Yeah, so did we. And then we were introduced to Ventyx – a software solutions company that manages and maintains the systems that make our society possible. Along with our former client Mincom, Ventyx was recently brought into the ABB family, and needed a brand refresh to reflect the expanded capabilities of the newly merged company.

And so, they came to us to help them define what the new Ventyx meant, looked like, and stood for. Our work centered on a new website, but extended to a logo evolution and voice and style guidelines for the brand as a whole.

Here’s a quick rundown of how we reimagined an enterprise software company:

• First, we conducted global research to validate the most important brand and purchase drivers of key audience segments. We then articulated their new positioning as a solution partner for the world’s essential industries, and defined personality traits that accommodated the two former companies’ culture and offerings.

• Once we established the new brand positioning we designed a strong new logo that evolved from the company’s roots, reorganized the website, and developed easy-to-follow tone and voice guidelines for all marketing copy.

• Finally, we wrote engaging web copy, choose photos and established photographic guidelines that reflected the new-but-still-powerful global brand.

So head on over to ventyx.com to see how interesting enterprise solutions can be. We think you’ll be surprised and intrigued. We sure were.

The wheels have been turning, the sparks have been flying, and a good dose of fairy dust has been applied to the whole Sequence office. Yes, you read that right – fairy dust. We just put the finishing touches on three different iPad apps for Disney.

The first app out of the gate was Disney Pix, a photo app for photographers of all ages. Built to complement the recently released Disney AppClix camera, the app lets kids (and grown-ups) create works of virtual art with their favorite photos and Disney characters.

Next up? We worked with a few legendary characters currently making their comeback on the big screen – the Muppets. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? We helped create Muppet Mail and Muppet Mail Lite – two e-greetings apps that redefine what an e-card could be. Make yourself a Muppet, make your Muppet talk, surround yourself with your favorite characters, and then share with your friends – and that’s just the start of the fun.

Last but not least, we kicked off the holiday season with Disney Holiday Magic, an easy way for moms and families to get their holiday greetings sent with minimal stress. But of course, we couldn’t just let e-greetings be e-greetings – that’s not how we roll. So, we turned the usual holiday e-cards into a deeper, more interactive, and ultimately more fun experience: we gave the user the chance to add hidden photos and letters to their cards. Imagine Grandma’s surprise when she discovered this!

So feel free to check them out, give them a (preferably five-star!) review, and let us know what you think. If you need us, you’ll most likely find us in front of an iPad screen, catching up with family and friends in about a million different magical ways.

You can read more about the new camera at their website.

Kudos to Ren, Charles, Kira, Chris, Kristen, Shamik and the rest of the Lytro team.

Editor’s note: Sequence was recently asked to design the brand identities for the three finalists of NBC’s reality TV show, America’s Next Great Restaurant. Up until the final episode, we were sworn to secrecy and could not mention even our involvement in the show (nevermind who the winner was). But now that Soul Daddy is officially America’s Next Great Restaurant, we’ve asked the Creative Director behind the work to tell the story of what it was like working on a secret.

=================

Working on a secret.

Before I start, there has to be some setup for you all to understand what I’m talking about.

Two of my colleagues and I were called in to “consult” with the three finalists of the new TV reality show “America’s Next Great Restaurant.” Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle (one of our clients), was a judge & investor for this exciting new show in which the grand prize is three working restaurants based on their concept. As investors, Steve and his fellow judges wanted to make sure that whichever concept they chose had an overall brand that they could both “live with” and might also ensure success.

Our role as brand consultants and designers was going to take place on the air. We would be introduced as members of Steve’s brand agency that “helped take Chipotle to the next level,” and that this final polishing of their brand would do the same for the eventual winner.

Well, reality TV is a long way from reality for us designers. Very little briefing time, next to no prep/design time, here are the judges…nice to meet you…we like those ideas…a little “here’s how TV works, kid” and….boom, we’re on!

By the way, if you expect someone to follow the celebrity judges on to a Hollywood set, hit some sort of mark, and not be distracted by a dozen camera and sound people…you might want to let them know what is going to happen and where this mysterious “mark” is.

So we get settled in, meet our contestants, do the chit-chat thing and learn about their concepts. Steve and Bobby Flay do their walkaround… “I like where this is going”… “hmmm, do you think this”….you know, your standard client-designer-judge/investor-reality-TV-show-cameras-filming-your-every-move kind of thing.

Yeah…not a normal scenario for us designers, but I will say, I was very proud of the way all three of us handled a somewhat hectic and crazy experience. We had a well-deserved drink that night, and came back to our studio with a great story to tell the rest of the gang.

And now, secrecy.

Some time goes by, we are still excited by our experience and wondering if we’ll be on TV or on the editing room floor, when they call once again. They need us to work on the winner’s brand.  Real reality will come into play as the winner’s three stores are built and opened the day after the finale. Final refinement of the concept, so all involved know what they’re getting into. A final tweak to the identity so that it can be applied to signage, uniforms, co-ordination with architects, etc. All of the stuff that we designers normally spend months on when creating and implementing brands that millions will see and interact with. Sounds fun. Seems easy enough. I’ve worked on major brands before. Hell, we just finished a rebranding of Chipotle, so how could this be any different?

Well, I’ll tell you how. It’s a secret. No really, it’s a secret, and you can’t tell anyone.

We need to do our refinement, plan, design and implement this new brand across three stores all the while keeping it a secret. The show hasn’t even hit the airwaves, and I already know who wins. Crazy.

Our office isn’t huge, but we have a little over 30 people. How am I going to work on this project, be available for other projects, and keep the secret? The first thing I did was to create my own personal philosophy around keeping the secret. I decided that if the secret was leaked, it wasn’t going to be because of me. I decided that I wasn’t going to tell anyone. Not even my wife. I devised all kinds of answers to questions about the show. My favorite was, ”the winner is definitely one of the three finalist.” (What an amazing side-step. Feel free to use it, I didn’t feel I could get a trademark.) The other thing we decided to do was to convert one of our smaller conference rooms into my new (private) office! We papered over the glass walls and in I went.

Now, a private office might sound like a sweet deal, but as a designer, it’s really nice to hear the passing comment about what you’re working on. To be able to grab another designer and talk through something that’s just not quite right, or the spontaneous, “what do you think of this..” kind of thing just isn’t as easy when your in a private office, let alone trying to keep what your working on a secret from the entire country.

The inner circle of secrecy grows.

Refining the identity and developing the extend look-and-feel of the brand wasn’t a huge challenging, but the logistics of everything certainly were.  All of a sudden, simple things like getting exterior signage approved and manufactured was an issue because that would mean someone else would know the secret. Proofing things became an issue — heck, if I just wanted to print something out here in the office I needed to do it on the sly. Or, at the very least, be very fast and run to the printer before other might see my work.

We had the idea of doing a mural in each of the stores, and the biggest discussion point was around how we could get something installed and keep the number of eyes on the work to a minimum. The next problem was the artwork itself. For a variety of reasons, I ended up bringing the muralist in house (another person “in-the-know”), working, in secret, in the back of our studio, all the while keeping prying eyes at bay.

Every discussion about whatever the next component was going to be was partnered with a conversation about who would now need to know the secret, or, how we planned on keeping something out of view. Installation dates were pushed. Some installations would just have to wait until the stores were opened. All the while, I’m working without my fellow designers for critique or advice.

Personally, my big take away on this was really about the side of our business that is often taken for granted. Design is only one part of the equation. Getting it printed, manufactured, installed, coded, or otherwise brought to life is no simple task. It takes a lot of people, and getting them all to keep a secret only adds to the complexity.

And now, everyone knows.

As the final show airs, and the secret is revealed, my work seems a lot like all of the other projects we’ve worked on. The basics are the same. I still needed to understand the client and vision. I still needed to create systems and styles that crossed many different mediums. I also needed to rely on others involved to be both critical and accepting. I got to see the joy on peoples’ faces as all of the hard work came to reality. And, I get to take pride in my work, and be able to say: “I did that.”

It really wasn’t all that different from work we do with our other clients, except this time….it was a secret.

Sequence has been approached by a variety of clients looking for advice regarding this platform. This holiday season Samsung, Dell, Archos, Augen, Gome, Best Buy, Acer and others have been pushing hard to get their Android tablets out in front of consumers.  As a result, many of our clients are required to consider how these devices will affect their business.  Whether or not we recommend a business enters into the Android tablet space at this early stage depends on their individual situation and strategic goals.  But with every case, Sequence wants our clients to be aware of some general observations we have made about this emerging platform:

“Just make it bigger” is not a tablet app design strategy
Anyone who says the iPad is a big iPhone isn’t paying attention. There was a reason why the Apple tablet was rumored for so many years: they were working on it for that long. The iPad flavor of iOS isn’t a hastily modified version of the iPhone OS. It is a complete overhaul. Yes there are many similar patterns and elements between the iPhone and the iPad  but Apple understands that users approaches a larger screen-size in a completely different way than a phone-sized device.  As a result, the interaction models and task flows are often completely different and require UI components designed for that specific type of user experience.

One of the biggest differences between the phone and tablet is a tablet-sized screen allows for discreet tasks. A phone-sized screen allows for a handful UI choices so multi-step tasks often require many different screens.  Its what many call a “hub and spoke” task flow.  The user makes a single selection on one screen which then moves the user on to another screen to continue the task, and so on.  (Example:  The users views a list of options,  they choose one item in that list, the list is removed from view to show only the details of the choice you made.  You must tap “Back” to see the context of the previous step.)

A tablet-sized screen’s increased real-estate  allows multiple interactive components to be spread across a single state of a tablet screen.  This allows users to maintain context to the primary experience (which is hopefully taking advantage of the beautiful media display) while completing discreet side tasks (if you have seen the Calendar on the iPad users are able to edit/view details of single calendar events while never leaving the calendar view itself).  The iPad OS has a number of behaviors and components that allow for discreet task flows: multi-pane layouts that can affect each other, UI containers such as popover modules, light-boxes, and more.  It’s a much richer and intimate experience than a phone-size screen allows.

Android 2.2 is not a tablet OS
TechRadar caught up to the Director of Products for Mobile at Google, Hugo Barra, where he admitted the most recent public version of Android, 2.2 (Froyo), is “not optimized for tablets.”  The form factor was not a consideration when v2.2  was developed.

Android 2.2 does not come with stock tablet components like those iPad elements mentioned above to help make the most of the larger screen size. But that’s not to say Google won’t roll out some/all of these components sometime soon.  The Android design and development community generally agrees that this form-factor cannot be ignored.  Many speculate that the release of Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) will contain tablet components though Google has not confirmed this.

Which leads to our next point:

Any custom tablet components you create could have a short lifespan
Ok, so Android 2.2 doesn’t have a library of components optimized for the tablet experience. “Android is open source” you say, “you can just create them!”  And that’s true, we can.

Almost every handset manufacturer out there using Android has created some custom experience.  They do it to improve the Android stock offerings and to distinguish their product in the marketplace.  HTC has done this especially well, creating a library of custom components that allows for a much richer interaction experience than stock Android is capable of.

The question is, do you spend time and money developing custom tablet components for your specific application when a native library of Android tablet components is reportedly coming soon?

Our general interaction design philosophy is to use the commonly understood language of the platform to minimize the user’s learning curve.  That’s not to say all apps should look and act the same, but basic interactions around accessing information and routine tasks should start from a commonly understood model.  Creating custom components for basic interactions that run contrary to official Android tablet components can make your application less usable.  If custom components are created, there should also be plans to review and possibly update the experience once Google’s native components are released.

The Android app marketplace is not available for all tablets
Barra has also said that “the way Android Market works is it’s not going to be available on devices that don’t allow applications to run correctly. Which devices do, and which don’t will be unit specific. If you want Android market on [a tablet] platform, the apps just wouldn’t run, [Froyo] is just not designed for that form factor.”

Different OEMs can create their own brand specific marketplace for applications that will run on their particular device, but that type of market fragmentation doesn’t work well with most clients’ cost/reward calculations.

Device specifications are very fluid
Google created Android to be a software framework that is installable in a wide variety of hardware form factors.  Therein lies a big challenge for application development. The variety in the hardware specifications can greatly impact the development of an application .  Here are a few of the variables:

Version of the OS - Right now some devices like the Archos 7 use the antiquated v1.5 of Android.  Other devices, like the upcoming Samsung Galaxy use the most current v2.2 and promise to upgrade to 3.0 when its released.  Do you design for v1.5?  You do if there is a large potential audience using that version.  But by doing so it can cost you the ability to design a better experience using the latest Android capabilities.

Screen resolution – There are two common sizes screen sizes for current/upcoming tablets: 7 to 10 inches.  The resolutions range from a 800×480 to 1024×600.

Hardkeys -  Different tablets devices are placing their Android hardkeys at the bottom of a portrait orientation, some at the bottom of a landscape orientation.  Some are even placing them on the side of a landscape orientation.  That decision is going to drive the user’s perception of what is the natural way to hold the device.  Full-screen smart phones were given a portrait orientation because it was the natural way users hold a phone.  A tablet is more of an open game:  Is it held portrait like a single sheet of letter paper?  Is it held landscape like a two page book/wide screen television?  With the iPad, the position of the home button is relatively minor decision since all the application controls are within the app interface on the screen.  The Android hardkeys makes the hardware orientation much more critical.

Conclusion?
The net of all of this is the Android Tablet landscape is an emerging platform without strict implementation oversight.  The result is a great deal of potential confusion as product designers attempt to get a handle on all the variables that are currently in play.  The situation is worsened by a platform that is currently not designed for a tablet form-factor.

If you were looking for a definitive answer of whether or not you should jump into the first generation of the Android tablet, sorry you won’t get that from a blog post.  The unique requirements of each particular project will influence that decision.

But, you can give us a call and we’d be happy to help you figure it out.