The Cube Lab are delighted to confirm that they have acquired the contract to produce a hallmark magazine for one of the UK’s top tourist destinations.

The agency will be responsible for the design of a new 2009 brochure, showcasing lifestyle articles all about The English Riviera, which includes popular holiday destinations Torquay, Paignton and Brixham. The chairman of Torbay Hospitality Association, Gordon Oliver was delighted to have teamed up with a new exciting design agency and said that “a lifestlyle approach to the brochure and marketing in general is just what Torbay needs to highlight the delights of such a beautiful part of the UK”

The Cube Lab will be working on the brochure in the coming months with a view to its release next year. In addition to this the agency are looking to target a long line of local businesses, Steve Marson from The Cube Lab commented “This opportunity to work with the THA is a great booster for our local presence in the South West, it really enforces our new products for small and medium sized enterprises”.

Hello, as some of you may have noticed, The Blog is a bit poor in terms of its visual appearance. To be honest we haven’t really got the time to get round to updating it. I know, we’re supposed to be a design agency and so shouldn’t be all that hard. We’ll it is.

We (I) did become a little enthused by the power of The Blog a few weeks ago, and as a result put together a little creative redesign. As it turns out our production boys (which unfortunately includes me) haven’t got any free time to spend on our own PR or marketing. So its down to me to learn some HTML and Wordpress things so that hopfully I can make it work..

Here goes…

The Cube Lab - local branding and online agency has just confirmed the completion of its work at one of Britain’s biggest and most loved retailers, Marks & Spencer.

The agency was tasked with producing some internal and external branding work for the retailer including sign design, décor and promotional material. They also provided market analysis and customer insight products.

As part of their recent expansion, The Cube Lab are offering their valued expertise to local businesses with new products targeted at smaller enterprises. The Lab are about to launch branding & online sites for Playdome, Inox Group and LTC specialist scaffolding - all based in Devon. Look out for them early May!

Get brand, get online, get going.. www.thecubelab.co.uk

The Cube Lab, newly formed branding and online agency have been awarded new business from one of the UK’s largest DIY retailers.

The Cube Lab, based on Bartholomew St West, Exeter, will be working some internal branding aspects of DIY giant B&Q.

The Cube Lab specialises in delivering branding, websites and marketing services for small and medium sized businesses as well as large corporates. It was formed recently by the merger of Lazymouse Creative and Matthew Robin Fairweather & Associates. www.thecubelab.co.uk

Read more on this article at thisisexeter.co.uk

We at The Cube Lab spend about 20 hours designing and building a fairly basic website - the time is split into the following categories:

4 hours - design the draft
1/2 hour - explain the draft to the client
1/2 hour - listen to their design ideas
1 hour - advise the client our idea is the better one
6 hours - build the website
4 hours - add the content and test
4 hours - fixing Internet Explorer issues!!

The reason we spend so much time fixing Internet Explorer (ie6) issues is that Microsoft, in their wisdom, didn’t follow the guidelines set down  by the W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) and so decided to make up some rules of their own, in addition to leaving out support for features that they promised years ago and were added to most of the other browsers available.

We have to allow for the different way that ie6 uses padding and widths as well as a lack of support for other features that make the web browsing experience so much better.

Why don’t people upgrade to ie7? It’s free and offers a better web experience. Come to think of it, ie 8 is in beta use right now, so they might as well wait and go straight to that version!

Firefox - free and far superior - is an alternative browser available now; try it, you might not go back to ie6!

Web designers such as ourselves have a restriction when it comes to design - what width to use with our layouts?

We used to be restricted to 760 pixels wide to accommodate those users with a monitor set to 800px by 600px (the 760 allows for the width of the scrollbar) but with the popularity of newer, wider screens and better processors, most users now set their screen to 1024 pixels wide - allowing us more freedom with our designs.

We still have to design with 800×600 users in mind, though, as there are still quite a few people with this type of screen in use.

And of course, a monitor set to 1024px is more difficult to read due to the smaller icons and fonts (sorry, Dad, you’re one of them!) but I have found that once the change is made, the screen looks crisper and is far easier to use now their is more screen space to play with.

We often get asked “why is there so much space around the design, can you fill it with something?” and we have to bite our tongues (our own, not each others).

We design fresh looking websites that need room to breathe - hence the whitespace, no matter what the design size. And who wants to read from one side to the other when the page fills the screen anyway? Our clients often think that they are getting less for their money if the design doesn’t use the full width pf the screen!

Less is more, we say!

So, what is your screen set to? Are there any 800 x 600 users still out there? And don’t get me started on the use of Internet Explorer 6!

GM has 33 brand names. BMW has one. Both are valid brand architectures. Answering the question “What to brand?” is a complex challenge for companies of every size. The key is to create clarity — the trick is to leverage the brand without diluting it.

Think about your markets and how your customers react to them. If you want simplicity follow the trend. Cultivate one brand, maybe with different values for different people.

Do you buy a Ford Focus ST when your 65?

Probably not, you buy a Ford Focus.

My most recent outing, to buy a sandwich, was complicated yesterday by the introduction of new packaging. On a trip to one of our clients outlets, in search of lunchtime sustinence, we came across what was usually an array of good quality easy to read packets. Now, annoyingly the packets all look irritatingly similar. Alas, if you can be bothered to push your way through the many others trying desperately to discover what their favourite combination now looks like, then no doubt you’ll discover the subtle change to the ring like shapes on the front. But, for me, I just could not be bothered. Consequently I ended up with some rather curious combination of “New York Deli” and “Cheese Ploughmans”.

Later on, at my desk I found myself intricately examining the first packet, primarily trying to discover how to open it into a “handy tray..” in the confusion I managed to subtly coat my new aluminium super thin keybaord (with somewhat dodgy CapsLock key) with bread, cheese and some variety of pickles. Nevertheless, quite unsuitably I began to understand just exactly what this new packaging was all about.

On the reverse, our favourite retailer had decided to employ some overused work experience placement to typeset the back of their sandwich packet, sporting various icons about recycling and a plan or other to tackle it all. Then, rather abruptly it hit me that the packets, although all looking the same had a common theme throughout. They all looked like you could recycle them.

Previously my favourite sandwich was purple with a green stripe and some Helvetica Neue that I could read prety much as soon as I stepped onto the salesfloor. Now, its a sort of paper brown envelope colour, a bit rough looking with minimal ink and small text. But, curiously I notice that my previous packets were just as reuseable or recyclable. They had luxurious laminated paper with bold colours and lots of text, icons and little healthy eating endorsements.

But they definately didn’t look like you could recyle them.

Recycled: Brown, off white, rough finish, dull inks, no images & milled so you can see all the paper bits..

Despite all the hype about Google and the other search engines, there is no mystery to how your site can be found on it’s pages.

There are dozens of search engines apart from Google, but we’ll use them as an example.

After all, it’s just a glorified word search facility - a user enters a phrase that he or she is searching for, and Google searches all the pages it has previously indexed and presents those pages that have those words on the page.

However, as there are so many other sites on the internet in any given sector, you need to be careful when adding content to your site.

This is how it works ..

Google periodically indexes all the (new or changed) pages on the internet. Then, when a user enters a search term Google searches it’s index and serves up all the pages it finds with that word or phrase (called keywords or key phrases).

Now, if you have this phrase on your website in the general text of one of the pages and your competitor has the same phrase in a heading or a link, Google will list your competitor’s page higher than yours.

This is because Google searches all pages and indexes words and phrases in this order:

1. Domain name
2. Description (more on this in a later post)
3. Title of the page
4. Main Headings -called H1, H2 and so on
5 Links
6 Text

As a little experiment, we registered a domain name called www.exeter-plumber.co.uk and designed a simple site with our chosen keywords entered in appropriate places on the site.

Within 2 weeks, this site is number one on Google when searching for ‘corgi approved plumber exeter’ and page 3 for ‘exeter plumber’.

Of course, we cheated a little by registering a domain name as specific as this .. but it demonstrates what can be achieved in a little time.

There are also other ways to help your ranking .. incoming links for example are invaluable. If you can find other ‘relevant’ websites to list your site and link to you, all the better. However, it’s no good just getting anyone to link to your site. Try getting a link on more respected and established (and relevant) websites as they will already be highly ranked and Google will naturally follow those links to your site, therefore increasing your ranking.

Outgoing links are not as important and the use of keywords hidden in your website is not so important these days.

Remember -

Relevant - make sure all your links and content is relevant to your business sector
Content - keep updating the content on your website .. content is king!

A little test - which of the following sentences carries more weight with Google?

a. We can help you with this! Contact us at The Cube lab for more help with Search Engine Optimisation.

b. For more help with Search engine Optimisation, click here.

Answers on a postcard to The Cube Lab please!

Brand Architecture is one of those products that has many guises. In one place you may find that having your brand architected means you get a “corporate font face” and a list of colours that you can use here and there. But nobody is telling you that the letter Z in your logo should be proportionally rescaled or blue when the rest is green, or when its on a van it needs to be bigger or a different shade of red. Then what happens when Mr marketing manager comes along and asks for your corporate branding book? What do you do if you have a new product, or develop a new business sector? How big should the sign on the door be? and will anybody really care, or notice.

Okay, so if you sell buns for a living and the occasional coffee with cream then you’ll probably get away with no one giving a damn about your ‘brand’, apart, maybe from the design agency around the corner. But apparently they like the coffee anyway.

What if the design agency’s comments about your coffee are something you want to talk about. What if the design agency are talking about your great coffee. All you get is ‘the white van over the road’ or ‘guy round the corner’. Maybe you need something that people can remember, as well as the coffee.