InfoVista is a Paris-based enterprise solutions group that markets a powerful, innovative Quality of Service Management product, also named InfoVista.

DESIGN BRIEF

Develop a brand for the product that gives potential users some understanding of its capabilities and immediate application. The brand must appear in a wide variety of media; be appropriate for both the U.S. and European markets; and appear on packaging, product collateral and websites, and be integrated in the user interface of the product itself.

INFORMATION GATHERING

This was a challenging design brief given the complexity of the product, which was developed by French engineers. The European enterprise solutions market is quite different than the U.S. market. The very nature of the product, which provides a vast variety of metrics for performance and utilization analysis across large networks, precluded offering too many pre formatted templates before user profiles were complied.

We assessed competing brands; polled users about their mental images of information technology; and studied the symbolic conventions of networking diagrams.

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS

Several different design solutions were developed, including a "black family" and an "orange family". We favored solutions that made the name prominent, and used images appropriate to the networking environment.

CHOOSING BEST SOLUTION

We chose a white program, with a strong, idiosyncratic color palette. This worked well on the web, and seemed to refer to a kind of pristine Cartesian space, where pure information skitters between the nodes of a vast, neural structure.