That was a mouthful.. and so is what it represents.  One of the difficulties I encountered working with Novare is trying to explain what Novare does in one sentence, or in this case, one glance.  The graph below will never see the light of day, but I still think it is worth showing.  The graph represents what Novare Technologies do, or rather what services they offer to their customers and partners.

Here is the circle in more detail.  Why a circle? I think it is appropriate since it also gives some reference to the Novare logo.  The innermost circle represents the customers of Novare.  The circles outside represent the six services of Novare, differentiated by a color.  There are overlapping circles since some of the services cover more than one customer.  For example, the yellow colored ring which says “OSS/BSS Outsourcing Solutions” can be offered to all the customer segments, where as the grey ring, “NWARE” can only be offered to “consumers & enterprises.”

To make it clearer, I added an additional explanation to the right.  This explicitly says what Novare offers to which customer segment.  I enjoyed working in this abstract / conceptual level.  I thought that it was successful in illustrating the point.  But others didn’t agree, so Novare went with another one, which I shall post someday.  So do you think it is difficult to understand?

SMART Communications Inc. is, arguably, the top mobile network operator in the Philippines boasting of over 25 million subscribers.  I have written about the recent rebranding of their competitor Globe. Could this be their answer back?  I didn’t hear of any launch party like what Globe did, probably because it didn’t merit one.  It seemed like they just slipped this one passed us.  I only noticed the change when they had their new campaign for the launch of their SmartBro Prepaid product. (Which incidentally also had a logo redesign, see below) The new SMART logo change will not be very obvious to the untrained eye, and SMART will keep its brand equity.

Now what do I think with the redesign?  I actually think that this is an improvement from their previous logo.  The typeface change was necessary.  It makes the logo feel younger somehow, probably because the old logo really used an outdated typeface.  If you would notice the letter “A”, the slant of the inner bridge is no longer facing against the whole type, but now is slanted to the right, making it more unified with the rest.  The “rays” illuminating from the letter “M” also saw some improvements, no longer using another color plus reducing its total number.

I’m not sure if the number “rays” mean anything, but I thought they could still drop a couple of them… specially that one under the logo! Oh my, are we back in the 90s? What’s that swoosh doing there? I think that was an unnecessary “ornamentation” on their part, just additional fluff.  The base of most of the letters looks like it was taken from the old font, just narrowed down a bit and fixed here and there… although the “S” seems to be out of place.  I agree that the old “S” should be changed, but they could’ve used a better one… just feels a little sloppy.

Even with my negative remarks, I think it was a good logo redesign and will not alienate their millions of subscribers.  I’m also happy that these big companies are seeing the value of good branding and design.

Here’s a font game for you!  I got 27 out of 34.  Damn serifs.. Blecchh! Thanks to Cargo for the link.  

In my mind, Starbucks has one of the strongest brands in the world. A solid logo implemented flawlessly across their stores around the globe. So it was a big surprise when I saw this article in Brand New that they have gone back to their first logo! In the US, Starbucks has launched a new brew: Pike Place Roast. Along with this a new campaign is the resurrection of its old brand, I guess symbolizing the Starbucks commitment to going back to its roots and that experience that made Starbucks such a powerful brand.

I suggest reading the link above to get an idea of how massive their campaign is. It is also nice to see the evolution of the Starbucks logo.

Just a couple of weeks back, I blogged about how I was moving my files to a PC.  Well that experience convinced me that I really need an upgrade.  Although the PC experience was not too bad there was the occasional screen freeze and yes I got “the blue screen of death” about 3 times… possibly because that was a really old problem.  Anyway, during that time and this week, some of the local distributors of mac lowered the price of the previous models of MacBook Pros since the introduction of the Multi-Touch ones.  It was too good an opportunity to pass up.  So I got myself one.  Yup… the exact same one which I said would be “My Next Apple” about a year ago.

The performance boost was expected of course since it is a significant jump from my old Powerbook G4.   But what amazes me is the software really.  After an installation of a few key software packages, it was back to work for me.  It was like I was transported back into a familiar room except the furniture was new but still in the right place.  Getting familiar with Leopard (vs my previous Tiger installation) was a breeze.  No need to learn anything new.  That’s good for someone like me who needs to get back into work right away.  I have yet to migrate all my data, specially my email, but I think this is a good time to start fresh.  Now back to loading up my CDs in iTunes…

After presenting to about 50 people last week during Virlanie Foundation’s town hall meeting, I recently heard that my proposed logo redesign was accepted. The Virlanie Foundation Inc (VFI) is the largest private non-sectarian child caring institution in Metro Manila, Philippines. It operates 12 residential homes providing shelter, food, education and love to over 1,000 disadvantaged children. Below is the result:

The redesign is more of a ‘nip/tuck’ really and this was probably the first redesign I’ve done with so much self-restrain. The reason was I knew that even the slightest change would face a lot of resistance. The original logo was done in France and they were represented during the town hall. True enough, I was informed before the presentation that the draft I had submitted was being questioned. Luckily I had the opportunity to present to everyone myself and show them the logic behind the redesign.

Above are the old and new logos superimposed with one another. The most obvious change was the move and resize of the smile. The previous smile was unnecessarily taking up a lot of vertical space and I explained that it looked more like a grin than a smile. Another thing I did was to make the typeface slightly narrower, thus also reducing the horizontal clutter. I made the letter “V” capital and smoothen the edges. And last but not the least, I changed the color of the dots from orange to blue. I thought that it was very distracting to have them like that. The result is what I believe to be a more solid and streamlined identity done without loosing its 15 year brand equity.

Yeah… well my trusty ol’ 12″ Powerbook G4 has been sluggish lately. And there is a desktop PC on my desk which has been gathering some dust. I thought of de-centralizing my work and moving my files to this Pentium 4 1.6 GHz with 1GB ram, using my Powerbook as a secondary machine. So far it has been okay. Windows hasn’t bugged me yet. Most of my time is spent on the browser, checking gmail, writing on this blog, administering my host/server, FTP etc.. And core graphics work using Photoshop and Illustrator is also fine on this machine.

It does actually seem faster to do browser based stuff with the desktop considering most web-apps are built for Windows in a way. Firefox seems faster on th PC than on the mac ergo Gmail is faster, wordpress is sturdier… etc. Or could be that this machine has a more stable LAN connection versus the WiFi on my mac. I don’t know.

But what I do know is that I either need to cleanup my Powerbook or buy a new MacBook Pro 15″.  I’ve been thinking about the latter for a while now… actually since Apple released an SantaRosa LED backlit one. But with all the bills and other things I have to pay for I’ve been holding off on getting one.  Now Apple just released an update to the Macbook Pro, based on Penryn Intel chips with a multi-touch pad, but I think I would settle for the SantaRosa ones.

Familybonding.com.ph is a community portal for families. The site has been online since last year. The aim of the site is to promote family values and community building with other families. The site has a lot of community tools like a forum, polls, a community calendar and it also allows members to create their own blogs.

This was our first community website and the design was also one of our most different. The colors and illustrations are fun and very appropriate to the site. Technically it was also the most challenging. Handling a CMS with forums and calendar functionality was not an easy task but I am proud of how it turned out. Let’s hope the families will follow.

It’s rare that I post tech news on this blog but I think this deserves it. Yes its true, only a few hours ago, Microsoft just made an unsolicited bid to acquire all of Yahoo’s outstanding shares at $31, pricing Yahoo at $44.6 Billion. NY Times reported this so it can’t be a hoax. TechCrunch even shared the letter of Steve Ballmer to Yahoo! Now with all this hype circulating, I’m not sure how Jerry Yang will react.

I for one love Yahoo! products, not particularly its search engine, but I think it did some great web 2.0 acquisitions like delicous and flickr. So I think it is a good move by Microsoft, and probably a good idea for Yahoo! to take the offer as well since they have been lagging behind Google as well as recent news of Yahoo! laying off a thousand employees.

This is not the first shocker Microsoft pulls on us, remember last years deal with Facebook? Valuating Facebook at $15 Billion, which I personally think was ridiculous.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what will happen next and how this might affect our daily web lives as well as our ‘office’ life.

I have been on a blog vacation for a while and aside from being swamped with work, having a week of flu, and a wedding. The Perlas clan from different parts of the country and the world came over the holidays for a reunion 2 years in the making and a first in maybe 15 years family gathering. I have a lot of stories about the reunion but I’ll save that for my personal site. But during one night where everyone was there I was able to take portraits of all of them.  Using my newly acquired Canon 400D with 50mm lens I quickly went around the venue taking a total of 53 portraits of the family.  This is the first time I do quick portraits and I was happy with it.  Here are some: