As recently featured in Design Week Underscore has rebranded The Money Charity – formerly Credit Action, by introducing a logo ‘template’ that can potentially be adapted by and for each member of their staff.

 

Following a pitch, we were briefed to create a new visual identity to mark the change in the name of the organisation, which uses a very personal approach to help people stay on top of their finances.

For the identity the ‘money’ element always remains consistent, while the ‘the’ and ‘charity’ are written by the staff member, creating a number of personalised marks as well as one main, italicised logo. The word-mark is written in black and white, and Underscore devised a supporting palette of colours that will denote their different audience groups.

Neil Stanhope, Underscore founder, says, “The Money Charity needed a positive, friendly, helpful face that can really help people get on top of their money. We wanted to turn the negatives of managing your personal money into something that can be positive and helpful.

Because the new identity needed to appeal to a wide-range of audiences, we created a challenging but highly versatile proposition of ‘what would you do if…’, that can be adapted to include any number of different conclusions for the brand as it evolves.”

The new name and identity are due to launch in the next four weeks, and their feature-filled new responsive website to ‘help your world go round’ will also launch in late September.

As part of our ongoing works to promote an ever increasing offers and events calendar at Duke of York Square in Chelsea, underscore has created a website that is responsive in every sense of the word.

Our responsive time-line for events helps our client to highlight dates to showcase past & future events, our news publisher creates a list of news for our clients to preview and publish, and our twitter and Facebook feeds displays posts with images in a seamless and fluid ‘hub’ to reflect the hive of activity that befits a leading destination in central London.

Our client Will Lewis was quoted at the launch of the site “With our data showing that more of our visitors are using mobiles and tablets to gain information about our activities, its great to have so much groundbreaking technology for our venue that reaches them intuitively on any digital platform, and this can only add to their experience of our brand”

Duke of York Square

 

Last month in the Guardian Tim Anderson argued search engine optimisation is dead and is being replaced by social media optimisation. A bold statement, but news of SEO’s death have in this case been greatly exaggerated

The truth is that as long as search engines exist we will be able to optimise for them.

SEO is the process of optimising your website in a number of areas specifically to improve how search engines find and rank it. It’s part strategy, part alchemy, and if you rank well then you’ll see increased.
From the Google trends chart above, you can clearly see that social media search is rapidly expanding and that SEO doesn’t look to have progressed over the last few years. What this doesn’t account for is that that over the last eight years the amount of Internet users has more than doubled and social media has gone from it’s conception to being a branded content vehicle. According to HitWise, search activity overall increased by 18% between 2012 and 2013; which is estimated at an additional 400 million visitors.

Saying that SEO is irrelevant now makes the assumption that social content is more relevant and rich than that on a brand’s website, that a social community creates content that searchers want to find, and that this content both answers their search query and fairly represents the brand. Considering the investment that companies make in their brand – whether they’re small of large – this is a dangerous assumption to make.

The only part of SEO that no longer exists is black hat optimisation, which encouraged developers and marketers to stuff keywords, produce poor content or create low quality backlinks to rank on the 1st page of Google. Using black hat techniques, you were able to manipulate and trick Google into ranking your website above your competitors but since the release of Penguin, Panda and other algorithm updates Google have made, this is impossible to do without some form of penalisation; including having your website removed from its listings.

These algorithm updates from Google have made the search results more relevant and targeted. This allows you to find the information you want easier and more quickly. If you want a website to rank highly in 2013 then the only real way to do it is by not tricking Google. Your website will need to be optimised on page and you’ll need to publish regular content that is unique, relevant and high quality.

Finally, you want to have high quality back links to your content and interactions to your content through social media. Also, SMO is not a strategy without risk, as the future may bring new kinds of strategies to hijack social activities.

Rather than using one or the other you want search engine optimisation and social media interaction to directly work with each other. If people share your content on social media it is more likely to rank on search engines and if people find your content on search engines they are more likely to share it on social media.

Although some points in the Guardian column are accurate, we at underscore believe you would be missing a lot of potential customers if you neglect SEO.

David Kenningham, once described by Property Week as “Mr Oxford Street” has formed a boutique retail property business called Kenningham Retail.

With a unique appreciation of the type of space today’s global retailers and landlords will need in London, underscore has been working with David to create a brand image that will communicate to them why and how he sees ‘the bigger picture’.

The outcome is a bold and striking new identity that translates his brand message in Arabic and Chinese and works equally well across either his signage or his new digital suite.

As the website was getting ready to launch David Kenningham said “After a very enjoyable and positive series of brainstorms with the underscore team I’m delighted with the results so far. We already have plenty of people commenting on the innovative use of Arabic and Chinese within our branding and our new website has achieved all of the goals we set for it at launch.”

For more information about why Kenningham Retail see the bigger picture please visit http://www.kenninghamretail.com