Thinkside

What’s a Brand Hack?
Brand Hack brings the inci­sive think­ing of agile devel­op­ment to the advance­ment of new brands. Tools are built in eight-hour bursts, so the brand’s expres­sion in the mar­ket­place is as nim­ble and respon­sive as its owner. 

The Mapkin Brand Hack on Tuesday, October 30th, at the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square was yet another thrilling and unique expe­ri­ence. Mapkin’s co-founders—who hail from Nuance’s iOS devel­op­ment team and MIT Lincoln Laboratory—have a phe­nom­e­nal prod­uct but have strug­gled to tell the right story. Mapkin has all the func­tion­al­ity of a great GPS app but adds a per­sonal layer to the expe­ri­ence of get­ting from point A to point B.

Mapkin’s users see their route in a totally new way—just the route itself, with key cross-streets and sig­nif­i­cant land­marks along the way. But the jour­ney doesn’t stop there. People can also cre­ate their own cus­tom maps, adding per­sonal land­marks and points of inter­est, even record­ing their own turn-by-turn voice-overs. This enriches the space between ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion, and helps us enjoy the jour­ney and not just the destination.

In approach­ing Mapkin’s vision, cre­ative direc­tor Ben Spear con­sid­ered the prod­uct as an answer and worked back­wards to deter­mine the question—if the ques­tion at hand is “how can peo­ple enjoy the jour­ney?”, Mapkin becomes a very strong answer. This lends dura­bil­ity to the vision as it will allows Mapkin to assess changes to its strat­egy or prod­uct over the full life of the busi­ness. If their prod­uct changes or new fea­tures are added, they can assess the value of those changes and fea­tures in how well they help answer this core question.

Brand writer Angela Gaimari car­ried this con­cept through to Mapkin’s pitch. The con­cept of “copi­lot” fig­ured heav­ily; human­iz­ing nav­i­ga­tion. The tone and cadence are famil­iar, friendly, invi­ta­tional, all fac­tors that will help Mapkin’s audi­ence per­ceive the value in enjoy­ing the journey.

Designer Ben Whitla’s iden­tity suc­ceeds on many lev­els. In the lit­eral, it shows a map which, like Mapkin’s name, con­jures the cat­e­gory right away: this is about nav­i­ga­tion. We see the map as if it’s unfold­ing (a char­ac­ter­is­tic that was coor­di­nated with Angela’s tag-line “the jour­ney, unfolded”), com­mu­ni­cat­ing that the app expands a sim­ple GPS-navigated jour­ney into some­thing fuller and more experiential.

Ben’s palette is a direct reflec­tion of the app’s key qualities—qualities we look for in a good copilot.

Ben chose the logo’s font for its unique qual­ity; the let­ter­forms of Neutraface No. 2 Inline are divided, like a road. Proxima Nova is at once human and geo­met­ric, with the flex­i­bil­ity and ease of Helvetica but none of the boredom.

Portrait artist Allana Taranto (who also kept us all on sched­ule as project man­ager), equipped the team with indi­vid­ual por­traits for use with LinkedIn and other pro­fes­sional social net­works. From left to right: CEO Marc Regan, CTO John Watson, and Alex Kinney. Jake Wasserman, Mapkin’s fourth team mem­ber, was stuck in London due to Hurricane Sandy. Allana will do a sec­ond por­trait ses­sion once he’s back.

Allana chose to shoot their group por­trait in a land­scape (not far from the CIC) that incor­po­rated sev­eral key visual sig­ni­fiers. The new archi­tec­ture, old archi­tec­ture, and scaf­fold­ing all serve the idea that land­scapes are rich and changing.

Angela extended her pitch lan­guage into copy for a single-page mar­ket­ing web­site, pro­vid­ing peo­ple with a brief, two-sentence descrip­tion of Mapkin, the app’s key fea­tures, and bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion about the team.

Erik Weikert’s respon­sive web­site design is a cul­mi­na­tion of the iden­tity, writ­ing, and por­trai­ture. As of the writ­ing of this post, Mapkin is hard at work cod­ing the site, and until it’s up you can view it in sta­tic form here.

The browser and mobile sites, unfolded.

Erik’s design for Mapkin’s retina iOS icon.

Angela sup­ported her writ­ing approach with sug­ges­tions for in-app tone of voice.

Ben Whitla’s busi­ness card designs.

Pictured above, from left to right: Ben Whitla, Erik Weikert, Marc Regan, John Watson, Alex Kinney, Angela Gaimari, and Ben Spear. Not pic­tured is pho­tog­ra­pher and project man­ager Allana Taranto.

As the day wrapped and every­thing deliv­ered, Mapkin, Brand Hack’s cre­ative team, and the com­mu­nity at CIC all agreed that the work—extending from core vision to com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools—will be instru­men­tal in attract­ing the company’s first batch of users. Brand Hack will con­tinue in the short-term to assist in the web build and get the busi­ness cards printed, and look for­ward to Mapkin’s con­tin­ued success.