Authenticity in products

Sencha is one of my favourite teas and I recently bought this particular variety of tea.

I don’t read Japanese but I’m willing to take a guess that this is a pretty direct translation from Japanese to English. I think this is a smart choice of using very little Latin script on the export version of their tea.

In this instance, for me, the fact that I don’t read Japanese adds something to the product. Not understanding the language actually lends authenticity to the product.

It’s a bit like opera. I don’t want to understand what the cast are singing about, I’m content just to listen to the beautiful sounds they are making. I can make out the story from the context and visual cues.

Had the manufacturer chosen to remove all of the Japanese writing from their products for sale in Europe and only use Latin scripts then I think their tea brand would appear less valuable.

Kanji pictograms sheer genius

I discovered these pictograms cards on Flickr the other day and their creator Michael Rowley has been kind enough to let me use the images for this post.

When I first saw them, I was struck at how they opened up written Japanese to someone like me who has only dabbled in spoken Japanese in the past and can say a few words. If your mother tongue is written in a latin script you usually have to make a choice about how much of an Asian language you want to learn.  Are you happy just to learn speaking and comprehension or do you want to go the whole way and learn to read and write.

Their excellent design unlock some of the building blocks of the Japanese language making it easy to take a first step in learning to read Japanese.

As a European, the further east you travel, the less likely you are to be able to communicate and find your way around. While in Europe you’ll still be able to read most of the languages and figure out place names and read numbers etc.

Once you step into the Middle East that changes and continues to change until you exit Japan heading East for the USA.

What is so great about the cards is the way that Michael has used an image to bridge the gap between the word in both languages.

If you fancy trying your hand at some Japanese you can find out more from Michael’s site at www.vizcabualry.com

One Coke Can Using All Three Benelux Domain Names

I came across this Coke can the other day and noticed that they were combining 3 country endings (TLDs) of the company’s website onto one line.

.be for Belgium, .lu for Luxembourg and .nl for the Netherlands.

I’m not sure why they’ve opted for the layout that they have used, lumping Belgium and Luxembourg together like that in a rather odd way. I guess if they’d done it alphabetically, they would have put the Netherlands, the largest of the 3 markets, at the bottom and that might have been deemed unacceptable.

Incidentally, the .be site offered French and Dutch as language options, the .nl was, not surprisingly in Dutch and the Luxembourg site was in French, but offered a “change language” button which takes visitors to the Belgian site.

The .lu site had no Luxembourgish (not surprising really), but no German either which I had expected.

Ah the complexities of doing business in the Benelux region.

Estonian Heritage Plaque

I took a picture of this plaque while staying in the Estonian village of Käsmu. It’s in Estonian and English and the circular design lends itself perfectly to this bi-lingual sign. The symbol in the middle feels vaguely Celtic and it screams heritage trail, but in a good way.

I found it on the door of a chapel which was being used to house a photo exhibition of all the people in the village.

Käsmu was originally populated mostly by sea captains and has some wonderful wooden houses, but during the Soviet era the sea was fenced off and the seafaring industry went into decline. It’s now been revitalised as a tourist village and a haven for writers and artists.

I can’t help feeling it would have looked a bit better like this though… oops

Who sees your adverts? Location specific web advertising.

Nowadays, it is very common for part of the content of a web site to have been created and published by someone other than the owner web site. For example, the content of many question and answer fora is almost exclusively created by the users themselves.

The volume of comments on the most popular newspapers and blogs will easily outstrip the word count of the original article written by the paid journalist. Any site owner can add continually updating streams of photographs and news to which others freely contribute and which appear on our Web sites automatically.

And then of course, there is online advertising. Placement of advertising used to be a very controlled. But since any web site owner can now publish adverts irrespective of the amount of readers they have, the number of sites carrying adverts has mushroomed. Now that anyone can carry ads, the whole process has been largely automated.

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Asparagus anyone?

This food packaging example is a favourite of mine because it’s a very simple solution. I don’t know if it’s the first time it has ever been done, but it really caught my eye when I first saw it.

As you may know, Belgium has three official languages; Dutch, French and German. It’s also a country where people are rather fond of asparagus. Dutch, French and German are also of course the languages of Belgium’s four neighbours, the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg and France so by creating packaging that uses all three languages they have covered the home and easily reachable export markets.

All of the packaging for this asparagus (yes, I know, asparagus doesn’t need packaging, but that’s a different question) is tri-lingual Dutch / French / German and has been achieved using a standard technique of displaying the relevant blocks of text one after the other in the respective languages.

Where this packaging differs slightly is in the use of the word Belgium. It’s Belgian asparagus that the producer is clearly proud of this and uses it as a selling point. Therefore they wanted to make sure that the word Belgium is very prominent. But if you have to say it in three different languages that that’ll take up a lot of space on what is a fairly small wrapper

So here’s the solution.

The word Belgium in Dutch, French and German all share the same stem “BELGI” but all have very different and distinctive endings.
So the designer has attached ending for all three language variations to the same stem.

Doing so means that the stem “BELGI” has to be large to accomodate the three different endings and drives the message that this is Belgian asparagus home.