Joost, Babelgum & Apple TV in your browser

Want to get a taste of Joost/Babelgum/AppleTV (they do all sound quite edible) but don't have a beta invite/can't be bothered with the download/don't want to shell out £200? Well, you're in luck. Independent developer, Paul Yanez, has created browser-based Flash mashups of all three products and they're pretty damn slick (see below screengrabs). Whilst they don't feature the same video content as their parent apps, they do give a very good feel of the interfaces and the content they suck in from assorted video sharing sites is arguably more compelling than much of the official offers. Nice job, Mr Yanez.

Joost Flash Mashup



Babelgum Flash Mashup



Apple TV Mashup

TouchGraph Facebook Browser

Continuing the theme of interesting interfaces, check out the below screencap from TouchGraph Photos, a Java-based Facebook app which maps your friends and their relationships using coloured bubbles (and photos when your more zoomed in). It's similar to the popular Friend Wheel app (175,000 adds and counting) but with a slicker interface and a focus on navigating your friends' photos. They've employed the same interface in tools for exploring both Google and Amazon.

Can brands own colours?

According to marketing lore, it was once possible for a single brand to 'own' a colour; Coca Cola owned red, IBM owned blue, UPS owned brown (or so the legend goes). Regardless of whether this was ever really the case, it certainly ain't true now. Our globalised, digital world has more brands, shouting more loudly, across more media, than ever before.

Not that all companies have given up on the dream of owning a colour globally. Vodafone still seems pretty set on wresting red from Coke's clutches (with some success according to Martin Lindstrom’s 2005 book Brand Sense, in which he claims 30% of UK consumers now associate red with Vodafone, compared with 22% for Coke). The fight for red has been further complicated by the entry of (PRODUCT)^RED last year, which is hoping to own red across multiple sectors. That said, most companies have moved away from a goal of universal colour ownership and relocated the battle for colour supremacy to their own market sector.

Exhibit A is the 2005 legal dispute between Orange and easyGroup over the use of Pantone 151. Both companies had been using the distinctive shade of orange since the mid-90s, but it wasn't until Stelios announced the launch of the now-defunct easyMobile in 2004 that the mobile operator called in the lawyers; unsurprising when you consider that colour is the tacitly agreed brand differentiator amongst the mobile operators, where blue is synonymous with O2, magenta with T-Mobile, orange with, er, Orange and red with Vodafone (sorry Virgin). 3 opted out of the colour war by creating a chameleon logo, which employs different colours in different contexts.

Exhibit B is an Australian court action brought by Darrell Lea Chocolate Shops against confectionary giant Cadbury Schweppes last year. The judge found in favour of Darrell Lea concluding that "Cadbury does not own the colour purple and does not have an exclusive reputation in purple in connection with chocolate in Australia". Whilst Cadbury may have lost in court and been forced to amend the trademark claims on its packaging, it remains indelibly associated with purple in the minds of chocolate-loving consumers.

All of which is a precursor to asking whether it is possible to own a colour in the online space. My instinct is no - there are just too many competing brands. Strong colour/brand association is possible amongst UK mobile operators because there are only half a dozen of them. Likewise, cigarette companies successfully carved up the colours amongst them because there was a limited number of brands, enabling them to take out billboard ads or sponsor Formula One cars primarily on the strength of colour association (purple meant Silk Cut, gold meant Benson & Hedges, red meant Marlboro, black meant John Player Special).

However, the barriers to entry (and by extension, brand creation) on the web are so low that even in the same market sector, companies seem to have accepted the futility of attempting to own a single colour. The practicalities of web design may also feed into this; it's fine for Vodafone's full-page print ads and billboards to be almost entirely red, but that wouldn't work on its website (unless it was aiming to make its visitors' eyes bleed).

If ownership of a single colour is unattainable on the web, how about a particular combination of colours? Graham Beale got the ball rolling on this with a colour scheme montage posted on his blog, Hold and Modify. However, of the 15 represented, I could identify just 2 (Flickr and Blogger). Whilst Graham assures me that his fellow web designers were able to name many more, I think it's fair to infer that Joe Public wouldn't.

Interestingly, the one site which comes closest to achieving colour ownership on the web for me is lastminute.com which has had almost 10 years to stake its claim on a particularly aggressive shade of pink. Shown a swatch in isolation (or in a pink line-up with Smile and T-Mobile) I reckon I would be able to identify it, although that may just be the subliminal impact of their weekly newsletter in my inbox.

Whilst colour will undoubtedly remain a critical element of brand identity, both on and offline, I wonder if it's moving lower down in the mix as the marketplace becomes increasingly crowded and colour ownership is redefined as a pipe dream from a bygone era (the mythology is that Coke began its ownership of red in the 1950s by changing the colour of Santa's suit from green). The democratisation of branding, facilitated by the Internet, has blown the lid off the notion of colour exclusivity and marketing will need to become more sophisticated in response.

The favicon - your 256 pixel brand identity

Despite often being deprioritised (or forgotten about altogether) by web developers, the lowly favicon (a contraction of favourite icon) is becoming an increasingly important aspect of brand identity on the web.

Usually measuring just 16 by 16 pixels, favicons are the small logos that appear next to the website names in your browser's list of favourites/bookmarks. Chances are they are also displayed in your browser's address bar, before the URL of the site.

Another place you will see them is on the tabs of tabbed web browsers such as Opera. Mozilla Firefox, and Internet Explorer 7 which, collectively, now account for over a third of the browser market (according TheCounter.com).

The rise of Web 2.0 has also contributed to the favicon's higher profile as a growing number of social bookmarking sites, syndication tools and API-enabled mashups make use of favicons when linking to other sites. In particular, the increasing use of favicon-based buttons on blogs encouraging visitors to summit to del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit, Stumble, Technorati etc. (see AddThis).

So, how are web developers responding to the increased attention on the favicon? Representing your brand effectively in just 256 pixels is undoubtedly an enormous design challenge and four main approaches seem to have emerged:

1.) Attempting to replicate the site's logo in it's entirety

This approach stands or falls on the complexity of your site's logo, which clearly favours those companies who designed their logo with favicons in mind (e.g. Blogger , del.ico.us , Digg ). Long-established brands which pre-date the web have more of a conundrum - should they attempt to shrink their existing brand down to 16 x 16 pixels (e.g. BBC , NPR ) or should they design a new logo with this new branding space in mind? Companies who have already successfully distilled their brands down to a simple image (e.g. Apple , Nike , Smile ) have a clear advantage in this area.

2.) Abstracting the initial letter(s) from your site brand

Championed by Amazon (), Google () and Yahoo! () this approach has become increasingly commonplace. The challenge here is to ensure your design treatment is distinct enough from all the other sites using the same letter, or in some cases, a different letter - compare Blogger () and easyJet (). Amazon and Yahoo!'s favicons are particularly successful as they incorporate another brand element besides the font (an arrow and an exclamation mark, respectively).

3.) Creating a custom graphic which attempts to convey the site's USP

More in line with the design conventions of desktop icons, this approach sidesteps the challenges of representing your site brand, but introduces the equally daunting task of effectively conveying the site's purpose in just 256 pixels. More successful examples include Lego () and Threadless ().

4.) Creating an abstract image

The least common approach, its main advantage is that in a world dominated by reduced logos and initial letters, abstract images stand out by virtue of being different. The downside is that is that it swims against the tide of received wisdom regarding branding and the resulting images are often indistinct or unmemorable (see this site's favicon, which I really must do something about). Interestingly, Flickr recently abandoned the initial letter approach () in favour of something more abstract ().

Whichever approach you adopt, it's worth remembering that your favicon is your (potentially permanent) brand presence on the limited and valuable real estate of people's browsers and across the wider web. The cardinal sin of favicons is not having one at all, which just looks lazy. Not having a favicon is like not having a sign promoting your store ahead of the turn off from the main road, when all your competitors have one. Yes, visitors will still find your site via search engines and weblinks and some may bookmark it. But they won't have the visual reminder of your brand when they scan their bookmarks/tabs, deciding where to visit.

In spite of this, a surprising number of high-profile sites are currently without favicons. I was so disappointed by the absence of a favicon for Empire that I created one () and emailed it to the developers who I'm pleased to see have since put it live.

So, what lies ahead for the humble favicon? Well, larger sizes (32 x 32 pixels is increasingly common) and alternative image formats both seem inevitable as does a growing prominence on the mobile platform. I'm hoping use of animated favicons don't become more widespread as gratuitous animation usually pisses people off.

To finish off, below is an A-Z montage of initial letter favicons. First person to name all 26 gets a Cadbury's Cream Egg (click through to Flickr to annotate).

PopArtPortrait.co.uk launched

A quick but shameless plug for my latest web venture, PopArtPortrait.co.uk, which went live yesterday. The site enables you to upload a portrait photo of your choosing which will then be transformed by our highly skilled in-house artist (ok, me) into a one-of-a-kind pop art portrait, framed (or not, if you prefer) and delivered direct to your door. I guess its aimed mainly at the gift market in a 'what do you get the person who's got everything?' kind of a way (my first order was a wedding present for a couple getting married in China). Please check it out and link to it if you think it's any cop as I don't think the marketing budget's going to stretch to those full-page national press ads after all...

Threadless tees

Have got a few t-shirt designs in the running at Threadless at the mo. For the uninitiated, the site allows any would-be designer to upload their t-shirt design and have it voted on by the Threadless community for the next 7 days. The most popular designs then get printed up as tees and sold via the Shop area of the site. If you're bold enough to submit a design you can expect some pretty forthright comments in return as Threadless users aren't backwards in coming forwards when it comes to sorting the wheat from the chaff. Designers of a sensitive disposition may be well advised stick to rating other people's submissions!