YCN - Google Brief

To start off the Google brief there was a workshop to deal with developing starting points for the briefs. It was basically just defining what the brief is, what the problems are and what initial research needs to be done for the brief.

Google Packaging YCN Brief

The brief:

To create an imaginary packaging range for some of the Google products. The packaging can be any size/format/design or interpretation of packaging. There is complete free range in terms of design and what packaging is.

·      Any kind of packaging is allowed

·      I don’t have to use every kind of Google product or service but there must be a minimum of 3

·      Packaging needs to show off Google’s imaginative possibilities.

·      Additional material such as merchandise is allowed but is optional.

·      Any medium is allowed as long as appropriate.

·      Use the logo according to logo brand rules. Do not edit or change the existing logo by any means unless stated.

·      Additional colour palettes can be used within work if required.

·      Keep it informative and not overly complicated. Simple.

IN SHORT:

Create packaging designs for at least 3 of Google’s products or services with any additional material if required.

Why have I chosen the brief?:

(10 things answered genuinely as honestly as possible)

1.     It is working primarily with packaging – Not something that I do a lot.

2.     It is a broad brief in terms of concept and design – The only certainty is at least 3 packaging designs.

3.     The deliverables are fairly set in stone – At least 3 packaging designs is a good starting point to work with

4.     I know and like Google as a brand – I use them every day and have a bit of experience in their products and services

5.     There is loads of potential for different ideas and different directions to take the brief in – lots of creative potential

6.     Should be able to develop it quite quickly and get it done to a good standard in a good amount of time

7.     It isn’t specifically type or image – Gives me the opportunity to work more conceptually than usual – few limitations

8.     This brief was more appropriate than others – there weren’t a lot of good or appropriate briefs to deal with. This one was one of the best/ most appropriate for what I want (Statement of Intent)

9.     “Imaginary Packaging” means a lot can be proposed rather than physically created – saving time in the long run.

10. I like Google’s simple, clear style – it could work nicely with some illustration if I choose to use that route

5 things I hope to get out of each of the 10 reasons for choosing the brief:

1.

·      Progress my understanding of packaging and packaging design

·      Add something new to my portfolio – very little packaging design

·      Working much more hands on – I often work almost entirely digitally until printing

2.

·      Loads of different directions to go in – Lots of idea generating means lots of content and better ideas.

·      Chance to work a lot more exclusively with the concept of a brief without getting stuck on just the aesthetics.

3.

·      Really good starting point to work towards the 3 deliverables – By knowing the minimum outcome it should be easier to start working with

·      This should make the brief quicker to resolve

·      It should also be faster to get started and get going with

·      It has a really set direction to go in – much more focussed than a lot of my briefs at the moment.

4.

·      Background knowledge and experience in using their products will help with ideas and concepts

·      Any research should be a bit easier as I will have starting points to work with

·      This will also make research quicker as it wont be from a completely blind perspective

·      I like the brand so I should enjoy the work

·      This should make it easier to be motivated with as well

·      I know what the brand looks like meaning that designing should be a bit simpler.

5.

·      More creative potential should make it more enjoyable and easier to work with.

·      Because there is so much potential it gives me the opportunity to show off my best abilities.

·      Loads of ideas should come from this – more work to work with will make the brief easier to deal with in later stages

6.

·      Will be able to get it done and put onto submission boards – Will help with the deliverables for the module

·      Will leave more time for other briefs in the module – hopefully wont get bogged down with this brief.

·      Could open the possibility of a 5^th brief to complete if done in an appropriate time frame – more chance to pass the module

·      I Don’t have a lot of time and I do have a considerable amount to do before submission – If this is easier to work with then I will have more time to complete other briefs for the module.

7.

·      This allows me to work with any medium

·      I can be much more creative in terms of deliverables.

·      Lets concepts/ideas overwrite any initial design or medium potentials

·      Broader range of ideas allows more idea generation – more work to help against module assessed outcomes.

8.

·      Brief relates more to my work/ what I want to do

·      Relates a lot more directly to my Statement of Intent compared to most other competition briefs.

·      Should be easier to work with as it is more appropriate to my standard of work

9.

·      Allowed me to propose a lot more without having to physically print/ construct etc

·      Saves time – should help with the speed and turnaround of the brief

·      Some thing will be able to be done digitally – Although I want to work more hands-on, I am more confident and able with digital software.

How does this relate to my Statement of Intent?:

“An Image driven investigation of Branding and Identity with a focus on Print and Promotion”

-The brief allows me to work with any medium or design and it’s likely I will use an image-based resolution.

-The Google identity has to be considered a lot when being worked with and I will have to simulate the whole Google branding across the packaging range.

-Similarly, each product will have to have an identity of their own and work as a set as well as relate back to Google’s own. 

-The packaging is effectively there to promote that particular Google service, and it is design for print.

What is the problem/ problems that the brief produces?:

“Imaginary” packaging needs to be designed –

·      Google have no physical products – No one knows what they would look like.

·      Google is all digitally based, but does it need any physical products?

·      This is really only a concept for the brief in hand.

Google do not need packaging really and they do not need to promote themselves or advertise. The underlying issue is the range that Google produces.

·      Google now own and run a huge range of products and services

·      How can they make them each stand out individually/ be recognised as useful and desirable/ fit to the Google brand and represent Google as a whole.

“Sometimes it’s hard to explain to people how many products we make for our users and what they all do.”

It needs to be easily explained through packaging – the product and the purpose need to be obvious.

What do you know about the subject already?

·      Google are an internet based company

·      They have a variety of products/ services

·      They started in the 90’s as a search engine

·      They are the most popular search engine

·      They bought Youtube a few years ago

·      They have a really simple branding: yellow, red, green, blue usually in flat colours.

What do you need to know?(10 questions to answer)

1.    How many products do Google have?

2.    What is their most popular product?

3.    Do Google have any physical products at all?

4.    What are their most used Google services?

5.    What kind of physical design do they have? E.g. promotion

6.    What is their least popular service?

7.    What were Google’s first services?

8.    What services do they pride/ base themselves on?

9.    What services do most people associate Google with?

10. Does any packaging exist for a similar company already?

11. How have similar companies addressed the same problems?

12. Are there any companies in the same field as Google that are as successful?

13. Do Google intend to launch new products soon? How many and what?

50 facts:

1.     Google was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page

2.     It was founded in California

3.     It was founded on September 4^th 1998

4.     Their mission statement was and is still “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”

5.     The unofficial slogan is “Don’t be Evil”, Coined by Amit Patel

6.     The Google search service was the first provided.

7.     Google developed and owns the Android operating system for mobile phones.

8.     Google appears in the number 2 slot of the BrandZ brand equity database for 2011, meaning it is the second most valuable company in the world (Hitting the number 1 spot in 08,09 and 10).

9.     Google actually started in 1996 as a business project but didn’t go live until 1998

10. The name ‘Google” is a misspelling of the word Googol; A number represented by 10 followed by 100 zeroes.

11. The name is to signify that the engine provides a lot of search results.

12. Google acquired Youtube on October 9, 2006.

13.  Google also own Blogger.

14. The majority of Google revenue comes from advertising programs.

15. Demoslam is a Google-run website dedicated to people using technology and science to compete for entertainment value. It is effectively a big advert for Google.

16. Google search is Google’s most popular service

17. Google is the dominant search engine in the US.

18.  In 2007 and 2008 Google ranked first in Fortune Magazine’s list of best companies to work for.

19. Google Headquarters is referred to as the “Googleplex”

20. The number “Googolplex” is the number 10 to the power of ‘. The number itself could not be physically written because there is not enough space in the known universe for that many zeroes.

21. New employees to Google are called “Nooglers” and have to wear a propeller baseball cap.

22. Google reached 1 billion indexed page views in 2000.

23. Gmail Launched in 2004 but only became public in 2007

24. Google Chrome launched in 2008

25. Google.com is the number 1 viewed website in the world.

26. Google have designed a driverless car called “Stanley”

27. “Stanley” won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005

28. Google was originally nicknamed “BackRub”

29. Google.com went live in 1997

30. The CEO of a company called “Exicite” rejected buying Google for $1000000 in 1999

50 Stats:

1.     Google was first funded $100,000 by the founder of Sun Microsystems

2.     Google indexed 30 million pages in 1998

3.     8 billion indexed in 2004

4.     Bought youtube for $1.64 billion

5.     1 trillion pages were indexed in 2008

6.     They have over 1million servers in data centers around the world

7.     They receive 7.2 billion page views per day

8.     87.8 billion monthly worldwide searches

9.     There are 620 million visitors to google every day

10. They made $19 in revenue in 2000

11. In 2009 Google made a $6.5billion profit

12. Over 97% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising.

13. They have over 19000 employees

14. 37% of employees are research staff

15. 37% of employees are sales staff

16. nearly 50% of googles products are in beta form now

17. There are 270,000 words written a minute on Blogger

18. There are 146million Gmail users.

19. Over 400000 new Android products are activated each day

20. Over 4.5billion apps have been installed from the Android App Store.

21. Revenue in 2010 was $29.32billion

22. Income was $10.38 billion

23. Profit was $8.50 billion

24. As of 2011 they have 31,353 employees

25. It generates over 24petabytes of information every day

26. There are 1million gigabytes in a petabyte

27. Google has acquired over 100 companies since starting.

28. Google have about 200 different products and services

29.  

Quotes about Google:

Google actually relies on our users to help with our marketing. We have a very high percentage of our users who often tell others about our search engine.
Sergey Brin

Google is a global Rorschach test. We see in it what we want to see. Google has built an infrastructure that makes a lot of dreams closer to reality.
John Battelle

Google is in an amazing position to be the target of tons of lawsuits that will set precedent for many important things for us on the Internet.
Joichi Ito

Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach.
Jesse James Garrett

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo should be developing new technologies to bypass government sensors and barriers to the Internet; but instead, they agreed to guard the gates themselves.
Tom Lantos

Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards.
Steve Ballmer

Half of Google's revenue comes from selling text-based ads that are placed near search results and are related to the topic of the search. Another half of its revenues come from licensing its search technology to companies like Yahoo.
Eric Schmidt

I am hoping, though, that many of them have kids, who, when they have a moment to take a break from their iPods, Internet, or Google, will explain to their parents running the country just how the world is being flattened.
Thomas Friedman

I basically did all the library research for this book on Google, and it not only saved me enormous amounts of time but actually gave me a much richer offering of research in a shorter time.
Thomas Friedman

I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere.
Marissa Mayer

In comparison, Google is brilliant because it uses an algorithm that ranks Web pages by the number of links to them, with those links themselves valued by the number of links to their page of origin.
Michael Shermer

It is very similar to companies like Google and other internet companies. When you go and search on Google you don't pay for that. But sometimes you click on an advert and Google makes money on that.
Niklas Zennstrom

It's actually not unlike Google at that stage of development. They had an up-and-running site. It wasn't losing very much money, it wasn't making very much money, but it was growing.
John Doerr

My children - in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.
Steve Ballmer

Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.
Sergey Brin

The Google algorithm was a significant development. I've had thank-you emails from people whose lives have been saved by information on a medical website or who have found the love of their life on a dating website.
Tim Berners-Lee

The only thing Google has failed to do, so far, is fail.
John Battelle

The thing that people seem to miss about not just Google, but also our competitors, Yahoo, eBay and so forth, is that there's an awful lot of communities that have never been served by traditional media.
Eric Schmidt

There's a difference between being able to make long distance phone calls cheaper on the Internet and walking around Riyadh with a PDA where you can have all of Google in your pocket. It's a difference in degree that's so enormous it becomes a difference in kind.
Thomas Friedman

We want Google to be the third half of your brain.
Sergey Brin

We want to make sure the thing you're looking for is on Google 100 percent of the time.
Eric Schmidt

Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.
Bill Gates

With Google I'm starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.
Doug Coupland

“As a rule, we don’t preannounce new features.”
Eric Schmidt, Google, 2002

“This gem of a search engine officially opened for business September 21, but has been available in beta for over a year.”
PC World, 1999

“If we wanted to sell ad banners, we could call DoubleClick and be profitable today ... But we can be more successful in the long run if we grow our user base. ...”
Sergey Brin, Google, 2000

“The possibilities are limitless.”

 Nelson Minar, Google, referring to the now cancelled Google SOAP API, 2002

“Banners are not working”
Sergey Brin, Google, 1999

“Fast AlltheWeb: Google killer?”
 ZDnet, 2002

“China tightened its restrictions on the Internet recently, blocking access to the search engines Google and [AltaVista]. [Fortunately], these Web sites did not cave in to China’s pressure. Google even said it would provide a different, moving portal site every day to break China’s blockade.”
Taipei Times, 2002

“Blogger users can expect to see no immediate changes to the service”
David Krane, Google, referring to Blogger.com, 2003

“The main motivations were to try to leverage Google’s expertise with large computer systems and to try to give something back to science”
 Susan Wojcicki, Google, referring to now cancelled Google Compute, 2002

“Yahoo selected Google because they share our strong consumer focus”
 Jeff Mallett, Yahoo, referring to Yahoo’s switch to Google search results, 2000

“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
To the Atlantic

 “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”
At a CNBC interview

 “Every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.”
To the Wall Street Journal

 “It was a joke, it just wasn’t very good”
In The Colbert Report about his remark about identities (number 3)

 “Streetview the cars we drive only once, you can just move, right?”
In a CNN Interview

“Our policy is we try things, we celebrate our failures,”
At the Techonomy conference

“Just remember when you post something, the computers remember forever”
In The Colbert Report

“You can trust us with your data”
Interview in Telegraph with Shane Richmond

“Washington is an incumbent protection machine… The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists”
Washington Ideas Forum

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.
NYT Interview

“We are willing to get it one way or another, with or without deal.”
About Facebook data in Telegraph interview

“We Want People To Be More Logged Into Google.”
During Google’s third quarter earnings call

“We don’t have a plan to beat Apple, that’s not how we operate,”
Interview in Telegraph with Shane Richmond

“Computers will clearly handle the things we aren’t good at, and we will handle the things computers clearly aren’t good at,”
Venturebeat

“The Internet of things will augment your brain”
Venturebeat

1.    How many products do Google have?

A lot. Between 100 and 200 main products and countless much smaller ones. There are 39 listed on the “more products” page of Google.

2.    What is their most popular product?

Google search is the classic google product and remains the most popular on a day to day basis.

3.    Do Google have any physical products at all?

Not in the sense of these products, but they do help fund some things and develop new technologies such as the driverless car.

4.    What are their most used Google services?

The most used Google product is the Google Search product, probably followed closely by youtube and mail.

5.    What kind of physical design do they have? E.g. promotion

Google do not really have physical promotion as it is almost exclusively an online enterprise

6.    What is their least popular service?

Google Wave, Gears, Friend Connect and Knol are all to be closed down in the next few months

7.    What were Google’s first services?

The first service was Search in 1998, followed by thing like Images in 2001 and then Mail in 2004.

8.    What services do they pride/ base themselves on?

They definitely revolve around the original search engine aspect of the company

9.    What services do most people associate Google with?

Search, Blogger, Mail, Youtube, Calendar, Images, Books

10. Does any packaging exist for a similar company already?

There aren’t really any companies on the same level as Google. In terms of search engines there is Yahoo and Bing. But neither are really competition for Google. In terms of larger, more encompassing businesses, there are things like Microsoft. In fact, Google is actually owrth more as a company than Microsoft is.

11. How have similar companies addressed the same problems?

-

12. Are there any companies in the same field as Google that are as successful?

It doesn’t look like it

13. Do Google intend to launch new products soon? How many and what?

As the majority of google products are in Beta, they are constantly releasing new products.