Archives / Tag: Branding

Pretty pleased with this one, we just launched a lovely little site at Nine Four for our client Design & Contract Interiors. Mobile first, responsive, clean and simple… running on ExpressionEngine.

Bit of a ‘work in progress’ as we’re slowly updating all the legacy site images with nice new high res shots but something I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working on these past few months, brings back memories of my days at Berkshire College of Art & Design where I studied furniture design as part of the multidisciplinary 3 Dimensional Studies ND and HND. :)

From the moment that I decided to go it alone and start my own business with my wife 3 years back I was keen to ensure that I bagged a .com as our primary domain. However it very soon became obvious that the chances of settling on a name that we were happy with and it being available as a .com were pretty much nil.

After what seemed like an age we settled on a name (Nine Four) and purchased the only available domains, the .co.uk and .net. The .com was already registered but not in use so we held out some small hope that we might manage to get hold of it one day.

How much?

In October 2006, just over a year after we started the business I decided to approach the current domain name owner, hoping that a reasonable offer might be well received. However he was clearly not in the mood to be reasonable and wanted no less than $25,000. Obviously I declined.

Thanks for the reminder

Almost another 2 years passed and to be honest I had for the most part forgotten about the .com. Resigning myself to the fact that I would never be able to get hold of it and that perhaps it wasn’t so important after all.

On the 6th of August I received an email from a company called Tripod UK Ltd alerting me to the fact that ninefour.com had not been renewed by it’s previous owner and that it was soon to be released. They claimed an 80% success rate in catching dropping domains but you know what… I fancied giving it a shot myself.

So I read up on Mike Davidson’s Blog about his experience snatching ‘newsvine.com’ and formulated a plan of attack.

Drop what?

After a certain period (usually 75 days) a domain name ‘drops’ and becomes available for re-registration. The trick is to know exactly when the drop will occur. Unfortunately there’s no way of being privy to the exact time or date so as Mike suggests, your best bet is to enlist the services of a company that will continually monitor the status of the domain name for you and automatically attempt to register it as soon as it becomes available.

Mike suggests using SnapNames.com, Enom.com and Pool.com. Enom.com didn’t seem to have an obvious option for back-ordering a domain name so in the end I went with NameJet.com.

SnapNames seemed like it was going to be my best bet as they have a clear and open auction process and if there was no competition for the domain when it dropped they would automatically register it for me for just $60.

NameJet seemed to offer a similar service to SnapNames but Pool was a lot less enticing. Although I didn’t get to experience their auction process in the end, from what I read on Mikes blog it isn’t great for the buyer, only great for Pool.

The auction

I was one of the lucky ones I guess because SnapNames bagged ninefour.com. I soon discovered though that I was not the only bidder, there were two of us… I guess it could have been much worse.

My counterpart had opened the bidding at $60. I had set a maximum bid amount of $300 prior to the auction so SnapNames had automatically bid on my behalf to $70. The auction process lasts between one and fourteen days, in this case the auction was 7 days so I made a note in the diary and got back to work.

A week later I was regularly refreshing the SnapNames auction page to check the status of the order as the hours counted down. With no come back bid from my counterpart I was feeling confident. I did a little research online based on his/her SnapNames username and found that s/he had a history of opening the bidding on a number of names but didn’t seem to bid any further. This was all good. :)

The last minutes

With less than 10 minutes to go I’m outbid. I was gutted, all of a sudden from nowhere the other bidder had upped the ante. After a few minutes Jo and I decided to up our maximum bid. SnapNames extends the auction end time by 5 minutes every time a new winning bid is placed so we knew we had to be bold. We entered a maximum bid of $800 and sat tight. 10 minutes or so later we were the proud new owners of ninefour.com, the final bid being $579.

It was more than we had hoped to spend but I think it was worth it. As a business your brand is probably one of your most valuable assets (in addition to your employees!) so in that context $579 seems like a small price to pay. Certainly beats $25,000!

A white box arrived today containing an ‘“ExpressionEngine Mug”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/nathanpitman/2678386600/’ from the good folks at EllisLab as a thanks for my video short on ‘“Why I Choose ExpressionEngine”:http://nathanpitman.com/journal/539/why-choose-expressionengine’.

It’s most awesome, primarily for its capacious capacity and then also for the ‘cut in’ ExpressionEngine ident. Now all I need is a matching T-Shirt and my life will be complete.

Thanks to all at EllisLab! :)

Looks like they ‘just’ made the switch, swapping the old macromedia logo out for an adobe one and making some subtle design changes to the site.

Very strange to finally see things starting to happen, but kinda exciting at the same time.

Update: Even more interesting is some discussion of plans to integrate the PDF and SWF formats.

Well as the title says, I’m no print designer, but with a few minutes to spare between children going to bed and the increasingly excellent afterlife I thought I’d have a shot at a concept for my business cards. The number of times in the last month I wish I’d had a bunch of these in my pocket is getting beyond a joke, so it’s time to pull my finger out.

I can’t afford any ‘snazzy’ print techniques, it’s just single colour and a tint of black for me on a good quality stock.

So, as you can see, solid on the reverse with a portrait apsect and white on the front with landscape and a nice large logotype. I must say I’ve been tempted to include something about nine four, focus etc… a little inspired perhaps by the clear:left business cards.

Update: Well, after some discussion with a few old work mates I decided that the card needs to at least say what I do. Not everyone who has one will neccesarily have talked to me in person or remember what I said. What if I hand some out at a party and someone bags one only to stumble acrosss it in a years time when they need my services, but ignore it becuase it doesn’t spell those services out.

So, with that in mind I decided to add a short and simple description of my services; “new media design & development”. I’ve also ditched the company address as I really can’t think that anyone would benefit from this on a business card in this day and age, especially when I’m not likely to meet clients at the ‘home office’ and don’t really want clients communicating in a non electronic manner. Do you think it’s safe to lose the address?

So now the iPod plays video, I guess we all kinda saw this coming, but it makes me wonder, should apple re-brand iTunes to be a little more descriptive? iTunes Music Store doesn’t quite work when you’re trying to tell people that they can browse and buy Music Videos and TV Shows (and films soon I’m sure). Just wondered.

I’ve been a bit slow to post it here (life is pretty busy when you’re working for yourself believe it or not) but Glen Richardson of Design Ontap also took some time to devise a logo for Nine Four.

Similar in concept to Mr Ruffles effort, but Glen opted for a more contemporary font and a play on the binary for ’9 4’. Again there’s some discussion over at Flickr about this but I thought I’d post it here for further critique and comment.

Designing your own logo is just the worst task you could ever be charged with. Lucky for me a couple of mates stepped in and offered to take a look at this for me.

My good friend Chris Ruffles who I used to work with at Mirashade is the first back to me with something. There’s already been some discussion over at Flickr about this but I thought I’d post it here for further critique and comment.

Macromedia have gone public on ‘“Studio 8”:http://www.macromedia.com/software/studio/’. The final installment perhaps before we see a combined effort from the Macromedia and Adobe software development teams.

In a less than unexpected move they have seen sense and dropped the pointless ‘MX’ tag and reverted back to a simple version numbering.

So I hear via foo that the next version of Windows is to be branded ‘“Vista”:http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/’ which according to the Visual Thesaurus means ‘the percept of a region’.

Not a bad name if you ask me, and a much needed departure from the whole ‘slap two letters from the alphabet together’ thing.

There is speak of Microsoft focusing less on the windows brand this time around, with ‘Vista’ taking centre stage (‘Vista Home’, ‘Vista Professional’, ‘Vista Server’ etc). As others have already stated this could be a good move and will encourage the view that this release perhaps represents a more substantial step forward from XP than critics might suggest.

What’s the deal with all the bird brand logos at the mo…?

Is this the next drop shadow, the next trend. Maybe I should get me a bird in my logo… or a Badger.