Jul 30 2011
Team Yeah Can were invited to participate at a client’s 50 birthday party on Saturday. This client, CEO of Phoenix Education, is an American living in Vietnam now for 18 years has married a lovely Vietnamese lady and has three gorgeous children with her. He is also a personality of note.
What was good about the party was that for the first time several of the new team for Phoenix Education were together during an activity outside of work. Phoenix Education is a brand new venture and the first school is only being built as we speak.
It was good to have everybody socialise and most of the evening was spent on chatter designed to get to know each other. In a strange turn during a conversation between a few of the new staff the new logo came up.
Design is something that most people feel passionate about. And when a company gets design right it can ensure good growth in profits and one needs to only think about Apple to get that. Of course Phoenix Education is not in the design of products field. But being passionate about good design will benefit all enterprises. A school as well.
The discussion ended up being so passionate that one of the staff members announced that he would have the Phoenix Education logo tattooed on his arm. In fact he already has the logo as a screen image on his smart phone. However, he had some competition. Others in the group in fact felt that the Phoenix Foundation logo was even better. The arguments raged!
Team Yeah Can had huge grins on their faces. Amazing when your logo design ends up being the center of heated discussion and praise. See what you think about the two logos. Which one would you tattoo on your arm?
Jul 29 2011
Business Card for Kim a Volunteer
At what stage should you start branding yourself? Is 22 years of age too early to worry about logo design, business cards and a general branding exercise? It really depends on the individual of course. In general though the earlier a young person considers the image they present to the world the better it is.
Too many young people start their professional life not caring about the image they develop. In the age of the internet where everything spreads, is remembered for ever and most definitely public it’s surely not a bad idea to be careful from an early age on.
Young people make the mistake of thinking that it’s fun to have a sexy name as a label when picking a Twitter name or email address. What they don’t think through carefully enough is the fact that the internet doesn’t really forget.
That label, online identity stays around a really long time. In fact there are now specialist lawyers whose work consists of managing online reputations. That is they scour the internet to find and where possible destroy items that could harm their clients.
Wouldn’t it be just so much easier to brand oneself cautiously from an early age so that these kinds of costs don’t occur at a later stage.
Her are two young people, in their early twenties, who have decided that a good clean branding exercise is not too early. Check out their ‘brand’ here. Aren’t their business cards great?
Jul 24 2011
It’s taken a while. But finally Yeah Can has its first Vietnamese client for logo and web design. And it’s a great one. The full monty so to speak. Client needs from Corporate ID to brochures, power point presentations and web sites, uniforms and more. It was certainly worth waiting for.
Client is a new educational institution. Under normal circumstances it would be a non-profit organisation. But it’s not easy to set up non-profits in Vietnam. The authorities are not that partial to people’s organisations that are not controlled by the government. That’s how it is and that’s how one has to work.
The logo design came as first part of the design project. Of course as with all modern businesses the name depends on what one can find as a URL that hasn’t been snapped up by somebody else. Not that easy in the dot com world at all where short names have been scooped up long ago.
So it was decided to go with dot asia and that made it easier in the end. Besides the URL it was also important to find an image that appealed to Asia and that would work in both English and Vietnamese. It’s important to take note of local customs while staying global.
For this reason it was decided to go with the Phoenix. Strangely enough the dragon is the symbol for masculine power and the Phoenix for the female power. And that seemed to work well with the idea of education as this is a nurturing field and women tend to do that better than men.
So here are the designs for the logo in both English and Vietnamese as well as the black and white version which is to be used for documents and stationery that needs to be copied and where a black and white logo is more appropriate.
What do you think?
Jul 09 2011
Here is top model Kim Megson showing off the first of a small range of fun T-Shirts which the Hope Center, Yeah Can’s favourite charity, will be selling for fund raising purposes. Product design rather than web design – indeed.
Well, the top model is not quite the right label. Kim is a volunteer working for Hue Help at the moment teaching English. He was ‘persuaded’ to try on the T-shirt and pose for the camera. Not something he has done too often hence the embarrassment on his face.
This particular T-shirt is one in a range of fun slogans around the expat’s favourite beer. It’s consumed in great quantities in Hue. The heat contributes to the consumption levels but mainly it’s a great tasting beer brewed with the help of a Danish brewery. Hence the name Huda which is a combination of Hu for Hue and Da for Danish.
Now we need to find more models for the T-shirt range so that the images can go up on the Hope Center’s website. Never a dull moment in the lives of Team Yeah Can.
Jul 01 2011
Whether you want to design your own web site or hand it over to a web design company or independent designer here are some pointers to take note of.
1) Keep it clean and uncluttered
One of the big mistakes the web site owner makes is to try and fit in too much information, too many images, too much advertising in fact too much of everything. Keep your message clear. This applies to the design and navigation as well. The cleaner a site the easier it is for visitors to find the information they are looking for. It also enables search engines to collect information. Check number 2.
2) SEO enabled
Creating a Search Engine Optimised site is not that difficult. Put some effort into researching your keywords that you feel your visitors or customers might be using to search for your services and build these into your site. Check this great article for more tips on SEO practices and apply them to your site.
3) No Flash
Let go of those animation introductions and banners. Nobody has time for them anymore. Besides this Flash animations tend to irritate search engine bots who are trying to spider their way through your site checking to see what your site is all about. You don’t want to irritate search engines!
4) Use WordPress or equivalent
Do not be at the mercy of your web designer everytime you need to change something on your site. Those days are over thank goodness. Insist on a WordPress site. This great content management tool will allow you to update almost all of your site yourself. This means you can change information as required, upload images and even write a blog.
5) Have a blog on your site
It’s really important that you have some fresh content on your site. Regularly. Build yourself a customer list or just a following of interested people. Work on your reputation by showing you know what you are talking about. Write about your field to inform, impress and for search engine robots to take note.
6) Social networking and all that jazz
Encourage people to recommend you, vote for you, follow you, join you, appreciate you. And the list goes on. Plug into all this sharing world. Be on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Flikr or whatever suits your time and inclination and include widgets on your site that allow people to network with you. But don’t forget you have to share back.
This brief list of tips should help you set up a website that serves your purposes. Still stuck, then contact Yeah Can.
