Collective Detective Blog Archives

Collectivus Branding Revisited

Just a short update on our branding for Collectivus. You may have noticed that the logo has been punched up a little and is sporting a shiny new color-scheme as well.

I had taken a crack at revising the original Collectivus logo from 2003 about a year ago, but not being a graphics pro, there’s only so much I could pull off with my limited art skills. So as part of the development for the Collectivus application, we brought in a professional to tweak the logo and create additional branding assets for us. Tara Petrilli of Eye-Volt Design has been doing a great job meeting our graphic design needs for this project.

Original (circa 2003)

Old (2008)

New

What do you think?

This is just a small preview of the look of Collectivus. You’ll be seeing more sneak peeks and additional information rolling out faster as we countdown to launch.

Speaking of launch: Beyond the CD blog, become a fan of the Collectivus Facebook page and follow Collectivus on Twitter for news and other ways to check out Collectivus early.

It’s In the Cards

We recently ordered some new business cards. Business cards are one of those staple items needed when meeting people in the wild. It ensures that each party can continue to interact at a later date. Pretty textbook stuff right? Sure. However, the way we do business, especially in the ‘Net biz is ever changing and evolving. It wasn’t long ago you’d hand each other your mobile phones and enter yourself into the other’s speed dial. Just recently I met some people at a conference and they simply asked me for my Twitter handle; they added me right on the spot via their iPhone.

Yet, the business card endures. It’s tangible, promotes your brand, and will someday endear you to someone when they fold it up and use it to level a wobbly table.

The new Collective Detective cards are smaller than the originals. We opted for the more tree-friendly and compact MiniCards from Moo — plus c’mon, they’re cool. On the back, in addition to the tried and true company logo, name, email address, phone number, http://www.collectivedetective.com URL, and personal site link, we’ve added something simple, yet useful at the bottom:

“@username on many online communities”

In my case: “@quixado on many online communities.”

The online versions of the small “us” that is CD exist and are reachable in many more places than just the Collective Detective site or a personal blog. Each community is another opportunity for outreach and engagement with the people met online and offline. Simply putting a link to a Twitter or LinkedIn profile is limiting; listing every social site one belongs to is excessive. So we thought this was a happy medium: provide the standard contact information and extend the invitation to find and reach us elsewhere.

A small and simple thing we’re trying and that we wanted to share with you. Something you might consider for your own cards in 2009.

Happy New Year from Collective Detective!

Collectivus.com vs. Collectiv.us

So in this era of new domain extensions and mobile Internet surfing, a few of the things one looks at when launching a web property is the the domain and the URL people will see and use.

In “web 1.0,” it used to be that it was important to prefix the website with “www.” because otherwise people would be confused. (Mind you I’m articulating this from a layman’s point-of-view, the system admin-side of me knows exactly the reasons for doing these things.)

“Web 2.0,” brought with it a trend of dropping vowels out of names (flickr) and leveraging creative uses of TLDs to overcome the lack of decent, easy-to-remember dot com names.

I’d been toying with formally using “http://collectiv.us” for the official domain name. It was shorter and “in.” That was essentially the reasoning. With yesterday’s relaunch of Delicious (formally del.icio.us), the Yahoo-owned bookmarking service, I’ve realized that their logic is sound and mine was bad. When possible: Stick to the basics when it comes to your domain names!

From the Delicious Blog:

So why did we switch to delicious.com? We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com”, and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends.

Another good reason to keep it simple is that most browsers will attempt to tack on a “http://” and “.com” when you just type a word into the location bar like “delicious” or I dunno… maybe “collectivus” and hit enter. It’s the browser’s helpful way of saying: “Is this what you meant?” Making it easy for visitors to find your site is pretty important stuff. Why complicate it even a little if you don’t have to?

So when we go live, the official URL for Collectivus will be http://collectivus.com. We’re pretty sure it’s safe to leave the “www.” off these days; we’ll make sure all of the other variations still work though.