Without looking at the picture below: What color is the Discover Card brand?

Do you know how hard it is to take a picture of a credit card edge without getting any numbers in the frame?

Orange. Right.

I wouldn’t say they own the color, necessarily, but Discover Card (the brand) is orange, just like American Express is green, MasterCard is red and yellow and Visa is yellow-orange and blue. Clearly, a Discover Card doesn’t have to be orange to be recognizable because the logo takes care of that, but references to orange help to strengthen the brand.

Plastic Makes Perfect

It should come as no surprise perhaps, that this Discover Card has a bright orange edge. I’m pretty sure the substrate on which the design has been screen printed is actually orange, (although I’m really not interested in cutting it in half to check).

What I mean by that is that, much like a piece of black matte board which is black all the way through, and not just two pieces of black surface stuck to an inner layer of a different color, I’m pretty sure this whole card is printed on solid orange plastic.

Yeah? So?

Clearly, the use of orange reinforces the brand but the orange edge on this card serves another, subtler yet extremely valuable purpose. I find this amazing because it’s one of those design solutions that are so basic and so simple that they are incredibly hard to imagine. I mean…who would ever think the edge of a credit card could be useful for anything except scraping the ice off your windshield, picking your teeth or jimmying open stubbornly locked doors?

To appreciate the brilliance of the orange edge, let’s take a look at the Discover card in it’s natural habitat, nestled snugly between my library card and driver’s license in my beat-up, yet trusty wallet:

The Discover Card in its natural habitat

Pretty easy to find the Discover Card, isn’t it? I wonder how many extra transactions Discover lands each year simply because credit cards look exactly the same when you’re trying to distinguish them using only the edge.

Very cool design work, Discover Card. Two thumbs up.

For those of you who are familiar with this post, or for those of you currently employed at L’Universitie du Notre Dame du Lac and inhabit office space in Grace Hall:

The Powers-That-Be at Cafe DeGrasta have agreed to give this “twitter thing” a whirl…just as soon as the students leave for Christmas and she has the time to concentrate. Putting aside for a moment, the fact that she is giving Twitter’s inherent complexity waaaaay to much credit, I am gratified that they’ve agreed to take this small, hesitating first step into the 21st century. 

Watch this space.

 

Click for actual size (flickr)

This was a concept for a Twitter dictionary page which would collect submissions for the spontaneous words Twitter users pull out of thin air to describe things unique to Twitter. My addition to the coined terms is the word used in the demo entry in the site comp.

Unfortunately, like most decent Twitter-related ideas: it’s already been done, which i find moderately disappointing because I really liked this design.

A couple of notes: The book is done entirely in Illustrator and Photoshop.

Know any authors who need a design for a site to promote a new book?

Glossary:

Cafe Degrasta: One of Notre Dame Food Service’s brands that operates out of the first floor of Grace Hall. Cafe Degrasta serves breakfast and lunch to the somewhat captive audience of Notre Dame employees whose offices are in Flanner and Grace Halls on the north east side of campus.

Twitter: A social network web application for micro-blogging.

Micro-Marketing: Marketing that targets your most likely customers on a direct, personal, hopefully permission-based level in the manner in which they most wish to be targeted.

Dear Cafe DeGrasta,

I had a stuffed pepper with mashed potatoes last Friday. You cooked said stuffed pepper and served it to me. It was very tasty, and I would definitely return to order more stuffed peppers in the future. Unfortunately, I don’t know when you serve stuffed peppers, and the only way I can find out is to go up to the Grace Hall lobby and read your specials board, hoping against hope that today is stuffed pepper day. Clearly…what we have here is a failure to communicate.

Now, I could, I suppose, go out to the NDFS website every day (presuming that your menu is posted there), and check the specials. I’m sure I could also remember to pick up a xeroxed copy of your specials for the month (just like my elementary school used to do for lunches in 1988!). Let’s think about that for a minute though, do you really want to base your sales on my ability to remember to do this?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a quick, easy, free way to send a tiny message (say…140 characters or so), to me every day around 10:30 a.m. that tells me if stuffed peppers will be available that day? What if I could choose whether or not I wanted you to send me this information, so you’d never have to worry about direct emails being deleted or ignored, or (worst of all) actually annoying me, a valuable client, potentially influencing my future decisions to patronize your establishment?

So here’s the challenge, Cafe DeGrasta…I want to follow you on Twitter. I want you to update your status once a day to let me know what you’re serving and I want to know this information before AgencyND’s daily waltz of the “where do we want to go to eat today?” starts around 11:15 every morning.

I do enjoy your food, and even without this tiny little investment in time (and literally no investment whatsoever in dollars), I do make the trip to the lobby just to be surprised by what you’re serving. Imagine how much more frequently you could have my business if you made it impossible for me NOT to know what your specials are from day to day. Even better still, there are at least eight or nine other twitterers just like me, right here in the same building who you could reach at no extra charge simply by trying to sell me a stuffed pepper or two. Heck…I bet if you put a little “follow us on twitter, username: degrasta,” sign next to the cash register you might even attract the attention of more people like us…and attention, my dear degrasta is the cradle of sales.

Most sincerely,

-oAk-

Brandsinger has a very astute insight on the real difference between Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks posted today.

The flaw in Dunkin’s campaign is the premise – that competition with Starbucks is “all about the coffee.” If that were true, you could sell a great cup of joe straight from a garden spigot for LESS money and make a fortune. No, you good-hearted Dunkin’ bozos. It is NOT “all about the coffee.” It’s about Starbucks’ creation of an urban refuge in a menacing modern metropolis.

He’s right. Starbucks isn’t selling “better coffee.” It’s not better. They’re selling a warm, infinitely customizable experience built around getting a cup of coffee in which actually drinking the coffee is only a part.

Until the Starbucks customer is attracted to the idea of spending an hour skimming the paper at a Dunkin Donuts, no amount of quality in the coffee is going to win Starbucks’ customers away from Starbucks.

I suspect that the Dunkin Donuts quality campaign is aimed less at winning new customers away from the high end competitor in the space and more at reinforcing the brand identity with the people who are already loyal Dunkin Donuts customers.