Artistry, marketing and publishing were the themes of the April party in San Diego that celebrated Create Magazine’s Los Angeles/Southern California’s launch edition.

MiresBall, one of the largest independent brand design firms in Southern California, were hosts for the first half of swanky soiree in their Little Italy digs, entertaining guests from throughout the marketing and advertising community, along with media and of course, MiresBall clients. Their hip loft was the setting for guitarist Billy Thompson and plenty of food and drink. Colorful samples of MiresBall work for Taylor Guitars, Lux Art Institute, Qualcomm and more were displayed in the firm’s conference room, on walls and a looping video.

“The launch of Create Magazine in this market just further demonstrates our place on the map as a robust creative community that produces a lot of fabulous work,” said principal Scott Mires.

MiresBall, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2005, recently changed its name from Mires to signal the partnership of founding principal and creative director Scott Mires and John Ball, who is also a long-time principal and creative director.

Mires clients, including Kurt Listug, CEO, Taylor Guitars and Jacquie Johnson, VP of Marketing, Creative Nail Design, and dozens of other guests enjoyed a lively drawing with prizes from MiresBall clients including top-of-the-line Shure headphones, Taylor Guitar t-shirts, Bochner chocolates as well as Create Magazine t-shirts.

Later, on the second stop for the party at encompus, a new creative collaborative that offers a full menu of design services in little Italy, guest enjoyed a club-like feel with a DJ spinning records and a cool video/light display produced and created by Nathan Megaw of Lighten Up Inc., Jon Newlander of BlackBurst Productions and Michael Karp with Pulse Staging & Events. encompus’ studio was formerly a paint factory through the 1920s and 30s and has been redesigned by architect Manual Martinez. The encompus collaborative includes team members Marc Aguilera, Marc Hedges, Manuel Martinez, Jorge Naranjo, Fabrizio Scippa and Steve Stadwiser.

All this took place during Little Italy’s “Kettner Nights,” a monthly open house of art and design exhibits along the popular Kettner Boulevard, showcasing San Diego’s creative talent.

Guests from some of San Diego’s most vibrant creative community were there including Scott Mires and John Ball of MiresBall, Mark Hedges and Marc Aquilera from encompus, Reesey Shaw, executive director of the Lux Art Institute, Ron Miriello, Principal/Creative Director, Miriello Grafico, John Meyer from matthews/evans/albertazzi, Bennett Peji of Bennett Peji Design and Robert Arends of JWalcher Communications.

Create Magazine brought a generous supply of its new summer issue, quickly swept up by eager guests. Create Magazine provides creative professionals with an insider's perspective on the people, news, trends and events that influence the local advertising and creative production industries and has become a vital resource to the creative profession in Southern California and beyond.

Reesey Shaw, executive director of the Lux Art Institute said, “Parties like this reflect the camaraderie of San Diego’s thriving arts and design scene; our city is unique like that. The creative community is a close-knot bunch and for organizations like ours, those friendships are vital and valuable.”

Encinitas, CA: Award-winning: that’s the only word to describe the collaboration between the Lux Art Institute and the brand design firm, MiresBall. The two organizations have repeatedly garnered awards in the American Association of Museums’ Publications Design Competition, and this year is no different. First prizes went to The Case for Art, a poster depicting portable works of art from the Valise Project, Lux’s educational program, and Lux Luminaries: The Church of the Nativity, a fundraising event invitation. A brochure entitled The Valise Project: A Portable Museum took a second prize. The Lux Art Institute is located in Encinitas, CA, and MiresBall in San Diego.

Consumer electronics dealers from Sears to Staples are in the midst of refreshing, refocusing or otherwise burnishing their corporate brands. Here are four golden rules that retailers of all sizes should apply to their brand revitalization effort:

1. Build your brand from the inside out.
Companies often make the mistake of looking to their competitors or to their customers to define their brand. Of course you need to understand your competitive landscape and what motivates your customers — without this information, you stand little chance of building a brand that is differentiated and relevant.

But your brand should be a reflection of your organization: What you do, how you do it and how you think. For example, if your store follows the latest technology trends, you can legitimately claim a position as a “purveyor of innovation.” Similarly, if your store offers regular how-to seminars, you can credibly position your brand around “education.”

2. Find your personality.
Although your positioning (by definition, a single defendable statement that identifies your brand relative to the marketplace) is the keystone of your brand, don't underestimate the importance of personality. In the CE retail space, where it is increasingly difficult to create differentiation, a strong personality can play a critical role in standing out.

A well-defined personality communicates the essence of your organization: its distinct and memorable qualities. Ask yourself: How do customers, vendors, employees and the media describe your organization? For example, is your corporate culture more helpful, laid-back and approachable, or smart, intense and sophisticated?

Different types of consumers are attracted to both personality profiles. For you, the trick is to isolate your organization's key personality traits and communicate them with enough impact to attract the “right” consumers — individuals who will feel a connection with your brand and may grow into regular customers or even brand evangelists over time.

3. Your brand lives in the details.
The strongest brands communicate with consistency at every point of contact with the public. When you're rolling out a new brand campaign, try to make the most of every consumer touch-point: advertising, signage, in-store product reviews, flyers, shopping bags, receipts. For example, even often-overlooked details such as shopping bags provide significant real estate for branded imagery and messaging, while the style and tone of product reviews say a lot about your store's customer service approach and overall vibe.

4. Learn from other industries.
Whether you're a big box or small independent, you can learn from successful retailers in other competitive markets. Major CE specialty chains can look to standout brands for inspiration — for example, to Target for the power of accessible design and to Tiffany's for the value of a distinct brand color.

Similarly, smaller CE dealers can look around their local community for good ideas. Do some research to understand how local players — from boutique hardware stores to mom-and-pop grocery chains — promote their local advantage to customers in your target area(s). For example, smaller chains often host neighborhood events, develop staff recommendation boards and claim a specific area of expertise such as architectural fixtures or organic produce. Look carefully at what successful chains are doing and cherry-pick what works for your retail establishment.

John Ball is a partner in MiresBall, one of the largest independent brand design and development firms in Southern California, and has led high-profile projects for such CE clients as Gateway, Jabra, Pelican, Shure and Sega.

The Lux Art Institute in Encinitas recently received two first-place and one second-place awards from the American Association of Museums (AAM) in the AAM’s 26th annual Publication Design Competition. A Lux spokeswoman said it’s the only national juried event that acknowledges excellence in graphic design of museum publications. John Ball, partner and creative director of the San Diego design firm MiresBall, is creator of Lux’s publications.

The first-place awards were for invitations to an event for some of Lux’s members, and for posters for Lux’s “Valise Project” exhibit. The second-place was for a brochure to the “Valise Project.”

Build your brand from the inside out.
You can look to the marketplace to understand your competitive landscape and what motivates end-users. Without this information, you stand little chance of building a brand that is differentiated and relevant. But your brand should be a reflection of your organization: what you do, how you do it and how you think. When there’s a break between how your company operates and what it says about itself, you risk suffering a dangerous credibility gap.

Solicit an outside perspective.
Over time you run the risk of losing sight of what makes your company unique and compelling. A talented outsider—either a recent addition to your team or external partner—benefits from a fresh, unbiased perspective. They can identify important elements of your brand that you may take for granted.

Find your personality.
Your positioning — a single, defendable statement that defines your brand relative to the marketplace — is the keystone of your brand, but don’t estimate the importance of personality. A well-defined personality communicates the essence of your company, or its distinct and memorable qualities. If you’re in a particularly commoditized space, your personality plays an even larger role. Ask yourself: What are the hallmarks of your corporate culture? What attributes do you look for in new employees? Once you’ve determined your company’s key personality traits, think about the best way to project them, from how you communicate verbally and in writing to how you interact with customers, partners and the public.

Create consensus as you go.
Internal consensus building and education are critical to your brand’s success. Your employees can communicate your brand with more energy, insight and effectiveness than any other medium. When they’re fully aligned around the brand, they become its ambassadors. At key intervals, update your staff on the status of your initiative and solicit their feedback. Once the new brand is in place, educate them, integrating examples of language, visuals and activities that are “on” and “off” brand.

Remember, your brand lives in the details.
The strongest brands communicate with consistency and at every point of contact with the public. When you’re developing and rolling out your brand, don’t forget often-overlooked touch-points: hold music, price lists, press releases, invoices, signage, etc. All of these elements bring your brand to life and need to reflect your company’s core message.

Written by John Ball, partner and creative director of MiresBall, a San Diego-based brand design firm that has developed re-branding campaigns for such clients as Starbucks, Jabra and Intel.

Branding the brand maker. That’s the name of the game—pun intended—for San Diego-based Mires, or should we say MiresBall?

The company, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, announced Feb. 6 that it is changing its name to MiresBall to acknowledge longtime principal and Creative Director John Ball. The singular name Mires was chosen 20 years ago in honor of founding principal Scott Mires.

“With his vision and tireless creativity, John has played an instrumental role in (the) growth of this company,’ said Mires. “Changing the firm’s name to MiresBall underscores the significance of John’s impact on our achievements.’ In addition to the name change, MiresBall is unveiling a new firm positioning, focused on its expertise building brands at what they refer to as “the intersection of lifestyle and innovation.’

The Mires design team strengthened the Rivet brand and extended its reach by implementing a number of effective design strategies.

Rivet International makes quality attachment systems for personal mobile devices and accessories. A typical “attachment system” would be a chain or cord with a clip that keeps a cell phone securely attached to the user’s clothing. When Rivet realized its packaging was not working hard enough and needed refreshing, they turned to Mires, a prominent San Diego brand design firm.

Rivet sees their products as sophisticated, sleek, and steely designs that are defining a new category by connecting technology—in its many modern forms—to a person’s lifestyle. For years, Rivet products generated rave reviews from cool “core” customers, but that was no longer sufficient.

Rivet challenged the Mires design team to reposition Rivet’s products to attract a wider general public and appeal more to mass-market retailers without weakening the Rivet brand’s connection with existing fans. The designers had to do all that, as well as describe the company’s revolutionary product line, within the borders of a smaller package footprint.

Simplifying the message
The Mires firm is led by two principals/creative directors, Scott Mires and John Ball. The firm saw that one of the biggest challenges would be presenting the Rivet products in a smaller space, as the rectangular package was being replaced with a tall oval package. “As today’s high-tech products and accessories become smaller, so does their packaging,” Mires explains. “In response to this trend, we have to tell increasingly complicated stories in less space. It requires us to communicate more through graphics and imagery. As they say, a picture says a thousand words.”

Some retail consumers found the previous Rivet packaging confusing, intimidating, and verbose. Mires’ new packaging presents Rivet’s products in a smart, simple, and intelligent way. By simplifying product descriptions and utilizing straightforward instructional diagrams with minimal text, Mires was able to convey Rivet’s message more effectively and show that using Rivet “is as easy as 1-2-3.”

Mires played up the premium precision-designed look and engineering of Rivet’s products. “Quality is one of Rivet’s most important characteristics,” explains Mires. “It was buried before, but by adding the descriptor ‘Quality alloy & stainless steel’ we saw an opportunity to convey a valuable message to consumers: Buy Rivet products with confidence and enjoy them for years to come.”

Mires’ use of a “thought bubble” in the new packaging creates a metaphor of what the device can do—and wants to do—for users. It literally answers the all-important consumer question: “What is Rivet and how do I use it?” Mires also made significant improvements on the legibility of Rivet’s logo, with a modern proprietary typeface and a bold red marker. The new Rivet brand presentation bridges the gap between the action sport associations of early Rivet fans and fashion-conscious aspirations new Rivet users.

Wide-ranging appeal
The new goal was to make the products appeal to a wide range of people from all walks of life while balancing the brand look and feel to avoid coming across as too mainstream or corporate. Mires added dynamic full-color lifestyle photos into the package layouts to showcase Rivet’s brand personality traits—cool, core, and versatile. The images show ethnically diverse, attractive people using Rivet products while chatting on a cell phone, listening to an iPod, or snapping pictures with a camera. They’re “fashionable, hip, passionate and original—just like Rivet,” Mires says. “They walk the walk, talk the talk. Most importantly, Rivet connects with their lives.”

Mires streamlined the product names in the product line to reflect Rivet’s three main product categories—Mobile Wear, Music Wear, and Pix Wear. They created consistent product naming guidelines for existing and future product lines, following three basic rules: 1) Keep it short, one syllable if possible; 2) Use action verbs; and 3) Choose a name that speaks to a product’s application, styling, or key component. For example, “SUPER TREKER” evolved into simply “TREK.”

A promise statement and tag line can be a brand’s lifelong legacy. Mires created one clear interchangeable phrase that says what Rivet is and what it does. In the case of Kingpin, it is: “Attach your phone to your life.” In the other products in the line, “phone” would be replaced by “iPod,” “camera,” etc. “This brand promise is the largest legitimate claim Rivet can make, so we made sure to highlight it on all of the new packaging,” Mires stresses.

The new Rivet packages were rolled out in late 2005, and Raleigh Wilson, president and CEO of Rivet, is quite pleased. “Mires differentiated our products from the competition and presented them to the public in a more visible and approachable way,” Wilson says. “Most importantly, they positioned Rivet as a cool, cutting-edge brand. The feedback so far has been outstanding.”

High-tech products are shrinking in size, yet their capabilities are becoming more sophisticated. One of the biggest challenges facing marketers of these products is to tell a compelling story and get essential product information on the packaging, which is shrinking in size along with the product.

For Rivet International, San Diego, the packaging answer was simple product descriptions and instructional diagrams, and minimal text. The graphics card inside the clamshell positions “techie” products as a lifestyle brand through graphics and imagery.

The design, created by Mires, a branding agency, makes the quality of Rivet’s products prominent and “positions Rivet as a cool, cutting-edge brand,” says Raleigh Wilson, President and CEO of Rivet. It extends the products’ appeal to mass-merchandise-store consumers.

The package emphasizes the premium, precision-designed look and engineering of Rivet’s attachment-system products for personal mobile devices and accessories. A “thought bubble” built into the clamshell mold creates a metaphor of what the product does. Rivet’s Trek, Kingpin and Shift products share the same clamshell, including an insert tray that is form-fit around the product. A larger clamshell for Rivet’s Grab products features a cavity that is fit to hold the product without using an insert tray.

The graphics card makes the descriptor “Quality alloy and stainless steel” a prominent message, and it features a bold red front and a proprietary typeface. The card positions full-color lifestyle photos into package layouts to showcase the brand “personality traits”: cool, core, and versatile.

Pushing the Envelope
Trident’s envelope-style EZ-Close Pack is touted as one of the brand’s boldest packaging renovations since its inception in 1964. “Consumers find the new pack easy to open, easy to close and, best of all, they believe it does a good job of keeping their gum safe and secure,” said Victoria Lozano, vice president of Cadbury Adams USA’s gum portfolio. Collaborating on the design were Allen Aldridge, project manager in packaging development out of Cadbury Schweppes’ Science and Technology Center; Jim Mandle of package design firm JS Mandle & Co. (201-909-8900); Shorewood Packaging (paperboard sleeve, www.shorewoodpackaging.com); Bomarko (innerwrap, www.bomarko.com); and Sonoco Flexible Packaging (foil, www.sonoco.com). The EZ-Close Pack contains 18 pieces of gum and retails for $0.99, unchanged from previous packaging. Trident says the new packaging is part of the brand’s overall renovation.

Bottles Convey Split Personality
Anheuser-Busch has been testing a liqueur in four U.S. markets through a subsidiary called Long Tail Libations. Called Jekyll & Hyde, the product is composed of two liqueurs, in separate bottles, that are meant to be served together. Long Tail communicates that mixable quality by housing the two liqueurs in curved glass bottles that nest together and reveal a single illustration along the front. According to a spokesman from Owens-Illinois (www.o-i.com), the glass manufacturer, the packaging came out of a fast-track directive that required the development of 15,000 shelf-ready bottle samples in just four weeks. Jekyll & Hyde is being sold only in restaurants and bars in the four test markets, according to Long Tail’s director of innovations, Mic Zavarella, who told the Associated Press that the product is priced comparably to other mid-tier liquor varieties.

Spillproof Juice—”Wadda” Concept
It’s not that kids are sloppy; they just need a little help to prevent spills. Enter Waddajuice, a juice brand that recently introduced spill-proof packaging, along with a flavor revamp. Waddajuice is packaged in an eight-ounce PET bottle with a triangular-shaped cap by Canadian-based Euro Moulds (905-624-7534) that contains a silicon valve made by Forest City Technologies (www.forestcitytech.com). The resealable closure prevents spills by restricting juice flow until pressure is applied through sucking or by squeezing the bottle; a groove on the side of the bottle enhances the grip for little hands. Unlike juice boxes and pouches, the resealable aspect of the new packaging eliminates the need for parents to toss out juice that hasn’t been consumed. Company founder Jordan Kerner designed the packaging for the juice line, which reportedly features half the sugar, calories and carbs of other fruit juices. An eight-ounce bottle retails for $1.49.

Riveting Redesign
Looking to win favor with mass market retailers, Rivet International recently refreshed the packaging for its line of personal-mobile-device attachment systems. The brand improved the legibility of its logo with bold lettering set in a modern proprietary typeface, but according to MiresBall (www.miresball.com), one of the biggest challenges was working within the small packaging footprint. “As today’s high-tech products and accessories become smaller, so does their packaging,” says Scott Mires, principal and creative director of the San Diego-based design firm. The solution was to minimize packaging copy and, instead, make better use of graphics and active color photos to tell the Rivet story. One of the more interesting graphic devices is a “thought bubble” that dominates the face of each package and explains how the product is used. The new Rivet packaging debuted at retail in November 2005.

A Better Butter Wrapper
Butter readily absorbs the odors and flavors of its fellow refrigerator inhabitants. So when Land O’ Lakes research revealed that consumers considered freshness among the most important factors in their purchasing decisions, the company wisely stepped forward to introduce a FlavorProtect Wrapper. According to LOL, independent testing has confirmed the new wrapper to retain freshness and keep undesirable flavors out better than wax paper. For consumers, the change is subtle—the wrapper still includes the brand’s Indian Maiden logo and measurement lines, and it can be easily cut and is microwave safe. But the FlavorProtect name is prominently displayed on each wrapper to communicate the “fresh” promise. One pound and half-pound packages of Land O’ Lakes Butter and Unsalted Butter feature the wrapping, which does not affect the price of the products. LOL is supporting the launch with a national television advertising campaign, online promotion and in-package offers.

Cleaning Up with Good Design
Method recently introduced a line of shower gels and cream body washes in 15-ounce, custom tear-drop shaped bottles designed by Karim Rashid (www.karimrashid.com) and developed by Amcor (www.amcor.com). Each variety comes in a tinted PET bottle that aids product selection by matching the hue of the product inside: the Mango Mint bottle is tinted orange; Cassis Flower is pink; Olive Leaf is green; and Lavender Thyme is tinted purple. A two-color disc-top closure by Seaquist Closures (www.seaquistclosures.com) crowns the bottle, which features the Method logo embossed on the back panel. The San Francisco-based personal and home care company is reporting positive feedback on the introduction. “Our customers like the design and feel,” says Gerry Chesser, Method’s vice president of operations. The body wash line targets upscale urban women and retails for $5.