Decomposing the Personality of the RedPeg Website
RedPeg Marketing is a company that I stumbled upon several months ago while on a walk with my wife around neighboring Alexandria, Virginia. It caught my eye because I relate any type of marketing or communications firm to my career interests. Besides – what was the story behind the red peg within the logo I briefly pondered?
As my wife ambled on, ever purposeful and ever moving forward during our meanderings that day, I remember lingering back and then making an outright STOP. Unannounced. I was curious about this business whose red brick framed a big white framed door, no. 727.
I yelled to the wifey “hold up a minute!”. I walked up the ramp to look closer and glean the story here. What I found instead was a white piece of paper, taped neatly on the door. It unceremoniously greeted me with only a listing of the company hours.
Fast forward to now where I recently stumbled again, this time somehow on the RedPeg website. Like the historic, yet artsy part of Alexandria where the modest RedPeg building is located, what I immediately noticed about the RedPeg website’s “personality” was the artsy, colorful, images and energy that it exudes – no flashes, in your face. And, no, of course websites are not people but I do harken back to an instructive comment that I read from Mail Chimp’s UX Lead:
In his case Aarron was conveying the importance of understanding personality and emotions in effective design and user response.
In my case, I will similarly examine such humanistic elements of the RedPeg website – which importantly will also include looking Gestalt principles – to better understand the intentions of the RedPeg designer(s).
As it relates to design, Gestalt principles involve us perceiving the many surrounding different signals coming at us at the same time. To organize them, and avoid going crazy, we visualize our surroundings as unitary forms or groups. Just how we go about deciding that some objects “go together” is core to Gestalt theory.
Some of the more straightforward Gestalt principles include simplicity, proximity, similarity, and symmetry.
After some brief additional discussion around the RedPeg website and Gestalt principles and comments on emotion, I offer a mood board to drill down even further into the design components and mechanisms of this engaging site. A mood board is a pre-design tool that designers use for inspiration, coordination, and collaboration for themselves and even for clients.
DISCUSSION
The RedPeg website describes the company as an independent, experiential, marketing agency. Examining the variously colorful, image filled site, it wasn’t much of a surprise that I was implored to check out its eclectic squad of team members.
Did I say I felt implored? I did in fact soon feel some personal and emotional connection to site not only because of its energy and activity and other yet-to-be discussed elements, but because of the diversity of the site’s colors and its team members.
One element that the site seemed to be conspicuously missing, at least from my point of view, was sound. Perhaps the RedPeg site with all of its almost bombarding beginning flashiness and video could have used a low-level music track or sound to gently compliment its beginning “push”. Click here, what do you think?
Similarity
True to the classic definition of similarity as explained by Laura Busche in her Simplicity, Symmetry and More article on Gestalt theory and design principles, we perceive the elements as belonging to the same group since they look like each other. In this case the principle of similarity is evoked by similarities not only in the size of the squares, but also in their colors and orientation. When you hover over the squares which all link to the Red Peg’s “Our Work” case studies, the client’s name comes up in the same Arial-type font further, underscoring the similarity principle.
Symmetry
The tops of these coffee pods are part of an advertising campaign that RedPeg marketing created for Italy coffee maker Lavazza. It is a clear example of the Gestalt principle of symmetry. Although the flavors of the coffee in the coffee pods are clearly different, we easily perceive them as being from the pod “family” because they are laid out in a distinctly symmetrical pattern.
These coffee pods also all have the same round shape further signaling to our brain that they all belong to the same family or brand. The distinctive font of the Lavazza brand even helps to quickly tie the brand name together with the advertisement on the white company car on the right.
Emotion
With respect to emotion, I did have a mild reaction when I first walked up to the RedPeg building and gazed at its logo which includes a distinctive red peg.
Donald Norman is often cited for his talks and academic work on the subject of emotion and design. As opposed to the designer’s point of view this scholar and author informs us that visceral responses from the all important user’s point of view involve an automatic evaluation of the perceptual properties of objects, and a quick classification of them as safe or dangerous, good or bad, cold and forbidding or warm and inviting.
My idling brain then, working in a quick, database-like fashion initially tried just to match the red peg on the website’s logo with any other similar images that I had come across in the many years that I had spent collecting such “inputs” in my brain. Like a slot machine landing on a winning image for its patron, my brain first landed on a baker’s rolling pin. The red peg was surely some kind of rolling pin? My only job was to figure out how such an icon creatively related to a marketing firm.
Not!
Turns out the red pin on the logo goes back to my teenage years and the popular Hasbro game, Battleship. The red pin is actually an exact replica of the ones, that if you were lucky, landed on squarely on your opponent’s ship. You sink all of your opponent’s ships before your opponent sinks yours? You win! White pins landing on the side of the ship means you guessed the wrong location to sink that battleship — you missed! With a nod to the neurons of an older generation, RedPeg’s marketing intent, then, is to emotionally convey that in a blue sea of generic white peg “misses”, that their marketing strategy is very much “on target”.
As I gazed at the tiny grey toy ship, suddenly, the RedPeg website’s youthful, playful colors, energy, and “attitude” all made sense now!
MOOD BOARD
