ARNE JOHANSEN JEWELRY THE REINCARNATION OF A BRAND Kﾃ話EnHAVnS ERHVERVSAKAdEmi multimEdiA dESiGn 2013 HAnnA EllA SAndViK
PREFACE Arne Johansen was my grandfather. He died in 2004 and this made a great impact on me, as he was my first real loss. I have grown increasingly interested in his work but only on a personal level. My mother had showed interest in portraying his jewelry in an online portfolio one year ago. At first I was hesitant because I am so emotionally attached to the subject. We had seen more and more jewelry popping up for sale on the internet and every time a new piece showed up, we would all talk in the family to hear if we had the piece in one of our jewelry boxes. It became appearent that no matter what it was needed to make a more collective effort on the family’s part to maintain my grandfather’s brand heritage if we wanted a say in how he was rememberred. The unfortunate event of a series of break-ins in my grandmother’s house gave me the final push to unite the family. Many pieces were lost in the break-ins and were probably sold for re-melting abroad. It seemed like a horrible faith for what is a part of Danish cultural heritage. My mother has been the primary force behind getting bits and pieces together for me. I have treated my family as a customer and luckily they have trusted my academic competences. It is not always easy to work with a collective of people all as emotionally involved in a project but it has taught me a lot about working with emotionally invested clients in general. In the day and age where many beacons in communication speak of “authentic communication” channelling this belief and love for the brand has been important for me to integrate into all efforts of the project and I believe it gives me a unique selling point when I approach the different groups of people we will make contact with in the process of launching the effort.
TABLE OF CONTENT INTRODUCTION 4 Arne Johansen Jewelry 4 The Arne Johansen Fund 4 Requirements 5 Problem formulation COMMUNICATION 8 Background 8 Audience 9 Segmentation 12 Stakeholders 14 Media and tools 19 Time plan 19 Criterias of success 19 Delivering the product TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION 28 What is a CMS? 28 Dynamic content 28 Plugins and safety 29 Modifications 29 Language 29 Navigation 29 Header
DEVELOPMENT 6 Developing the website 6 Developing the report 6 Developing communication DESIGN 22 Background 23 Arne Johansen as a Danish Designer 24 Logo 25 Typography 26 Form follows function 30 CONCLUSION 32 LITERATURE LIST 33 EXTERNAL REFERENCES
introduction ARNE JOHANSEN JEWELRY Arne Johansen Jewelry was founded in 1961 by goldsmith Arne Johansen. The company had a fair amount of success during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s and was especially popular outside Denmark which made it one of the first companies to enjoy the treats of globalization in the form of globalized trade. Over the years, the countries varied from more traditional trade countries in the Western World like Britain, France and later America. Among the more “exotic” export partners were the first wave of booming 2nd world economies like Brazil and Japan. The company of course also still catered to the Danish market. At retirement Arne Johansen passed on the company to his son Tom Johansen, but due to different circumstances the company went bankrupt in the early 90’s. Arne Johansen passed away in November 2004.
THE ARNE JOHANSEN FUND After several years of inactivity the family decided to form a fund. This decision was made because there was no longer any goldsmith related to the brand however the brand and the jewelry already produced is still active in the form of vintage resellers depending on the brand’s continued value. Despite of silver and gold prices being moderately high in 2013 (surviving the financial crisis, even increasing its value) the jewelry is estimated to have more value than the materials they are comprised of - sales on eBay suggest around 3040% added value. This is however information that is mainly available to professional resellers and not the general public.
Hence The Arne Johansen Fund’s (the fund has not yet been properly named but with henceforth be referred to as “The Fund” for ease) main mission is to enlighten current owners about the value of the jewelry as is, so that the works are not sold to the gold and silver wholesellers/buyers that have recently sprung up due to the current high value of gold and silver.
The Fund is currently applying for monetary assistance from other funds concerned with cultural preservation and preservation of the craftsmanship. When The Fund meets these goals, the long term plan is to utilize its funding to buy jewelry back from all over the world to form a collection of jewelry. This collection will like any other art collection be available for exhibits all over Denmark and even abroad - with the mission of preserving not only Arne Johansen’s jewelry but also educate about Danish Design. It is not completely ruled out, that some jewelry would be interesting to remake and sell on a longer timescale than we are able to envision at the moment. This is however not the driving force behind The Fund and in general The Fund is not expected to earn money itself through anything but donations and the funding from governmental and private funds as mentioned above.
As the family has inherited all molds and designs they are currently also copyright holders of the brand “Arne Johansen Jewelry” – this means that there are no judicial lines between The Fund and the brand. In that regard The Fund and Arne
Johansen Jewelry are one and the same. Maybe it would have been prudent to divide the two – and make one site for Arne Johansen Jewelry showcasing the jewelry only and one for The Fund looking for jewelry and sponsors. However the wish of the client is to keep the two together and I have supported this as I will argue for later.
The client’s requirements to the website solution “Catalogue” of jewelry Guide to stamps and marks for users to authenticate their jewelry The history of the brand Visual Identity A website with an easy-to-navigate backend so the client can add new content
Problemformulation “
How will it be possible to, through multimedia design and communication strategy to not only maintain the Arne Johansen brand as a whole posthumous - yet also allow it to grow into a contemporary design with cotemporary means of communication like ” a website and social media presence?
dEVEloPmEnt DEVELOPING THE WEBSITE
DEVELOPING THE REPORT
In the process of developing websites with a short deadline, the process often ends up being very rapid and more reminiscent of a waterfall method. I have experienced this before and for the same reasons, I put special emphasis being iterative in my approach to this project. Wordpress is excellent for iterative processes as you can add a new theme upon your content – just like trying on different dresses, but keeping the body the same. This is of course only possible until a certain point, where the modifications of the theme starts – at that point work is lost if one tries to change themes; if you have changed the CSS on one theme the specific styling doesn’t apply to another one as the selectors will have different names. As you will see in my design documentation I used this process for the logo as well.
For the report I worked incrementally through Google docs. I divided the content into different chapters and worked on them separately. This helped me decrease their abstraction. I kept track of the development by keeping a structural synopsis of what should go where, the word count on the different sections and their status (to be done, doing, done – not very unlike a SCRUM chart). Whenever I needed feedback on a certain chapter from a certain teacher I could easily download or share the individual piece instead of sending them a full report. To make sure there was a flow through the report, even though I broke it into pieces, I made sure to keep an eye on what the next chapter would be, so that the ending of one lead to the next. I think the incremental model helped the flow even more, because one had to be aware of it more.
THE ITERATIVE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS DEVELOPING A COMMUNICATION STRATEGY When you designed communication before you wouldn’t use an iterative developing model for your communication. It was a one way street and the communication came solely from the sender. With the rise of social media, communication is begging to be iterative. Your brand depends on your user’s understanding of your brand. Many companies go wrong by thinking they shouldn’t listen to what was referred to by Forrester Research executives Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff coined as “the groundswell”. Out of the 4 overall points of the theories, I have used the “listen”, “talking” and “energizing” qualities when talking to users on the social media. Essen-
tially if you are truly talking and listening to your users, you should also let that affect the brand. The “talking” will be most obvious in my chapter about Pinterest and “energizing” will be part of the facebook-chapter. Essentially by using this approach I am making the communication of the brand become iterative.
communication Plan BACKGROUND As mentioned in the introduction of the client, it was a requirement that the website product would be able to communicate on behalf of the brand “Arne Johansen” including everything from the man himself, the jewelry produced and the legacy surrounding the brand while at the same time also pushing The Fund’s agenda. In the following I will try to sum up why I think this is a good strategy – even though it may create a mild form of noise in the communication.
AUDIENCE PRIMARY TARGET GROUPS The groups that the communication is directed at. Non-specific order A. Owners of Arne Johansen designs B. Sellers of Arne Johansen designs C. Funds and private donors interested in preservation of Danish Design
OVERALL MESSAGE Arne Johansen was a great Danish Designer – and we want to make sure his legacy is preserved.
D. Funds and private donors interested in preservation of the craftsmanship
PERIFERY TARGET GROUPS
GOALS FOR THE COMMUNICATION Inform and educate on Arne Johansen as a designer Subliminally clarify that the jewelry has a greater value than the current price of silver Enable donations from potential givers
The groups this communication shouldn’t create obstacles for or offend a. Danish Design/modernist jewelry enthusiasts b. Goldsmiths and goldsmith students seeking inspiration c. Users seeking information about marks and stamps in general
ACCIDENTAL USERS
MINERVA ORIGINALLY
Groups that may find the site, but that we in general don’t want on the site
As earlier mentioned, Minerva is based on extensive research by A.C.Nielsen/A.I.M and even though the Minerva model is still in use, it is questioned whether or not it’s applicable in a current setting. A segmentation model is not and will never describe a person or even a personality. The model is rather a way of finding different values by which we can classify individuals into segments. These values can be both immaterial and material. Dahl’s work is at the same time based on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s early theory and contradicted by Bourdieu’s later writings. Bourdieu uses the concept of “habitus” (The Logic of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu, Polity Press 1992, page 23+24) to describe the foundation of why we make decisions that we make. According to Bourdieu these inherent structures can be both constant and changeable dispositions. Common for them are, that the individual will go to a great extend to try to avoid situations where these structures are questioned – in other words, the agent will seek confirmation through “fields” where the agents primarily have structures in common. These fields are part of an autonomous network of smaller worlds the agents share that make up what we call “society”. In Dahl’s Minerva Model, he essentially tries to narrow down some of the traits of our habitus, to describe (in his case) how we consume based on inherent structure on the premise of values. But in regards to describing such structure, Bourdieu writes “One has no chance of giving a scientific account of practice [...] unless one is aware of the effects that scientific practice produces”. (The Logic of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu, Polity Press 1992, page 82) and this is where Bourdieu and Dahl conflict: Bourdieu says that we use models like the Minerva to make a complex world seem less complex – in other ways using models are also a way for the scientist to make sense of the world because they need for the world to make sense. But more importantly Bourdieu also claims that we use these findings to legitimize our own standing in the social hierarchy either as scientiests like Dahl himself or as me, using the model for educational purposes . Bourdieu says we can’t make say anything about the segments we try to
1. Copycats wanting to copy the design 2. People searching for other Arne Johansen’s or other misspellings/misunderstanding 3. People who want to buy Arne Johansen jewelry or jewelry in general
SEGMENTATION During my research phase I was looking for an adequate communicative approach to how I wanted to further narrow down the target group’s further behaviour. Amongst the more generic or if you will, structural approaches is Henrik Dahl’s Minerva Model (Hvis din nabo var en bil, Henrik Dahl, Akademisk Forlag 2005) from when he was Head of Research at the Danish research institute A.C.Nielsen/A.I.M. The model (AC Nielsen AIM, Minerva 1999, based on 2.803 interviews) indexes Danish consumers into four more or less distinct segments. Originally the model had a fifth segment - grey - of the un-indexable consumers allotting to something between 10-12% of a population. The grey segment has also been addressed as the “undecided” or “young” segment, which in some ways has later led to misuse of its original meaning. Dahl has in a brief conversation on facebook1 disclosed to me, that he regrets initially including the grey segment because of this - I will in the following discussion address these issues and the current validity of the model.
explain, unless we are aware of these effects of our classifications. Bourdieu also says that different agents can have different understandings of a word like “tradition” that are different, yet all of the understandings are still valid. This basically puts a question mark at the premise of Dahl’s model, because all though all respondents have answered that “tradition” is a value they share, the respondents will still be able to have different understandings of the word “tradition” – hence making categorizing respondents based on the answer questionable. Although these are valid questions and underlining how questionable segmentation is as a premise for anything, it’s still interesting to see what the model says about my target groups – keeping in mind the two things Bourdieu mentions a scientist must keep in mind when categorizing the world in general: To not use the model just for the sake of making the world make sense and to not use the model to enforce intellectual superiority. With these in mind, I’ll firstly analyse the behaviour of users at the time of original purpose i.e. the original clients of Arne Johansen Jewelry: The majority of these buyers would have been in the blue segment. This segment of consumers are preoccupied with 1) Materialism: In spite of the economic upswing in the 1960’s and its increased economic flexibility, precious metal jewelry is still to be considered a luxury commodity. 2) Modernism: Arne Johansen was without a doubt a modernist and his jewelry was to be considered modern at the time, where they are now considered vintage. The only thing that really conflicts with the blue segment is that the blue segment is predominantly occupied by men. However this doesn’t mean there are no women in the blue segment, just that there are fewer of women in the blue segment. Arne Johansen’s clients may have been predominantly women as he made more jewelry for women than men (only cufflinks were directly targeted towards men). CURRENT TARGET GROUPS: The Minerva Model has been questioned since its conception, but lately the critique has become increasingly vociferous.
Postmodernist and social constructivists will claim that structures such as social inheritance and societal classes are tapering down to minimal influences on the postmodern individual. The upheaval of individualism is said to in some form clash with the idea of researchers being able to classify or segment consumers in as rigid forms as before. Bourdieu was only the top of this phenomenological iceberg: About the rigidity of the Minerva Model, its creator Henrik Dahl has said that the model “is good way of preliminary sorting massive amounts of data. And it’s great at that. But nothing more than that ” (Appendix: Interview with Henrik Dahl) actually supporting Bourdieu’s claim that the model doesn’t necessarily say anything more than what it does and that we should not use it as a fountain of perpetual wisdom. The grey segment has become increasingly discussed, as our understanding of identity has become more fluid - a fact more or less born out of the postmodern trend in sociology – indicating a paradigm shift yet again from the modern society. To draw parallels on to the Minerva Model, its relevance is now based on how the researcher defines and uses the model. If you see the segments as being dogmatic and a permanent state of the consumer, it’s hard to make it fit in a postmodern frame. However, if you see it as a snapshot into the consumer’s current behaviour, it’s not impossible to imagine that consumers will move between segments over time and confronted with different scenarios as the habitus of agents becomes increasingly less constant as the choice of field-activity is becoming more varied. In that sense all consumers are really in the grey segments and paradoxically never in the grey segment at the same time. When I confronted Henrik Dahl with the idea of the grey segment some sort of primary segment of postmodernity, he clarified that the grey segment in general had been greatly misunderstood: In regards to the original intention of the segment Henrik Dahl says “it (the grey segment red.) is not a group of “unresolved individuals”, but a kind of residual in the model: the 10-12 percent where all answers are about equally strongly correlated with each other. Even though it may be understood by non-statisticians, the group is a kind of “noise” (Appendix: Interview with Henrik Dahl)”. This shows a gen-
eral cleft in understanding between the humanist/teaching understanding of the Minerva Model as an abstract and the statisticians understanding of it, as a factual categorization of answers – where others may have used the grey category to describe something that is simply not its factual background. These “misunderstanders” may very specifically have been committing the sin, that Bourdieu describes: Using models to make more sense of a paradigm shift or even to enforce intellectual superiority by misusing the intent of the segments. This is also why Henrik Dahl says he personally would have preferred if the grey segment would have been never included (Appendix: Interview with Henrik Dahl). He proceeds to question the notion of a paradigm shift such as “postmodernism” - simply because (in his eyes) there are no data sustaining the theory that society has become structureless. All of this is of course a big discussion that is not relevant here, but it surely speaks of why one should use segmentation models like Minerva with great care. Not to agree with either side of the debate, I still concluded that it would still be interesting to try to compare the contemporary target group of the site to the Minerva Model, to understand their motivations better: TARGET GROUP (A): OWNERS As prior mentioned, owners of Arne Johansen’s design may very well have bought them in the original production time period and will probably fit in the blue segment. People who have later bought jewelry in a used state may fit in three different segments: 1) The violet segment: The traditional materialists that will buy the jewelry like they would buy a painting or other material things to exude status or maybe for hobby purposes. 2) The rosa segment: The traditionalist idealist that would own the jewelry because it’s ideally Danish, ideally traditional or ideally preservational. They would value the relatable ideals of the brand. 3) The green segment: The modern idealists that would own the jewelry for cultural purposes or own/buy vintage in general for climate-ethical reasons. People who have gained the jewelry through inheritance are not really placeable in the schematic as the jewelry will have affec-
tion value and probably will never be up for sale anyway. TARGET GROUP (B): SELLERS From research on the internet sellers of antiquities on websites like eBay, it has become quite obvious that these sellers show interest in Danish Design in general. Most of the sellers that will use Arne Johansen’s name or brand in their advertisement on eBay will be sellers of other Nordic or modernist pieces. These sellers will fall categorically into the violet segment – being both materialistic, but also traditional. They will usually have set up the “shop” as a small hobby project, buying and selling jewelry they appreciate for their traditional value. The occasional private buyer is hard to find, as they will normally not know that “AJ” stands for and it is not possible to say anything generic about their motivation. TARGET GROUP (C): FUNDS Already at the preservational motivation of this group, it’s quite obviously dominated by a glorification of tradition. However they have a clear interest in culture as well which is usually in the green segment. This target group is one of the places where the Minerva model comes up a bit short in explaining this group. The model is particularly closed off by its alleged juxtaposition of materialism and idealism, when in fact that is exactly what this group is: Materialistic, but idealistically motivated. Even though sentient of idealistic traditionalist may seem right at first look, the aspect of culture is also missing here. I would tentatively place them in the rosa segment, but it doesn’t suffice fully. DISCUSSION OF SEGMENTATION One of the problem areas in regards to the application of Minerva to my target groups in particular is the difference between culture and tradition. According to the model, the two are not necessarily opposites, but culture is only placed in the green segment, while this segment probably doesn’t fit my target groups in anyway – they are still very preoccupied
with culture. It beckons to ask the question: Is Minerva too narrow or should one re-consider what “culture” is? Culture in a broader sense is the inherited behaviours, beliefs and institutions of a society. In the more narrow sense, it’s the cultivation of these structures through primarily aesthetic and intellectual training (appreciating modernism is essentially aesthetic training). The definition of tradition is the passing down of elements of culture from generation to generation. When actually observing these two together, it becomes quite obvious that the values “cultural” and “traditional” are not the same but very similar. The difference in choosing “traditional” or “cultural” is essentially based on the personal understanding of the individuals of Dahls initial investigation – just like Bourdieu describes that two understandings of one thing can differ, but still both be valid. A green segment individual would never personify themselves with being “traditional” – however being “cultural” would be of no problem – although both are describing the preservation of certain skills/behaviours/artefacts. The difference between “cultural” and “traditional” is probably what is preserved, but both are essentially preservational values. Either this debunks the self-image of the green segment or it debunks the model – luckily it doesn’t really debunk that all of my target groups seem to have interest in preservation to the extent of their own understanding of either “cultural” or “traditional”. Based on that theory ¾ of the segments would value preservation to some extend – but that doesn’t really debunk the value of the model fully, just further smoothes the borders between segments.
STAKEHOLDERS FUNDS AND DONORS The amount of funds concerned is greater than first anticipated. Strategically we are aiming for culture-related funds and cultural preservation oriented funds, instead of shooting more blindly at funds with wider definitions of what they support. The funds are divided into memoriam funds like Brebøl Fonden and Jorcks Fond, the CSR-funds of companies like Nykredits Fond, Nordeas Fond and Danfoss’ Fabrikant Mads Clausens Fond and the art funds like Københavns Guldesmedelaug, Statens Kunstfond and Margrethe Fonden. All of these but the Guldsmedelaug are quite broad in regards to which form of culture they support, but all have given to preservational causes before. As the funds often publicize who they support and may want mention on the site, the website is de facto a part of the application process. Most of the funds are quite old and/or conservative and the final product has to not conflict with these ideals. Luckily, most of the segmentation I have done, points toward the idea of a more conservative design. I am however very aware that funds have very distinct criteria for handing out donation. To exemplify I have created “personas” for two very different funds. Such “personas” would be very useful in the initial phase of application:
Nordea Fonden
Supports: Health, exercise, nature and culture Despite also supporting culture, the fund’s outlook is more of the broad sense of the word. This fund is not as conservative as other funds and has a general focus on the “sharing”-factor – that culture is something for all, not the cultural elite. In regards to preservational efforts they mention natural preservation, local stories and folklore. For this fund the application
could make use of the local story of Arne Johansen in both Roskilde, Hvalsø and Fuglebjerg and also underlining that even though the jewelry is not yet “folklore” but will eventually become something along the lines of it.
Statens Kunstfond Supports: Scholarships in artistic educations, working scholarships and artistry in general This fund is in contrast to Nordea Fonden more oriented towards the culture in the traditional sense. The fund specifically says that they support “purchase of art”. However they also give out project grants. In their case it would be more prudent to pitch the whole preservational aspect as a “project”. The fund also supports art in the public space, which may be worth noticing or at least mention the idea of “lending” out the collection, not for art in the public space – but the mention of it says, that they like it when art is publicly available.
achieve The Fund is in possession of would naturally also be available for them. In the “kontakt”-area of the site there will also be press material such as photos of jewelry, newspaper clippings and other memorabilia scanned in and ready for download. This will make a pitch to the board of the given museum easier and the information would also be valueable for some of the other users on the site.
Examples of earlier exhibitions: From the coolest corner: Danish Design Museum, Copenhagen. Nordic jewelry Det unikke danske smykke: Kulturetagerne, Hobro. Curated by Statens Kunstssamling Smykkeskrinet: Museo Franz Meyer, Mexico. Curated by Kunstindustrimuseet
VINTAGE RESELLERS MUSEUMS AND EXHIBITIONERS When The Fund has gained enough capital to start buying jewelry for a collection, we slowly also have to look at recipients/borrowers of the collection. These are divideable by 1) museums and galleries in general interested in Danish Design such as Dansk Design Museum and Designmuseeum Danmark. 2) Museums interested in the craftsmanship like Danmarks Tekniske Museeum and Institut for Æstetiske Fag. 3) Local museums in Roskilde/Hvalsø/Fuglebjerg like Roskilde Museum and Museet for Samtidskunst in Roskilde. These are probably not as interested in the brand relation, however, they will be interested in the designs themselves. Eventually the gallery could feature a little “This piece is in the collection”, so that it would be possible for museems to also filter which jewelry they could potentially display. The vast historical
When The Fund has gained capital to buy jewelry it’s also quite important to establish a relationship with vintage sellers both in Denmark and abroad. It’s not impossible to consider, that advertisement on the webpage and other favour/favour strategies might be prudent with some sellers that often find Arne Johansen Jewelry. Besides that, the most important part is to get the word out that we are looking. This means a strategy of personally contacting every shop we encounter with Arne Johansen designs for sale. If we gain enough momentum monetarily, it will be prudent to promise the sellers nice, steady prices if they keep the jewelry off auctions where we may end up losing it – not on money but technicalities, deadlines and such. The advantage for the sellers is of course that the pieces are always sold above minimum bid. It may also be possible to later find a broker in one of the bigger auction houses to handle the businesses as these are trained for the
diplomacy and politics of vintage auctions. All of these resellers and the deals we make will rely heavily on the success of the fundraising.
HYPOTHESIS We expected 50% or less to know of the “quality stamp” We expected less than 30% to know about the “author stamp
MEDIA AND TOOLS THE WEBSITE The communicative purpose of the website was firstly to have an online gallery of the jewelry. The Fund is in possession of a lot of material but as the jewelry was produced in pre-internet days, they were not available online. The gallery should help create the identity of the brand when the user encounters the website just as much as a logo or color scheme. The gallery also serves a point of reference for the people seeking to verify their rings, necklaces and so on. Besides this information, my client had some different requirements to the site – for an example the stamps and mark section. During our initial talks, it became obvious that we needed to bridge a cleft in communication between the users and specialist knowledge regarding this subject. To estimate the cleft, I designed an internet exploratory online survey. The respondents are not representative – or at least I didn’t design the test to investigate whether they were. This test was mainly just to take the temperature on general user knowledge of precious metal stamping. In order to measure whether the users knew more or less than we expected, we formulated several hypothesis to measure the results against.
We expected the frequency of knowledge of these marks to be higher within the people who owns precious metal jewelry and the frequency to be highest in respondents within the group who owns vintage precious metal jewelry. We expected the interest in brands and marks to be primarily based on an interest in the value of the jewelry.
All results are available in Appendix: Online Survey. I wanted the survey to be open to both Danish and International participants as Arne Johansen Jewelry not only catered to the Danish market. The survey was constructed to investigate whether knowledge of marks and brands in precious metal jewelry. Had this been a campaign with a bigger monetary budget it would’ve been prudent to investigate in more depth within different age groups, the main countries of export and possibly direct a couple of questions to actual owners of AJ Jewelry. However this questionnaire served to either confirm or debunk some basic assumptions of the company in regards to precious metal jewelry. Coming from a family of gold and silver workers, stamps and qualities of precious metals are second nature - so in order to investigate we turned them into hypotheses up for question in the online survey. I wanted the survey to be open to both Danish and International participants as Arne Johansen Jewelry not only catered to the Danish market. Had this been a campaign with a bigger monetary budget it would’ve been prudent to investigate in more depth within different age groups, the main countries of export and possibly direct a couple of questions to actual owners of AJ Jewelry. However this questionnaire served to either confirm or debunk idea, that user’s don’t necessarily
know anything about something quite specific knowledge of precious metal jewelry. Coming from a family of gold and silver workers, stamps and qualities of precious metals are second nature and thus they can be regarded as basic assumptions. In general there was a difference between Danish and International respondents. The frequency in both owning precious metal jewelry and the frequency of respondents aware of the marks were generally lower than it was within the Danish respondent group. But as the International group of respondents was also relatively smaller (15%) than the Danish group (85%) this could possibly also be a result of statistical uncertainty. The Danish group was generally more aware of marks than we hypothesised as 61% knew of the “quality stamp” and 52% knew of the “author stamp”. In comparison only 50% of International respondents knew of the “quality stamp” but a surprising 58% knew of the “author stamp”. In regards to why the respondents would look up the goldsmith behind a piece of jewelry, the answers were quite scattered. The International respondents were mostly concerned with the history (29%) and age (21%) while the Danish respondents would be concerned with the history (24%) as well but also validity (21%) as well as value (19%) and age (19%). Overall the interest in information about marks and stamps was low for both groups (Danish 4%, International 7%). These answers are quite integrateable on the website and in the selection of content to portray at the website. When calculating how the user’s ownership of precious metal jewelry corresponded to their knowledge of the stamps, something interesting came up. It turns out, that our hypothesis about precious jewelry owners in general knew more about stamps than people with no ownership was not confirmed. More non-owners knew of both the “author stamp” (18 respondents) and the “quality stamp” (13 respondents) in comparison to owners with no ownership of vintage jewelry both on the “author stamp” and the “quality stamp” (8 respondents only on both stamps). This also suggests that the
“author stamp” is more widely known that first expected. On the other hand, our hypotheses of vintage jewelry owners being “superusers” of the branding system was completely confirmed: 19 of these respondents were aware of the “author stamp” whereas 27 respondents knew of the “quality stamp” proving that for some reasons, these respondents are slightly more knowing about purity than the designer. This could be because many of the respondents maybe have inherited jewelry, where the focus is more of a symbolic rather than design value or maybe because they have other channels of verifying the design (knowledge of designers, models etc. from other sources). All in all the results show a tendency of the respondents actually having greater knowledge than expected on the subject and also that the interest for knowing by whom their jewelry has been made by. This only supported the client’s requirements of including something about the brand history and stamp explanation.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION To make a great website is always a great way to reach your target group, but if the website doesn’t show up in the user’s search results, the chances are that the hard work on the site is lost. The aim of the search engine optimization is that owners should be able to access the website through information gained from their jewelry only.
this below). Through Wordpress it is possible to use certain plugins for SEO and I have primarily used the plugin for Yoast. The plugin basically just enables one to check how optimized the different pages/posts/images are ranking them from red to green, green being completely optimized. The plugin doesn’t do any optimization itself unless you chose to use the overall tools like building a sitemap or structuring links. In other words; Yoast is primarily a monitoring tool of how well your markup optimization is going and also a good visual tool to use to explain your SEO to the customer.
On-page optimization This type of optimization is essentially what can be done locally on the website. The best practice is to single out certain keywords on the site through simple mark up. Google will for an example rank the site higher on searches, by using the following features: • • • • • • • • • •
bolds italics list item placing the keywords first in a paragraph placing keywords in headlines above 300 characters on every page keywords in image alt-tags keywords in categories and tags in Wordpress breadcrumbs and internal links error pages like “404” and “500”
These are not new things in SEO, but rather one of the things Google have decided to move higher up in their internal hierarchy in their on-going pursuit for SEO-experts to use more energy on the content of the site, rather than different (questionable) off-page, efforts like backlinking (I will address
In general my strategy was to use keywords like “AJ 925S” and other more precise mark semantics besides, as competition on these words are naturally low on very specific keywords - it is not necessarily hard to get good page rank where it matters and not on more generic search words like “goldsmith” or “Danish design”. On Google (in Denmark Google.dk has a marketshare of 95.4%: Søgemaskineandele i Danmark 2008 -2011, Afdeling18, 2012) there is a bit of competition on the name “Arne Johansen” as it is not only a common name in Denmark but also in the surrounding Nordic countries. Initially the closest “competitor” is a Norwegian speed skater and social media profiles for persons named Arne Johansen. In spite of this I will still optimize for the keyword “Arne Johansen” (because Google is essentially English, a keyword can consist of more than one word, as the English language doesn’t use compound nouns as frequently as Danish), but this will primarily be to support the off-page optimization.
The last things to consider are things that affect the load-perfomance of the site, like reducing the sizes of images, plugins and widgets among other data heavy items, because Google will calculate loadtime, compare it to a sitemap (to understand how deep the site is) and relatively correlate these and this will affect the ranking of the site.
Off-page optimization This branch of SEO was initially why SEO at some point got a bad name. Off-page optimization is based creating on links that point back to your site from a completely different site. The value of the link is based: the popularity of the linking site how many external links the site has already how early in the mark up the link appears that the site has similar content to yours/same keywords Before the latest Google updates and in particular the “Hummingbird”-update, Google has more or less been shutting down all “linkfarms” that questionable SEO-experts had been using for external links or more commonly phrased “backlinks”. This would be sites only used for linking back to one’s own site for better ranks. By making the content of these sites more important, a lot of these businesses have failed. If Google finds your link on linkfarms, they will also “punish” you by dropping your page by 30 ranks. Hits like these are very hard for sites to come back from and this is why I only use relevant backlinking and consider very carefully which sites to place links on. Social media backlinking is starting to trend even though sites like facebook would normally be counted as having too many links to make any difference. But by changing the algoritms Google has made Google+, facebook, tumblr, reddit and other usually link-heavy sites rank increasingly better. Usually the first point of business in off-page optimization in Denmark where use of Google is so frequent would be to make a business profile on Google+ which ranks non-relatively high for obvious reasons. I have created such a business profile and I will be using social media backlinking on pages like facebook, tumblr, pinterest and flickr. Besides that I have created a Wikipedia-page and I will place an external source link pointing towards the site there as well. Besides that I will
make an effort to create links on relevant blogs, foras and the likes of it.
PINTEREST Through research we found out that “Arne Johansen” was a very searchable item. It wasn’t necessarily a part of the strategy to involve Pinterest in our communication plan, but as social media sometimes will it - then it’s not always up to you. We realized that some of the images tagged with “Arne Johansen” were not accurate - they were simply not his designs. Instead of asking users to take down images, we decided to use it to our advantage and have conversations with the users about design and Arne Johansen in general and it has helped to both correct and improve the brand image - at least on this platform. This is an example of Groundswell theory in action: “listening” (Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Harvard Business Press 2008) . We didn’t think Arne Johansen was a Pinterest-brand, but our users thought otherwise and we are now on Pinterest. Their feedback also changes the way we view the brand. We didn’t think we were a social media brand, but especially our Pinterest-experiences changed this. This is the value of “listening” in Groundswell terminology and has affected our facebook strategy mentioned below. Pinterest also gives The Fund the option of finding more materials for the growing gallery on the webpage. Many of the images in The Fund’s possession are black and white, which means a lot of detail is lost. By starting meaningful conversations with the copyright holders of the contemporary images, it is now possible to showcase more jewelry pieces in colour and showcase jewelry pieces of which The Fund has lost documentation of.
FACEBOOK The decision of creating a facebook page was initially to save the name and URL (facebook allows you to save a unique facebook/URL as soon as you have 25 followers). Many brands initially struggled with counterfeit facebook-pages monitored by fans instead and later had to gain access to those pages via lawsuits. To nip this in the bud, we created the page to keep all possibilities. In the start-up phase, the page was unpublished. With this strategy we could make the page user-ready and share posts before users actually like the page. This is for two purposes:
1) To avoid spam. When you start off your facebook communication you often share too much content out of enthusiasm, but end up taking too much space in potential “likers” newsfeed. The hypothesis also is, that when users have just liked a page, they will sooner evaluate the benefits of posts and actively go back to the page and unlike if the news stream is too heavy. They will also evaluate the posts with more scrutiny right after a like to eventually find out if they are getting what they wanted out of their like. Essentially liking a page is like the pre-internet newspaper subscription and even though the like is free unlike a newspaper subscription, users actively manage which information they subscribe to. Being too spammy is a sure way to use the most heavily scrutinizing users.
2) To make the page seems already active. When launching a page many make the mistake of presenting users with a blank page. This makes users question whether they want to subscribe, as they essentially won’t know what they subscribe to before the page becomes active. To avoid this, I created a representative news stream on the page to simulate what users can expect from their subscription.
But we didn’t just decide to create a facebook page to essentially discourage others from creating their own page: The overall strategy of the facebook page is to create ambassadors for the fund or as Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff refer to as “energizing”. Even though The Fund will actively search pages for vintage sellers and my experience in Google marketing will probably make it a quite thorough search – there will be sellers outside the regular search terms and even shops with only physical shops. This is where we’ll need ambassadors and for them to report back in where they have seen pieces for sale. In return we’ll give them feedback on whether jewelry is originals, what time they were produced and so on. This will give them a sense of being “Arne Johansen-experts” and improve their loyalties towards the brand. When The Fund gains capital it will also be possible to create a “reward-program” where ambassadors will receive monetary compensation for finding pieces. However this idea still needs to be thought out carefully before launching, as it could also make the motivation of the users rational rather than emotional and thus changing the dynamics of the relationship between the users and the brand. Essentially, if possible we want users to provide the service for free and feel that the rewards of being part of a movement as enough compensation for their time.
This approach to “likers” as more than just cattle, but actually qualified users also requires a bit of work in the recruiting phase. Not to say that “regular” likers will not be allowed to like the page – on the contrary we want as many that want to like to actually like the page – but we will also put a lot of effort into finding these qualified users. This is where the stakeholders and social media strategy overlap; we want the stakeholders to also become ambassadors. The potential places to find these “super-users” or ambassadors would be on the eBay shops where people specialize in modernist design or getting other pages of Statens Kundsfond or Guldsmedelauget to also interlink pages by the facebook feature that
allows pages to like other pages. Our page will then appear in the “likes” section when you view those respective pages. The selection of other brands to work together with has to be specific whereas some social media strategist will trade these links without thinking about the relation of the brand.
With facebook’s new “Facebook Graph Search” it is also worth considering, how user search behaviour will change in the future. The new search bar enables users to search the internet directly from their facebook. It is already said that most facebook users get their news information from facebook and it is not impossible to consider a shift that makes facebook a new force to be reckoned with in regards to search engines. This essentially makes a page as valuable as a Google AdWords as it will appear before the option to search the internet. Where Google charges for AdWords, facebook pages are still a free commercial tool.
WIKIPEDIA One of the things that can improve the professionalism of a company is its presence on Wikipedia. The online encyclopaedia has slowly grown from being questioned for being user-generated to actually sometimes taking factual precedent over newspapers and other factual sources on the internet. Getting an article on Wikipedia is also getting increasingly hard for the articles to remain to have a high standard. Through learning the inherent syntax of Wikipedia coding and research on articles in the same genre, I successfully created a Wikipedia article about Arne Johansen. Luckily for Arne Johansen, the Wikipedia moderators seem to think, that his work is valid for publishing which gives his posthumous brand validity - unlike many new articles that are instantly removed or questioned.
TIME PLAN
CRITERIAS OF SUCCESS •
Page 1 rank for ”Arne Johansen”
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Page 1 rank for Arne Johansens Wikipedia
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Page 1 rank for at least one stamp mark
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Above 100 page likes
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50.000 in funding in the first 6 months
DELIVERING THE PRODUCT Some may regard the interpersonal communication in relation to campaigns or websites as “not as important” as the external communication. However, the success of an external communication often relies heavily on the quality of the interpersonal handover of a product. Disregarding strategies on how the product will end up in the hands of a client will often create a bad brand in return for yourself or the business you represent. To avoid this, I usually have several backhand strategies to ensure the client feels full ownership of the final product. Introducing clients to Wordpress solutions was part of my responsibilities during my compulsory internship in relation to
my study at KEA. This means I have experience in introducing the backend to several clients on different levels of understanding. Some clients intuitively understand the backend, some need a bit more coaching. The most important part for me is firstly to explain what a CMS is and why I have used a CMS instead of pure code. Although the primary force behind The Fund, Ghita Johansen is an experienced internet user with experience in handlings CMS’s, it doesn’t necessarily mean that understanding Wordpress well – switching between CMS’s always gives a little bit of irritations because of their inherent differences in the same way I personally have issues switching between Adobe programs like Adobe Illustrator. It’s a strategy to stress analogies like this to make the client feel more confident in their first contact with the system. Another communicative analogy I’ll use is the same way the page and post-editors look like the Word interface or that uploading photos to the database through the interface is somewhat like uploading photos to an album on facebook. By using analogies you can make abstract facts more relatable and rememberable as the users don’t relate the facts to something technical to elements they use in their everyday life. I will normally prepare a sheet with talking point. I have included an example of this paper in my appendix.
DESIGN BACKGROUND
solely on construction and materials.
Danish Design has always been known for its focus on functionality and sleek simplicity. But this functionalistic way of designing did not origin in Denmark. In the chapter below I will explore how Arne Johansen relates to both Bauhaus and how modernism progressed up through the following decades.
“Gute Form – Max Bill 1957”
Bauhaus (Deassau & Werkbund): In 1919 the Bauhaus school opened. It’s mantra was ”form follows function” which in short means that design should be more focused on its function rather than aesthetics. The forming of objects in Bauhaus focused on three things; Use, the process under which it was created and the materials of which it was created. This was a break from earlier design paradigms like the romantic one. The focus became on making design objective – primarily departing in color theory and geometry. WWII 1939-44: After World War II’s shortly blossoming national romanticism, the functionalistic take on design was only gaining more followers. The German philosopher Theodor Adorno said, that after Auschwitz “high culture” was dead (reference: Design after Auschwitz). Design should be without tradition in order to make it democratic. The book from 1943 and following movie in 1949 “The Fountainhead” gained great success during this period. The book featured a protagonist, architect Howard Roark who is thrown out of school for not complying to incorporate traditional lines of architecture like classicism and Victorian style in his own, purely functionalist buildings, based
In 1957 former Bauhaus student Max Bill elaborated on the teachings of Bauhaus by coining the term “Gute Form”. Gute form was based on the democratic principle, that because good form was transcendent of tradition, it could be learned by all people. The Gute Form principle also implied that good design was not dependent on expensive materials – nor ornamentation or decoration and other laboriously heavy design processes. Gute form was also based on the ideas of the growing industrialisation of society, praising the craftsmanship and making it primary to the end design. Design should be “timeless” and “classless”.
Tomás Maldonado 1960’s – The Ulm Model At the same time of the Gute Form movement, Tomás Maldonado took the principles of Bauhaus even further. The “design and technique” of the Bauhaus and Gute Form was replaced with “science and technique”. The idea was that design was only good if it was based on a scientific calculus. This model-based approach to design became known as “The Ulm Model”. The critique of Gute Form was that it was not reduced enough as it still had a mission to become “timeless” which is and aesthetic value in itself. The students later complained about this intellectual way of creation, that mandated teaching in everything from cybernetics to science. The ascetic style was sterile and focused only on technique. The only measurement of design was how well it was planned out to work in practice – anonymous and elitist.
Danish Design in 60’s – 70’s Danish Design had been influenced by the functionalism of Bauhaus. Danish Design-legend Arne Jacobsen was influenced modernistic designers like Le Corbusier who was part of the Werkbund. One of the similarities between Danish Design and German functionalism is the focus on craftsmanship and Arne Jacobsen was celebrated for especially that – being a craftman. Also the idea of reduction of design has been flourishing throughout Danish Modernism. The degree of reduction is found somewhere between Gute Form and The Ulm Model – with a strong focus on useability but still relying heavily on aestethic qualities like form, shape and color. In others words, Danish Design is the bastard child of the two schools and actually takes departure in their most conflicting parts – but however quite successfully so.
Arne Johansen as a Danish Designer With goldsmith production being a part of the Bauhaus with Naum Slutzky already in the early 20th century, the reduction principle in jewelry design was quintessential to the end form of its modernistic appearance. Most notably in early Danish modernism in jewellery design was Georg Jensen – though he is now primarily known for his silverware. Because of the price of materials – jewellery design is often a more conservative branch, simply because of the value of risk-taking. Thus it was “safer” to still produce more romantic pieces in-between modernistic pieces. As is obvious in Arne Johansen’s portfolio, there was both a personal, artistic break for Arne Johansen and the more historical break of the entire goldsmith business after the time Arne Johansen graduated (in 1951) as it is seen in the contrast between his svendestykke and the products of Arne Johansen Jewelry – the first being romantic and the latter being drastically more modern.
The most drastic changes in goldsmith design during the time Arne Johansen Jewelry was producing, was a rise in silver as material for jewellery were gold had been the primary in the time before. This made jewellery more affordable, combined with easier ways of production made jewellery more mass-consumed and therefore also more experimental. Arne Johansen Jewelry would often make products in both silver, gold and white gold – but sales had a clear overweight in the silver department. Expensive stones remained in his catalogues, but less expensive materials such as mother of pearl, freshwater pearl, tigers eye and turquoise became a part of the design profile. Often only one stone would be in focus of the designs, letting the bearing material (gold and silver, formerly used for mounting and showcasing the precious stone) become the main component – sometimes even the only component (example “strygejernet”). This did not only reduce price and availability, but implied a clear aesthetic reduction and put more emphasis on the craftsman. One of the reasons the raw materials became the primary component of the jewellery was also the way it could be molded into the geometric shapes which Arne Johansen Jewelry became famous for. However, when stones were used, they often formed the design more than the design formed them (in contrast to e.g. diamonds that are traditionally very non-organically processed and heavily used in pre-modern jewellery design). Functionalisticly Arne Johansen Jewelry also pioneered locking systems that still to this day lives up to the needs for functionality of the modern human being. Another thing was also the production of pendants and charms, which made chains multifunctional and more available.
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Unfortunately availability also in many ways became the end of Arne Johansen Jewelry. The rise of not only cheaper, but non-precious metals in jewellery design fitted the buyand-throw-away mentality of the 80’s. The use of plastic also created pressure on the goldsmith industry as a whole. The craftsmanship in many ways died to be replaced by mass-production in both precious and non-precious materials. The businesses that survived was the ones that could deliver mass
produced items with a broad appeal. To this day most goldsmiths carry their own products alongside these mass-productions like “Pandora”, “Georg Jensen” and “Aagaard”. The market was further reduced by the rise of non-precious jewellery lines from “Dyrberg & Kern” and “Pilgrim” during the 90’s – 00’s. This also means that Arne Johansen was one of the last great Danish goldsmiths – as the craftsmanship and individuality of craftsmen as a whole is at an absolute minimum.
LOGO From the start it was obvious that we wanted a logo consisting of both logotype (wordmark) and a logomark for the full effect of shapes and brand coming together in one. From before we had two formerly used logos, both using typography to create the mark. As you’ll see in the section about the logotype, the logo was often followed by explanatory text (“Arne Johansen Jewelry”). I liked the tradition of this, but wanted to include the most important aspect of Arne Johansen more appearant: His design. The simplicity of many of his jewelry is incidentally easily translatable into more abstract figures; I wanted to keep the typography concrete and the figure abstract. The juxtaposition of the two would bring something new and interesting to the brand. Former logos:
For the abstract logomark figure we wanted to use some of the more iconic pieces in AJ Jewelry’s collections and we found the possible contenders because of their simplistic and recognizable design
A
B
C
D
The first choice was D because of its simple, but distinct style. However, when put on paper, it became obvious that it bore quite the resemblance to the logomark of sportswear moguls, Nike. So I tried reversing the illustration, but with no real benefit and compromising the original design. Both A and C were also good candidates. However, the reduction process of logo design stole from the design. The choice eventually fell on B which is a ring from the same collection as D. We searched the achieves for photos with the ring from different angles, at decided on the following angle: The ring also has the advantage of looking like an infinity sign from this angle, which supports the mission of The Fund. The ring is a silver ring by Arne Johansen himself and cannot be molded - in other words, the ring can only be reproduced by a craftsman.
Process:
Inversion
During the next couple of steps I’ll show the process the logo went from image to illustration. As you will notice on the frontpage of this report, the logo went full circle and back into silver again. Sketching on photographs Final logo
Inking using lightbox
Digitizing process (live tracing)
TYPOGRAPHY Experiments with the finished form
Even though you almost instantly settle your mind on one of the different type-families, I’ll usually try out at least one script, one serif and one sans serif type. in this case i was fairly sure I wanted a streamlined sans serif, but the script types were more convincing than expected as they looked a bit like signatures. I however ended up choosing the sans serif, but instead of centering it, I left-aligned the type and aligned the cut of the starting letters to the starting point of the lower curve – which makes the type more part of the figure, rather than just “thrown in there” with the logomark. The type is quite small, yet still legible – this is really for it to not compete
for attention with the illustration. On smaller surfaces of print, like business cards, pens and pins, it would be possible to upsize the text if necessary. Because I chose “Open Sans” – an open source and free typography it will also be possible for the client to combine the bare logomark with type on their own. Furthermore the font can also be carried on into the webpage, can be used in letters, print items and so on with no further cost for the client. This is important for an organisation that wants to use all the money that is donated on buying back jewelry – not on copyrights for fonts. I have also used this font for this report to show how applicable it is.
Forms follow function For the website I wanted the idea of functionalism and “cutting down on frills” from Bauhaus and apply it not only aesthetically – but also in the way I build the site. In my internship I worked with wordpress and instructed the clients in how to use their new websites and this made me realize how well it improved the interface between client and content. I also chose a very low-detail theme for the project – not only because it fitted the brief – but it also left the backend untouched where many themes will add extra (and often very not-useful) functions that my client would never have to be concerned with. Even though this is the design part of my assignment I want to stress that in especially this case design and function go together as they did in the ideals of Bauhaus and later Danish Design. In the name of cutting down frills I didn’t create a normal landing page on the website as many websites have. First off, landing sites are usually made for sales and since the site would contain to sales I saw no reason for it. Instead you are taken directly into the gallery of the page. This also assures the user quite early in the process that they are indeed on the right webpage. Instead of having to wait for a site to load categories, I chose to have filtering directly on the frontpage which basically enables a user to find what he/she needs
within one click on the webpage. For functional purposes, I did leave the search field in case the user would rather just search for product number, nicknames or anything really the internal search is optimized for. The grid system of the images ensure that as much space as possible is used up.
Color I wanted the site to mainly stay black and white, as the pictures are also mainly in black and white. But for contrast I added one very sharp blue for mouse over effects and in that way the color helps enhance the users interaction with the sign, putting full color-emphasis on the behaviour input. I chose the blue because I wanted a primary color – not for the color theoretical purpose of it (as has later been proven, that color model has been debunked), but because it gives the impression of essentiality – be they primary or not, red, yellow and blue seem naturally primary to us.
Geometry I chose the geometric look for the site again because of function. The grid layout of the “product” enables more jewelry to fit in the content area with no fill space in the primary viewing area. By using “posts” for the gallery instead of a solution with a lightbox gallery or something like that I managed to show both picture, categories the ring falls under and sofort already in the preview of the product. All categories are clickable for a smoother movement through the site. Instead of filling out the entire widget area with filtering options, the grid system also just fills in below the needed filtering options.
TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION What is a CMS? A CMS or “Content Management System” is an application to organize a collection of data like documents, photos or other files. In these days many use the term to define a web application for handling webpages, but also here primarily the content of the webpages like photos and files. Both in its original meaning and new use, the system is made for ease-of-use and easier collaboration. Many often also make a distinction between closed- and open source CMS. As I have mentioned earlier, The Fund would rather use money on their collection than paying for closed source options. Therefore I chose the most popular open source at the moment: Wordpress. The Wordpress web application was originally created for blog management and is primarily build in the serverside language PHP. The only requirements of a Wordpress installation are merely a webhotel that supports PHP and SQL plus a minimum of access to one database. In order to install Wordpress, one simply just has to fill out the database-connection file (wp-config.php) with one’s own database and server information and Wordpress will take it from there. The installation is also referred to as the “5 Minute Installation” – however this is quite depending on how forthcoming your webhotel is to provide the information you need and how well you have armed yourself with passwords before the installation. Dynamic content That Wordpress was a blog management system before is seen primarily through the PHP-framework: PHP is excellent for handling dynamic web content such as blog rolls. Wordpress has steadily moved towards making a sophisticated
backend including having several layers of user levels, video management, photo management and text management. In that sense almost all levels of Wordpress are dynamic – even the layouts are dynamic in the shape and form of “themes”. These themes are used for altering the output of the database into different styles. In my particular case, I wanted to use the output of “posts” to create a gallery instead of its regular blog roll and found a theme that supported this feature. Plugins and safety One of Wordpress’ other features is the ability to download applications for your web application – also known as plugins. These plugins vary greatly in function and build, but most are built from PHP and Javascript. These plugins can be used to manage simple tasks like “Simple Custom CSS” that just adds a non-server located stylesheet, so that modifications are not lost during updates and upgrades – to heavy duty plugins like Yoast that have multiple layers of function and includes itself as an extra layer of on all content outlets like posts, pages and images. When using plugins, it is however urged by all experts, that you always consider what plugins you use and delete them if you discontinue to use them. This is because these applications are gateways into your system. On a general note on 3rd party developed applications: Recently there was an attack on the widely used application chart.dk - a visitor counting application used widely by all types of businesses. The attack took down the sites using the application, re-directing them to a hacker forum. Only when it was discovered that chart.dk was the gateway used to get into the site, the web admins could remove the chart.dk files from the server and regain control of their webpages. Even though the case
wasn’t Wordpress related, it’s still a tale of how you essentially open doors for malware when you use plugins – be they Wordpress plugins or plugins in general.
Danish. Essentially this means that if the site needs to have both a Danish and English version later on, a non-hardcoding solution like mo- and po-files will have to replace it.
Plugins I have used: Code Styling Localization (translation tool) Column Shortcodes (grid-layout tool) Contact Form 7 (form tool) Diasble Comments Paypal Donations Simple Custom CSS Wordpress Importer WordPress SEO by Yoast
Navigation
MODIFICATIONS As mentioned above I chose the WP Shower theme “Paragrams” because of its way of styling the blog roll as an image gallery. I had used these developers before and knew that their products were well-build – a consideration one also has to have when choosing themes. The theme essentially creates this gallery by making the blog thumbnail a general thumbnail and styling the blog previews as small geometric entities filling the article section both horizontally and vertically. At the time of my hand in, WP Shower has actually removed “Paragrams” from their downloadable themes section. However, the demo is still available. You can find it in the link collection in the back of this report. Language I hardcoded (hardcoded is in Wordpress terminology modifications that takes place directly into the theme files – it is important to note if things are hardcoded because it will be overwritten by a “normal” update of the theme) some language changes in the error messages and functionality-links like “next” and “previous” in for an example the index-file, where error messages were in English. I changed these to
As I have argued for earlier, I created a second menu structure based on filtering option for the jewelry. This was done with a Custom Menu-widget. In that way I essentially used the widget area as the second navigation structure/filtering structure instead of the original second navigation of the theme located in the header-area. I used the CSS display:none properties to remove this. The display:none property varies from the visibility:hidden property by not only removing the content of the selector, but also the space that the selector area would normally take up and it is a very powerful tool in easy-to-use CSS hacking. Instead of having the widget area be full-length as it would normally be in Wordpress-layouts, it is cut of when the content ends. This leaves more room for the jewelry. Header As the logo used in the paragrams demo is not quadratic like mine, the space available for the logo would leave it too small for the abstract figure to stand out. I therefore elongated the header area to a size I thought fit. To try to create more fluidity and “air” I in general removed a couple of borders that were in the original Paragrams design, so the impression wasn’t as boxy. After debating a bit with myself I also chose to keep the search bar, as users should be able to search the site instead of using the filtering options – the contrasting argument was, that the filtering options should be well-formulated enough to replace the need for search. However the adding of too many categories would inflate their quality, so I eventually chose to keep it, but downtoned it to almost only appear at mouse-over, so that only users looking for it would really use their attention on it.
CONCLUSION Working iterative is not just a framework for developing multimedia products, it’s a way of working with communication in general. I know that the product of one’s final Multimedia Design should not be a prototype, but a finished product. But as I have stressed through-out the report – there is no such thing if you want to take social media seriously; if you truly work iterative the project is never finished because the foundations of the product will change depending on the world it is placed in. If The Fund moves to become more of a thing in itself, I’ll have to think it into the context of the product and the other way: If the library of photos becomes the primarily used part of the site this may have to change things as well. Communication is not a fixed entity anymore. We don’t just communicate one way or one time. Because I have worked iteratively the product has become not only an evolutionary prototype but rather an evolutionary product. With web communication moving onto different devices, I will probably have to add a mobile strategy to it eventually. If we move away from websites and primarily use facebook as representation of ourselves and our businesses, we’ll have to adjust for that as well. But by working iteratively, you also learn to constantly think to steps ahead into the next iteration and the next one. So the strategy eventually ends up not having a goal, but having a method. The goals I set up in the communication plan are not final, they are the goals of the first iteration and more will have to be added to keep optimizing and optimizing. I think I have managed to present a great image of where Arne Johansen should be right now – but it’s not impossible to think that this will change over time. When my grandfather passed away almost 10 years ago he would have never expected that people would be autonomously speaking about him on Pinterest or any other social media. Experiencing this I knew he would
have been so proud and honoured. This humility was probably why he never really promoted himself by anything but his craft. This is why I wanted the ideas all the way from Bauhaus to Georg Jensen to shine through in the final product; this is more than just preserving my grandfather’s jewelry but also making sure we don’t forget the craft he loved and devoted so much of his life to.
Hanna Ella Evald Sandvik, Copenhagen 2013
Til min Moffe.
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LITTERATURE Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Harvard Business Press 2008 Hvis din nabo var en bil, Henrik Dahl, Akademisk Forlag 2005 Minerva, AC Nielsen AIM, 1999 Søgemaskineandele i Danmark 2008 -2011, Afdeling18, 2012 http://www.afdeling18.dk/blog/2012/6/1/soegemaskineandele-i-danmark,-2008-til-2011.aspx Seen 18.12.2013 The Logic of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu, Polity Press 1992 Birth of the cool - Bauhausarven: Ulm-designskolen & dansk produktdesign, Kunstindustrimuseet, Skoletjenesten Kunstindustrimuseet, 2004 http://designmuseum.dk/assets/243/ulmskolen_gym__HF.pdf Seen 18.12.2013
External references Wikipedia: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arne_Johansen Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arnejohansenjewelry Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/arnejohansen/ Paragrams Theme Demo: http://paragrams.wpshower.com/
FAKTABLAD / Report detail form KEA Eksamensprojekt / Exam project Semester: ( )2 ( )3 ( )4 ( )Dansk linje ( )International line Dato for aflevering / Handed in: _______-_______-2013_ Projektets title / Project title: ________________________________
Email-adresse / Email address
Underskrift / Signature
Gruppens nummer/navn / Group no. or name: __________________
Cpr.nr / Date of birth
Vejleder / Coach: __________________ Gruppens medlemmer / Group members 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
URL for web-produktion / Website URL: ___________________.keaweb.dk ___________