A fantastic article about how the website for the magazine Monocle came about, the thinking behind it, the design and the style. Written by Dan Hill who has worked for the last year on the site, it goes into great detail about the challenges staying true to the style and brand of the magazine while also working in the medium of the web. There are many good insights made, many that remind me of our projects. For example, while discussing whether user-generated content should be in the Monocle site: “my view was that we didn’t need comments on the site as people increasingly have their own spaces to talk, discuss, comment - whether that’s blogs and discussion fora, or the social software of Facebook et al.” — an insight many organisations could learn from and feel comfortable about. Monocle, the magazine and website, are also recommended.

Newsweek on the Barack Obama “brand” – including a reference to how Hillary Clinton is actively copying it, typeface and all.

The New York Times (login required) compares the relative website design of US presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, to the debacle between Macs and PCs.

Adrian Shaughnessy for the Creative Review visits Wolff Olins, the company he was critical of due to their Olympics 2012 logo… and has his expectations confounded.

The BBC has launched a beta version of its new homepage, and we at FoxLand Towers are quite excited about it. We love how you can customise the information it displays and then move your “info widgets” around the page. Some of us aren’t so sure about the use of a large Verdana font and the buttons may be a bit too Web 2.0, but the general concensus is that it looks great. And those of us who are old enough to remember get a twinge of nostalgia from the retro clock. Shame they couldn’t find room for the noughts and crosses playing test card girl…

For those of you who may be interested in such things, here’s a sneak peak of what the BBC may (or may not) be doing with their homepage. Personally, I like the retro clock. (Found via Plasticbag).

Wolff Olins talk in the New York Times about their 2012 Olympics, New York City, New Museum of Contemporary Arts and other identities, and how they are all designed to be flexible, mutable devices that should not remain rigid. While they say that “in the era of blogging, social networking and mash-ups … a bit of flexibility is essential”, this is not such a new concept – companies such as MTV have been doing this for a long time – and surely does not need the web as a reason to think this way.

We are delighted that one of our clients, world leading search marketing agency Latitude, had a successful launch of their updated search engine optimisation product recently - Latitude Organic.

Working closely with Latitude’s marketing team we developed the logo and brand for Latitude Organic, along with the design for the website and some additional marketing collateral.

Getting a website to naturally appear in the top rankings of search engine listings is an extremely difficult and time-consuming discipline. However, it’s a discipline that Latitude’s team of experts seem to excel at.

Our challenge was to design a logo and website for Latitude Organic that successfully communicates this expertise. We therefore developed something that was both natural looking with a human focus and that suggests a positive upward movement - in line with the service Latitude Organic offers for its customers.

Sometimes, change is not welcome, and ‘feature creep’ can be a real risk to a product and brand. Allen Salkin in The New York Times discusses an issue that also effects how we change and evolve websites (via Daring Fireball).

It’s great seeing such debate about the 2012 logo out there on the web. All the usual arguments are being trotted out, but one of the best pro-arguments can be found at Coudal. Worth a read.

In case you’ve somehow missed the furore - the new Olympics 2012 logo has been revealed. It was devised with help from Wolff Olins (a company some of us have worked with in the past), and they are in the midst of a huge wave of controversy.

We are split as to how we feel about the logo. Some of us dislike it, seeing it as clumsy and patronising in its attempt at appealing to the ‘MySpace’ generation. There was an extreme example of cognitive dissonance in the sight of Seb Coe announcing the logo in a suit and tie. It is like a logo for a nu rave band, the scene of the moment, and it may well feel dated within 6 months.

That said, it is rare for such a high profile logo to be so bold and look so (no other word for it) bonkers - so much so, it would be great if we all ended up loving it. The thinking behind it is solid, and it would have been dull for the logo to have been a polite tasteful design that as Coe put it, would have comfortably sat on corporate polo shirts. A logo is not the brand, so it will be interesting to see how it develops over the years.

Update: Worthwhile further discussion about the logo can be found at Speak Up.