In the US, brands have long since recognised the power of female bloggers. But only now is the rest of the world waking up to this lucrative phenomenon. And it’s rapidly changing the rules of advertising, marketing and even brand management.

Women bloggers are the new advertising heavyweights. They control a huge audience – a whopping 36.2 million women actively participate in the blogosphere every week.

And a survey published by BlogHer this year revealed that around 50% of women consider blogs a reliable source of advice and information and are directly influenced by blogs in their purchase decisions.

So how are brands reacting? Businesses now send promo items to bloggers in an attempt to win their favour. Even Wal Mart publicly admits working with a team of female bloggers to promote the company.

My advice: take a more deliberate and inclusive approach to women bloggers. They can make or break your product’s success in the female consumer segment, so find out what they’re saying about you. If you decide to actively engage with them, read the blog to understand its editorial agenda before approaching the blogger.

The times are a’ changing. Women have long since established themselves as the stronger sex and influential consumers. And now they are ruling the blogosphere too. A safer option than letting us men lead the way…

My new design thrill is time. After 17 years of designing, it’s occurred to me that companies continually fail to consider one important parameter: time factor. Put simply, this is the amount of time a user is willing to spend on your product, service or communication solution before they give up and walk away.

Take this American billboard, for example. It may not be pretty, but it sure as hell works.

Why? Its design acknowledges the fact that people only have a split second to get the message. A two-word eye-catching question against a brightly coloured background attracts your attention in a flash and quickly communicates the product.

It competes hands down against the hundreds of other billboards in the city, which demand as much as 10 seconds from passers by. Just a thought … Check out Thinkaboutit for more reflections on the design time factor.

Environmental requirements and resource shortage provoke designers and engineers to rethink before creating yet another new design. Surprisingly, limits often result in innovative and even cool-looking solutions. 

ecofont, invented by Dutch communications agency Spranq, is a needed rethink of typo and the prevalent ‘typo-fashion’ approach. The basic idea: to transfer the concept of a hole-beam (or a Dutch holey cheese) to a font and thereby set new standards for ink consumption, while creating a new, powerful visual expression at the same time. 

Right, fonts are tiny, but trillions are printed every day. What I like particularly about ecofont is the statement that everything matters and makes a difference. It insists that everybody, even typeface designers, can contribute to the global aspiration for eco-efficiency and responsibility. 

Hopefully, ecofont – besides bringing down the large amounts of toner and printing ink that is used every day to create ordinary, ‘massive’ art works – will spark more rethinking in ‘massive’ graphic design.

Start taking notice of your (potential) female customers, was thrust of a seminar late last year at Copenhagen Business School. The seminar focused on how businesses can increase sales significantly by focusing on female customers. According to Helle Katholm Knutsen, women decide or influence a whopping 80% of all purchases! A GIANT business opportunity.

Many of Designit’s clients are starting to recognise this opportunity and requesting our expertise on how to best target the female segment. And we’re not the only ones. Here are examples of formerly male-focused companies that are doing what they can to get their foot on the female ladder.

Take for example Sydbank, which has a pension and investment service especially tailored to women. Or Q8, the chain of petrol stations, who is launching ‘Qvik To Go’, a new product series of healthy snacks and stations with new interior that appeals more to female customers. When Procter & Gamble Co. invented Swiffer, it was a result of considering how women feel while cleaning the house.

The business potential of the female segment is huge, so grab it!

This year's Mini-lit hit

Due to my roots in communications design, I’m often asked this question. It’s a question impossible to answer with conviction, as no other design discipline has such a wide cultural and personal variety as communication.

Blogging may be the fashionable answer right now, but in essence it’s just more of the same. There’s a more interesting answer. A new thing is going on, that if nothing else illustrates the challenge of the continuous information overload.

It’s called Mini-lit. The phenomenon owes a lot to synchronised messaging: SMS, Twitter.com, chat etc. It’s about saying a lot in very few words – demanding more from the reader – and sender. Mini-lit is limiting the number of words you have to convey a message: a five-word film review, 12-word novel, six-word prayer. Concentrate, think and communicate and challenge me – don’t just spam me with words. That’s the idea.

Hemmingway apparently started the whole thing when he was dared to write a six-word-novel. He came back with: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” Now you know what I mean.

I think Mini-lit will find it’s way into mainstream communication – for a while. This year’s surprise hit in U.S. bookshops was ‘Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure’. And a second six-word collection, on love and heartbreak, will be out in January. The Mini-lit thing is spreading.

Read more here

I’m currently reading a book by Rolf Jensen, called “Dream Society”. In this book Rolf Jensen tries to define the future society of the western world. In the past we’ve been hunters and collectors, we’ve been through the agriculture and industrial societies. Many would agree that we at the moment are living in the information society. Rolf Jensen though, is stating that we are entering the “Dream Society” or the experience economy as it is also called.

Rolf is definitely into something here – and why shouldn’t he be – he’s one of the leading futurologists. In my opinion the dream society is not only in the beginning state. We are living it.

You can define the dream society as a society, where we’re not only buying products, we are buying stories and dreams. We want a good story to accomplish the product we’re buying. That can either be the wine where you “know” who the farmer is, a product styled by yourself or any other story attached to a product. For the same reason individualism is becoming more and more relevant in product design. Many of the “old” brands is learning this the hard way. People are no longer satisfied with a pair of jeans or shoes that everybody else is wearing. They want a story attached to it. Nike, Burton and other companies has taken this into consideration and made it possible for their consumers to style their own products and thereby attaching a story to the shoes they are wearing or the snowboard they are riding.

So why am I writing this. I’m doing it to open your eyes for the new possibilities and to get on the train before it’s left the station. I would also like to recommend this book to everybody who’s interested in design and branding.

On my recent vacation in Egypt I saw this ATM. I needed money, but I still walked around for almost an hour to find a bank that I felt looked reasonably safe and trustworthy.

A bank with an armed guard outside gave me more confidence that I wouldn’t get cheated than with the ATM shown in the picture.

How does this translate into design? First of all, the company producing the ATM has absolutely no understanding of the problems and challenges their client, the bank, has. And the bank has no understanding of their client, the person walking up to an ATM.

Just few days of channel service analysis might have saved all 3 parties (manufacturer, bank and client) from embarrasment, distrust and annoyance.

If a designer had been involved in the process, the manufacturer could have found a better solution for the banks challenges, the clients would still feel confident about the banks services and the bank would make more money.

Who should now feel cheated?

What is good communication? Saying everything in six words, only? It’s easy, some people say.

What about using no words at all? Like Sony, in their Foam city ad. No words and still, after just one look, or rather listen-through, I recall the ad (and brand) by the subtle soundtrack. Well done!

Whooo! Check out Google’s corporate website. Super simplistic, non-corporate and totally anti stylish. But OK, if a service or a product has enough substance, style becomes less important. Or apparent lack of style becomes the style in itself. Just a thought, but this no nonsense approach has lots of potential if you ask me:)

120 scanned pages of logos from the mid-70s.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_carl/sets/72157604144345854/