The telecommunications market has experienced more change in the last five years than it has in the last fifty and doesn’t look likely to be settling down anytime soon.

The knock-on effect is that telecom brands now have to work harder than ever before to acquire and retain customer loyalty.

Turquoise Branding understands both the scale of the challenge as well as the depth of strategy required to bring brands to their full potential.

Take a minute to browse some of the work in our branding portfolio and if you’d like to have a chat about how we can equip your brand to go further in 2012 we’d love to hear from you.

We’re very pleased to share with you our first guest post on the Turquoise Branding blog. This distinguished honour goes to an accomplished specialist in the field of Arabic Typography, Nadine Chahine:

If you are on the look out for new Arabic typefaces, you are in luck.

New Arabic typefaces are garnering international acclaim in type design contests with TDC2 wins almost every year. TDC2 is organised by Type Directors Club in New York. The Typography Annual from Communication Arts also had a good showing of Arabic this year.

There is a growing library of new Arabic typefaces being offered, at international standards. The largest and fastest growing is the Linotype library with Arabic companions to typography heavyweights such as Helvetica, Frutiger, Univers, Palatino, and DIN Next.

There are quite a few designers who are specializing in custom type-design. A lot of us have studied at Reading or The Hague and so have had a chance to learn from the best.

The Arabic typography repertoire is growing very quickly and we are seeing a diversification of styles whether it is in modern typefaces such as DIN Next Arabic, workhorses such as Frutiger Arabic, dynamic calligraphic forms such as Thuraya, or the elegant forms of Tasmeem’s Nastaaliq.

The OpenType font format has done wonders for the Arabic script, which is famous for its complexity of forms. This has tremendously improved the offering, and has liberated us from decades of lousy typography. It has also made possible the inclusion of many more typographic features, and the combination of Latin and Arabic glyphs within one font. This simplifies the design and typesetting of multilingual publications, and resolves the difficulty of having to match the optical size and weight of very different scripts.

The Middle East is waking up to possibilities of high quality Arabic type. This is especially the case for TV channels and networks. I’ve worked with six different TV channels/networks in the last year alone so we are really seeing lots of amazing things happening there.

Web fonts! Yes we do not have to settle for system fonts anymore. Arabic system fonts, whether on a Mac or PC, leave a lot to be desired. It’s not about being tired of seeing the same faces over and over again; it’s about the sad quality of the typefaces that we all had to read our news in. This sorry state of affairs has had a very damning effect on web development in the Middle East. Thankfully, things are turning around. There are several web font services out there, but the one with the best support for Arabic is webfonts.fonts.com.

All in all, these are very exciting times for Arabic typography. The future is looking very bright indeed!

– Nadine Chahine

Nadine Chahine is an award-winning type designer with a special interest in Arabic typography.
She regularly lectures on Arabic type design issues at international conferences around the world.
Nadine has taught Arabic Type design and typography courses at the Lebanese American University in Beirut and at the American University in Dubai.
She currently works at Linotype GmbH, in Germany.

You can read more from Nadine and find out more about her work over on her website: arabictype.com

If you would like to write a guest post for the blog please drop me a line

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CLIENT: BDB
PROJECT: Rebrand

BDB are a leading law firm who specialise in a broad range of legal practice areas, from transport and real estate, to family law and private wealth. They also act as parliamentary agents for the UK government. We were tasked with overhauling the previous identity moving the firm away from the staid and formal brand that they had possessed for some time.

We conceived the new identity through employing the creative thought, ‘accentuating the positive’. This is reflected most obviously within the new BDB logotype and the illustrations, which are both visual interpretations of this focus. The repeated shapes in the logotype play on the relationship between positive and negative spaces to create letters. Each drawing is based around a colourful D shape, derived from the BDB logotype, using simple pencil marks to make it the positive aspect of any subject matter. We enlisted illustrator Keith Watts to bring our vision to life. This is all complimented by a vibrant palette of colours.

We also developed an extensive literature system to deliver information with clarity, consistency and a cumulative presence overall.

Initial Concepts

Idea Development

Design Development

Brand Illustrations

Brand Guidelines

Brand Applications

Saudi Equestrian have been blazing a trail to this Summer’s London Olympics 2012 and more than deserve to be front page news as they continue to justify their country’s tremendous pride.

The feature inside the magazine, running at close to 10,000 words, gives a fully comprehensive overview of the team’s history and their many successes.

If you’re in France you can pick up a copy from newstands, otherwise you can download it here.

L’Eperon is a monthly magazine specialising in Equestrian sporting and livestock news. It was first published in 1937 and has is the longest-running equestrian magazine in France.

Over the course of three days starting on Friday February 10, Grammy Live will provide access to live-streaming behind-the-scenes content and social media integration, primarily via their Facebook Page but also on GetGlue, Instagram, Tumblr and on Twitter where they’re using the phrases #WeAreMusic and #GRAMMYGlam to aggregate and share tweets about the event.

Over on GigaOm, Liz Shannon Miller writes:

In these heady two-or-three-screen days, the Grammy Awards has been a classic case study in how social media engagement can pay off ratings-wise. Viewership of the on-air broadcast have increased dramatically since 2009 in younger demographics, with no small amount of credit due to the increasingly elaborate digital campaigns implemented by the Recording Academy.

“Partnering with our network partner affords us enhanced opportunities,” Grammy Live executive producer Peter Anton said in a phone interview, such as being able to get more on-air mentions for Grammy Live programming. “It wasn’t part of our overall scheme, but this year there have been broadened opportunities through this new partnership.”

On Sunday, the live stream will follow awards attendees from their limos to the post-show after parties, with multiple camera angles available backstage during the show. Basically, any video you could possibly imagine watching will be accessible via Grammy.com and the Grammy Live iOS apps (optimized for both iPad and iPhone) for a true two- or three-screen experience — except for the actual Grammy Awards, which will only be watchable on CBS.

Naturally, the Awards organisers are aiming for all of this co-ordinated interconnectivity to coalesce into a perfect storm of positive exposure for the Grammy brand as a broadcast event through it’s viewers Social channels.

With reports indicating that socially engaged viewers were sharing 10,000 tweets per second during Super Bowl XLVI last Sunday it makes perfect sense for more broadcasters to be experimenting with the new and varied ways to engage audiences through Social Media.

Source: Gigaom

Using RFID technology, companies can empower consumers to share their experience on social media networks in real time – simply with the wave of a hand. It’s as simple as embedding a RFID chip into a wristband, tag or promotional item. Anything. RFID readers placed around your venue can be programmed to share status updates, images, videos, or even links to a brand’s web properties.

The idea is gaining momentum with a number of larger brands who have run pilot schemes using the technology. For example, Natwest recently trialled the UpD8r Facebook RFID solution from ExceleratedApps at a recent event for their online Cricket Club with great success.

Even 100 attendees at the exclusive NatWest event were able to create over 20,000 impressions on Facebook walls for their branded experience – whilst it was still happening – with almost 5% of friends seeing the posts engaging and clicking through to NatWest Cricket Club web properties.

Meanwhile in the US, Nokia used RFID technology at an outdoor music event to generate over a million Facebook impressions and thousands of online conversations about their brand.

There are always going to be some users willing to share their experience via a mobile device, or when they return to a computer, but the RFID social sharing solution UpD8r is enabling that organic sharing process to be possible via every single attendee at your event or brand experience.

Just from a common sense appraisal, the value in this approach should be self-evident to anybody who understands the behavioural aspect of social sharing online, and with one-tenth of the planet now using Facebook we’re now past the point of asking if brands should engage with consumers through social media, and more pressingly concerned with how they should engage.

Passive check-ins have been flagged up about as the natural progression from the time-consuming routine of check-in services for some time now but, understandably, there’s an innately unappealing aspect to this summed up by the word ‘passive’. The RFID approach allows scial consumers to share what they want to share as quickly and painlessly as using an Oyster card on the London Underground.

I like where this is going.

Source: ExceleratedApps
Photo courtesy of seven_resist

Their $10 billion and rising annual advertising budget has apparently taken a toll on the multinationals profit margins and CEO Robert McDonald wants to moderate expenditure on traditional marketing methods and to pursue a fuller exploration of the cost-effective channels of communication that the web provides:

“In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions and there are many other examples I can cite from all over the world.”

P&G’s realisation of the enormous potential offered by the social web as an effective tool in the marketing toolbox , whilst progressive, comes surprisingly late as Jim Edwards, writing for Business Insider, observes:

“P&G’s Old Spice campaign is a textbook example of what the entire company should be doing. The problem is that the entire company isn’t doing it. Check out Mr. Clean’s Twitter stream, for instance. Oh, right—he doesn’t have one.”

The Old Spice campaign was world news when Isaiah Mustafah, in character as ‘The Old Spice Guy’ answered user’s questions in realtime via YouTube, Facebook and Twitter over a 48hr period in July 2010 which reportedly contributed to an 11% sales growth during the following months.

Source: Business Insider

Their new service will be rolled out in the first half of this year, putting it head to head with the expected launch of YouView during the same period.

Customers will have the option to either pay monthly or on a per-movie pricing scheme and will be able to access the service across multiple devices, including including PCs, laptops, smartphones, games consoles and TV.

The service will be targeting the 13m UK households who do not subscribe to a pay-TV service and aims to be BSkyB’s answer to the success of LoveFilm and, newly launched in the UK, Netflix.

Whilst these and other brands battle it out for dominance in the new VOD market, consumers will of course benefit from the competitive one-upmanship that all of the new competition will engender.

For example, I often hear people grumbling about how infrequently LoveFilm updates it’s movie library. Let’s see how many updates it gets over the next few months.

Source: The Guardian