Introduction

The O’Brien & Levine case study provides a tour of our branding and design process.  Although we tailor our process to our clients, and while no two clients are alike, there are common features including in-depth analysis of clients’ market positioning by our branding professionals leading to an iterative design process.

This approach is suitable for firms seeking a bulletproof identity derived through a proven branding process and perfectly suited for its products and clients.  Generally attractive, “professional”, web design routinely results from significantly simple processes and lower budgets, which are suitable for many firms as well.  Polar Design offers both approaches to prospective clients.

The Challenge

O’Brien & Levine (www.court-reporting.com), a Boston based court reporting agency, approached Polar Design to revamp their web presence in early 2005.  This followed on the heels of the O’Brien and Levine’s (O&L) move to new downtown Boston offices, which positioned them closer to existing and prospective high profile clients.  With over a decade of experience and its new, central location, the firm seemed poised to see its steady growth accelerate. 

One thing was missing, however: a world class image to match its new presence and set it apart from the dozens of court reporting agencies in Boston.

O&L’s web site (see diagram to the right) had not been updated in years, and bore an outdated design with navigation that required too many clicks for busy attorneys and paralegals to access important information about the firm.  Its collateral ranged from well designed yet outdated brochures to leaflets printed on standard office stationary, none of which matched in terms of writing style, color or design elements. 

One preexisting advantage - a modest position in search engines – effectively went to waste since lead generation was hindered by the outdated image. 

The firm needed a new, attractive, usable, even better positioned web site, along with sharply designed collateral to match.  Strong design always communicates professionalism and success.   O&L wanted to go a step further.  By shying away from a form-fit corporate site and creating a unique, carefully conceived image that expressed the firm’s identity, it displays artful communication that in turns suggests a culture of communication – something essential in court reporting where accuracy and customer service reign together.

The Solution

Polar Design structured a complete brand, design and technology overhaul, centered around the following objectives:

1. Develop a new set of brand guidelines, and accompanying look and feel, that would first and foremost reflect the firm’s reputation and status. These guidelines also require development of a new market positioning analysis and statement, differentiating O&L from its competitors – a key to success in what is often a commoditized industry (i.e., court reporting)

2. Create a user interface and navigational map to allow web visitors easy access to information regardless of behavior, in turn serving to improve the site’s marketing efforts while also cementing the firm’s customer service (i.e., by displaying a sensitivity to site visitors’ time).

3. Further enable O&L to strengthen relationships with existing clients and its team of freelance reporters with an extranet that delivers timely, useful information ranging from forms and knowledgebase articles to event calendars, on an ongoing basis and at minimal additional cost. 

The first two objectives required in-depth consultation with the client.  As with all branding projects, Polar Design’s team met with O’Brien and Levine to gather materials and query its principals on every aspect of their business.  This led to internal brainstorming during which Polar Design developed a set of brand architecture diagrams that outline key brand characteristics expressing how the principals would like the firm to be perceived and also how the firm should be perceived in order to effectively address its target market and remain differentiated.  As with many firms in commoditized industries like court reporting, O&L’s key differentiators were actually very much the same as most of its competitors, presenting an additional challenge as the best differentiators for the company’s identity eluded Polar Design’s initial brainstorming sessions.

An additional challenge involved reconciling seemingly conflicting characteristics communicated by the principals.  For example, the firm felt that it should be perceived as “traditional” and “established”, while at the same time portray itself as technology driven (something that often evokes entirely different imagery).

Through our unique brand analysis process, Polar Design developed not only traditional AIDA, laddering, color selection and other proposals, but also “brand foci” built through brainstorming sessions that assist in guiding the creative team to comprehend a series of complex, interrelated concepts through visual representations of those concepts, leading to powerful accuracy in design work.

To meet the third and final objective (improving clients’ and reporters’ interactions with the firm) Polar Design produced an extranet that features forms, articles and other helpful information for O&L’s clients and reporters.  O&L cost effectively manages the growing repository of information and uses Polar Design’s InsightBuilder® content management solution to author and deploy content to all of the web sites.

Design Choices

Three different graphic designers simultaneously tackled design of the web site’s look and feel after completion of the brand manual described above.  Their initial compositions follow.

Design Example 1

This design features imagery that evokes customer service and technology, highlights the firm’s local Boston presence with appropriate photography, and has a firmly corporate look with cool blues and professional grays.  Despite this, it incorporated slightly unorthodox layout features such as overlapping panels intended to entertain the eye and communicate innovation.

Design Example 2

The second composition features a more conservative layout with well-defined, rectangular areas on the page.  The top graphics bar features a quad-panel photo collage displaying the top four major markets for court reporting services, intended to indicate O&L’s ability to serve clients nationally.  A prominent image on the left side communicates collaboration and customer service, one of O&L’s brand characteristics.  Finally, this design utilizes more warm colors such as the olive greens providing a more intimate feel than the other designs.

Design Example 3

In the third composition, a deceptively conservative layout frames eye catching effects such as a top menu bar with an incandescent appearance.  Warm greens accompanied by cool blues balance intimacy with professionalism offering both balance and intriguing contrast.  As with Design 2, this design features thumbnails of major markets as well as a larger banner image of Boston to emphasize the firm’s presence in New England.

Final Design

After a series of revisions based on O&L Feedback, the final look and feel emerged with essentially the same layout, look and feel as Design 2.  At O&L’s request, we modified the site and, after multiple revisions with the client, perfected a photo collage for the top of home page.  The collage depicts an image of a conference room in use for a deposition on the right, a lone reporter accompanied with abstract technology imagery on the left, and two people meeting in the middle of what appears to be an arching structure much like a bridge.  Steel and glass from other photos are woven into the background to add a clean, futuristic feel to the collage.  The complete collage depicts each of O&L’s main brand characteristics (“foci”) from technology to customer service, and also suggests that the firm brides these characteristics in its services.    

The final look and feel thus revolves around the central themes Polar Design identified in the design document created at project outset, communicating its brand characteristics and setting the company apart from its competitors.
 
Usability and Content Management

A second important part of the O’Brien and Levine project included developing an easy to use navigation, which is sometimes referred to as “usability”.  Web sites designed with usability in mind show that the design firm (and thus the client) took into account a user’s actual experience on the site, signaling that the firm cares about the customer.

Usability certainly includes many commonly accepted fundamentals.  However, contrary to common misconceptions, usability does not come “out of the box” – each site has its own particular system of organizing content, which means that everything from layouts and menu bars must be planned based on the site’s content.  This task becomes even more complex when the usability expert is tasked with anticipating how that content will change over time.

In O’Brien and Levine’s case, Polar Design took advantage of the content management solution’s ability to produce more than one navigation system from user-created pages.  For example, the service section features as many individual services as O&L can create.  These appear with icons and abstracts in that service section page, as roll-over menu options that appear when the users mouse over the top menu bar (see top diagram), and also as links in the site map.  Thus, by creating one article, O&L in fact updates several different navigation systems, all of which appeal to different “types” of users.  Thus, with content management, usability systems that appeal to a broad spectrum of user mentalities are cost effectively maintained.

Conclusion

Web site and branding projects like O’Brien and Levine’s ultimately succeed when we take into account both the client’s vision and what potential customers need to “see” in order to contact the company.  Through exhaustive discovery and careful consultation, Polar Design’s project managers obtain the information from which it is possible to formulate intelligent solutions to each identity and design project.  Finally, with a comprehensive design documents of the kind that Polar Design creates to guide its designers, the end result is a web site that is not only attractive, but also usable and capable of expressing the client’s uniqueness in a more emotional and effectively visual way – something that matters a great deal to a firm like O’Brien and Levine that operates in a commodity industry.