Hile Design LLC has been hired by New Hampshire-based game developer Goldbrick Games LLC to design packaging and game elements for two new family-oriented games: a continuous play card game and a dice game.

In 2005, Hile designed Goldbrick’s popular card game, Perpetual Commotion, which won numerous toy industry awards including the iParenting Media Award and the National Parenting Publications Award.

“We always look forward to our projects with Goldbrick Games,” said Dave Hile, President of Hile Design, “They have great, original products that are super fun to play, and we get to use some of our more specialized creative skills like illustration and retail package design.”

Perpetual Commotion and 2-Player Perpetual Commotion continue to be popular sellers on Amazon.com and at toy and specialty stores in both the United States and Israel.

Note: If you’d like, you can skip the off-color backstory and go directly to how FAQs can be useful, today.

The first time I saw the letters F-A-Q strung together was in the early 1990s at a grungy little club in Athens, Georgia. The one thing I remember about the otherwise unmemorable band that was playing is the three letters scrawled on the body of the lead’s guitar: FA-Q.

FA-Q? It took me a set, but eventually I sounded it out. “Oh. I get it. Faaah…”

A couple years later, the people’s Internet began in earnest. AOL was handing out CDs with “free trial hours” by the zillions and everyone was rushing to get on the Web. Frequently Asked Questions pages became as ubiquitous on websites as “home” buttons. Trouble was, early attempts at FAQ pages were a hot mess. From a user’s standpoint, they felt like more of a FA-Q from frustrated programmers than an honest attempt to answer actual F.A.Qs.

The troubled history of FAQs

In the early attempts to convert their brand to this new media, a lot of companies found that once their main site navigation was done, they had some leftovers—the content equivalent of what happens to me when I try to work on an “assembly required” project at home (a fistful of extra nuts and bolts). The thing is built, but what do I do with this stuff that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere?

I have a drawer at home where I toss all my surplus hardware. For many early Web builders, the FAQ page became their site’s equivalent of the junk drawer. Read the rest of this entry »

Hile Design has recently acquired ten new clients. They are Alpha Remodeling, CareBridge, Ergopoint, Go Docs Go, Internet2, Pall Life Sciences, Power Panel, REthink Real Estate CRM, Qualigence, and the Economic Development Advisory Committee of Scio Township. Services differ from client to client but range from complete brand research and development to website, animation, print advertising and exhibit design services.

Reflective of Hile’s diverse client base, the new companies and organizations range in size, industry and marketing needs. Alpha Remodeling has been serving the Ann Arbor area since 1989. The company specializes in additions and interior and exterior remodeling projects. CareBridge is a non-profit company incorporated to support the MiPCT (Michigan Primary Care Transformation) demonstration of a more integrated, affordable and effective system of providing health care. Ergopoint provides online self-assessment for businesses concerning their staff’s ergonomic work environments and provides education and recommendations for healthier alternatives. Go Docs Go is a health care provider committed to bringing doctors and medical professionals directly to a patient’s front door. Internet2 is an Ann Arbor-based consortium led by the U.S. research and education community dedicated to researching and sharing a revolutionary-class IP and optical network. Pall Life Sciences is a world leader in providing filtration, separation and purification solutions for use across the broad spectrum of life sciences. Power Panel, a Toronto, Canada based company, has a manufacturing facility in Detroit where the next generation of solar panels are being produced. Qualigence provides in-depth recruiting research and strategies for businesses, including recruiter education and an annual recruitment conference. And Scio Township is home to more than 900 diverse businesses representing some of the area’s largest firms to mid-sized and small boutique companies covering a broad range of industries.

Logo – that little spot of ink (or cluster of pixels) that communicates the persona of a company. We’re all familiar with the logos of major brands: Target’s red and white bull’s eye, Starbuck’s mermaid, the Nike swoosh, and You-Know-Who’s golden arches. These marks seem so simple, don’t they? And if you’ve spent any time looking for logo design services, you’d think it’s a simple process too. With online companies offering $50 logo design “packages” (including unlimited revisions), and sites where you can build your own logo, developing a logo can seem like a commodity similar to buying your company’s office supplies.

So why do discerning companies pay substantial amounts of green to hire a firm to custom design their logos? Perhaps the answer is that to really capture the essence of a brand, it takes a lot of thought, creativity, experience and trial and error. Ask any designer and they’ll tell you that designing a logo can be one of the most challenging projects they’ll tackle, because a successful logo says so much with so little. And regarding the cost? Well, a logo, like a company’s website is one of it’s most important brand assets. So the question really is, what’s the value of a corporate brand?

At Hile, we tell our clients that their logo is the clothes their company wears in public – a visual synonym for their business, and much more than a pretty graphic/type design – their logo should reflect the core of who they are.

We recently developed a brand identity for Go Docs Go, a medical start-up providing home medical care (read house calls) for homebound and geriatric patients. After going through the logo design process with our client, we thought we would provide a picture into how we do it.

Our first step was sitting down and talking with our client to discover who they were as a business, and how they could differentiate themselves from other competing firms. We needed to understand their core purpose, their customer promises and how they planned to prove those promises. We needed this information in order for the logo to have “authenticity.” While their competitors had typical corporate medical logos, Go Docs Go expressed a desire to have a friendly, contemporary logo that presented a sense of accessibility to their patients and their families, while still representing a professional organization that participating health care providers could align themselves with. These attributes were right on the mark with the way we experienced our client.

Next, we pass the torch to our designers and they develop an assortment of logo concepts. Then, internally we select the designs (sometimes as many as twenty) down to a few options to show our client. For Go Docs Go we also developed a tag line to communicate the company’s purpose: “Go Docs Go – The Doctor’s Office at your Door.”

Below are the designs we presented along with the reasoning behind each option. Our designer, Charlie Szczygiel, provides our narrative:

“The main thing we needed to communicate was ‘doctors (and other health care providers) coming to your home’ and we wanted to be clear about that message, so it shouldn’t be too abstract. There were some common medical images such as a stethoscope that we needed to avoid since our client’s competitors were already using them. Despite the ‘speedy’ reference in the Go Docs Go name, we realized early on that we should avoid visual references like the image below, as it might communicate speed at the expense of thorough patient care.”

The logos below are those we presented to our client. See if you can guess which one was selected, and click on the link at the bottom of this post to see if your selection matched the client’s final pick!

“This one was a softer option, but we still needed it to stand out. We wanted to try blue in order to give the logo more of a soothing feeling than the more typical medical red. This was a design where the messaging was incorporated in the typography.”

“This idea was the same concept as our first design, only in icon form. Initially, I was just playing with the icons and needed a way to contain them, so I ended up trying a pill image since that is a simple, medically recognizable shape. Then, we decided that if we put a slant instead of a straight line in the middle of the pill, it would communicate the travel aspect. The logo is saying three things (literally representing the tag line), but it is contained in a way that all the messaging works within a single icon.”

“This design communicates “medical” and “homes” in the simplest icon I could think of – the medical cross. The neighborhood graphic makes it a friendlier logo. The only downside of this might be that some people wouldn’t see a red cross right away, but it still works aesthetically and conceptually so I didn’t see a problem with the design.”

“This was a little abstract. ‘A little too feminine’ according to Dave (Hile). He felt this might be more applicable for, say, hospice care. But several designers argued it should be included and Dave gave in.”

“This one is pretty self explanatory. We wanted to present an option without a medical cross. The heart rate monitor delineates the shape of a house.”

“This design highlights a doctor or healthcare provider (developed from universal walking man) entering a home. It’s a literal and straightforward treatment. But that was okay since it was our goal to provide the client with a range of options.”

Click the link to find out which logo was chosen: The Winning Go Docs Go Logo.

How did you do? Leave a comment!

Hile Design LLC has been chosen to develop a new website and corporate logo for The McCreadie Group, an Ann Arbor-based software developer for the pharmaceutical industry.  

Founded in 2004, The McCreadie Group serves some of the nation’s top research universities and hospitals by providing software development, support and sales for pharmaceutical applications and products. The McCreadie Group is a leading provider of Investigational Drug Services software through the Web-based Vestigo™. The company also focuses on the education of future pharmacists through the PharmAcademic™ program.

Prior to developing the company’s corporate website, Hile developed the name and designed the logo of Vestigo™ as well as the software’s User Interface design.

XG Sciences, Inc., a leading manufacturer of graphene nanoplatelets, has chosen Hile Design LLC for rebranding services, including a marketing strategy session to define goals, objectives, and messaging for the company.

XG Sciences has its headquarters in Lansing, Michigan but serves clients around the globe, providing a new class of carbon nanoparticles in the form of the multifunctional graphene nanoplatelets. Their brand of xGnP ^® grapehen nanoplatelets, and other versatile materials, serves clients ranging from universities and research groups to compounders and end-users.

GPS (Global Productivity Solutions) consulting firm has hired Hile Design LLC to develop an updated brand identity and marketing strategy that will include a redesigned logo, website, and integrated advertising campaign.  

GPS is one of the nation’s leading implementers of Six Sigma and Operational Excellence®, which is their trademark approach to serving businesses through assessment, training, project execution and implementation. GPS serves some of the top Fortune 100 companies on a global scale and employs over 100 highly experienced consultants.

While most people at Hile Design were just starting to fulfill New Year’s resolutions and sincerely regretting that extra slice of pie over Christmas, I was boarding a plane, on my way to a land of Bollywood, chicken masala and blue skinned gods. As part of a Spring Arbor University requirement, I needed to spend a month in another country in order to graduate. So, I chose India.

I spent three weeks bouncing from city to city, tasting food far too spicy for my American tongue and keeping a look out for elephants (alas, I saw none). Starting in Mumbai, my group traveled to Hyderabad, Calcutta and ended our stay in Delhi.

We were required to keep a journal to record our experience, and in the first page, I described India in one word: Thick.  India is thick with people, thick with smells and noise and pollution, thick with poverty and thick with luxury, thick with tradition and color and religious deities; India is thick with markets and vendors and food and traffic and non-profits trying to make a dent in the thickness, but, most of all, India is thick with media and advertising.

The minute I stepped out of the airport into the humid Mumbai streets, I was struck by how much print advertising dominated the aesthetic culture. If there was wall space, whether domestic residencies, retail stores, corporate offices or broken down structures (of which there was a lot), there was a poster or banner advertising some brand of food or technology. Typically in America, a sign advertising something like Coca-Cola on a building is usually a signifier that whatever business occupies the space probably sells the product. But, in India that wasn’t the case. It seemed that as long as the public could see the building, it was free for the advertising taking.

Amid all the mangoes, saris and bangles, I expected to see a reflection of the society I was in when I looked at the posters and billboards. Unfortunately, just about every ad I saw had a very pale looking model dressed in western clothes and selling either a western product or its Indian equivalent. Nowhere in the television commercials did I see a dark-skinned woman in her sari holding up a packet of curry spices to the tune of a Bollywood song. Nowhere in the print promotions did I see a man in his kurta sitting down for a meal in his brightly colored apartment and eat with his hands and some chapatti bread. As far as marketing goes, India may be stationed in the East but certainly has its eyes to the West.

This Eastern idolization of the West isn’t anything new; skin lightening and eyelid lifting has been a trend in Asia for some time. However, I find it fascinating that it has gone beyond personal appearance to entire cultures embodying this movement to become “more American” through its media and advertising. That raises the question of the power of marketing and if it really is the global identifier for a society. I wonder how many cultures outside of the US associate Americans with the golden arches of McDonalds or the seductive women of Victoria’s Secret.  I also wonder how many Americans look at the ads and have the same feeling I got in India, where what they see around them and what they see on the billboards don’t match up.

So, as I sit at my desk in my kurta and crave a mango lassi, I’ll leave you all with the question that has been on my mind of late: is media and advertising a reflection of the culture, maybe the best parts of the culture, or is it creating some sort of ideal that the culture is trying to achieve? Does it matter?