display those photos that are licensed by Creative Commons. For more information, visit their site at http://creativecommons.org/ or read this short primer.

Image resources for your tourism e-marketing

Flickr – As mentioned above, there are millions of images to search from of varying quality. Use the advanced search page to specify the type of Creative Commons license required.

stock.xchng – A very popular and excellent resource concentrating on free stock imagery with over a quarter of a million images. The site can be a bit slow due to the heavy server load and it does require you to register to download the full size images. The comprehensive filtering system allows you to set useful parameters when searching the database, including over one hundred pre defined categories.

everystockphoto – Not a resource itself but a search engine for creative commons photos from a variety of sources including Flickr, stock.xchng, morgueFile, Freerangestock and Image After. Can be a real time saver.

There are many other sources for free stock photography and the following contain links to relevant sites.

Free Stock Photos, Where to Find Free Images and Visuals for My Blog and Blue Vertigo Web Design Resources.

If you know of any other image banks please let me know.

This festive season has again seen big increases in the number of people purchasing online. Whether it is down to improved content, increased trust in the medium or other factors such as convenience or bulk buying, the uptake in users booking their holidays online looks set to continue to rise. One example is Cumbria Tourism who have recently conducted a visitor survey and have found that internet bookings has tripled in four years, representing almost a third of all bookings. No doubt this is helped with a terrific site. The site scores highly from an accessibility perspective and is very easy to use. Coupled with great content that is presented in the various themes playing to the area’s strengths (such as lakes/outdoors and more topically Beatrix Potter) and a good balance between information and images the site provides an excellent browsing experience.

[Source: TravelMole]