Celebrating 7 Years
In August of 2011 btrax celebrated its 7th year - a milestone all the more significant given our continued growth through the recession and recent doubling size. Thanks to all our loyal clients and friends for their support – we couldn’t have gotten here without you!
Calbee US Launch
One of our biggest projects in 2011 was working closely with Japanese snack giant Calbee to boost their global brand profile. The summer grand opening of their first store in San Francisco came shortly after their IPO in the Japanese stock market, taking a 80 year old family held company public. Our wide ranging work for Calbee’s successful campaign included concepting, packaging, web work, event marketing, media outreach and ongoing marketing.
An Eventful Year
Our team assembled a stellar lineup of startups for two sellout Japan Night events with SFnewtech. Thanks to our partner Asia Society our Chinese Innovators event brought together a cross-industry group of mavericks from Huawei, Tencent and VanceInfo. And we are proud to have been a part of the equally successful MA7 Ninja Challenge, Startup Weekend, SF IT Nomikai, Asia Business Conference and J-Pop summit.
Building China Roots
2011 has been the year Chinese companies have entered the US market in force – a trend we project to increase even more in 2012. And even medium size companies in the US are now aware that China is a mature market that is not all about volume. These two trends have converged to pay off our early investment in building a Chinese business, consulting and creative team.
Tokyo Office Opening
We’re excited to announce we have a home in Tokyo’s cutting-edge Akasaka ward. And our team is equally excited for the projects that will make our newest office buzz with creative juice (and green tea) flowing.
Looking Forward to 2012
And the year of the dragon is shaping up to be even bigger. Our team always has an open door, so don’t be shy about emailing us to brainstorm and create a clear roadmap to results for 2012!
by
Tim
This is one of our more interesting sites we’ve worked on. Localization is not just the words but the approach. This particular client is a popular Social Game company from Japan – GCREST Entertainment.
Upon entering the US market for the first time, GCREST America had a main message goal to hit with their web marketing/branding – Introduce their company and web app products to attract talent to staff their company here in San Francisco. Our creative approach was to match their marketing strategy for their social games and use GCREST’s social game characters to tell the story about their company.
We put their Game backdrop on the home page as well as let the characters talk to the visitors through message bubbles. The Facebook page is highlighted because they have a Facebook app called Tinier Me – the cornerstone of their social game portfolio which has over 50000 active monthly users. We highlighted, Selfy – Tinier Me’s main character, as the main spokesperson on every secondary page. Our designers gave their characters for their website were given a fun appearance.
The creative team felt that to attract creative people to their company, we showed their anime-influenced characters in a fun, imaginative and creative way. Their jobs page gives a sense of the culture of GCREST by showing their social characters in creative dress and a brief description on the culture of the company.
Masaru Ohnogi, CEO of GCREST America, said that “With the unfamiliar nature of our company here in the US, we are satisfied that this site hit our initial goals and the approach gives us a great start.”
We enjoyed working with GCREST on their site because of the Social Gaming trend that is at its peak momentum and being a part of a company’s transition to go global in the US.
Our talented bunch of creatives were at it again for 2011. They created some very cool, fun and artistic wallpaper designs for your iPhone/iPad devices. Continuing from 2010, a total of six designers including our CEO-Brandon, Angela, Erin, Jill, Keiko, Megumi, and Tristan have joined this year’s project. We hope you’d enjoy them as much as we enjoyed creating them. Please download the wallpaper files for free and feel free to distribute them as well.
Give them a try and a ‘like’ here .
We have been working with Chaperon for over a few years and it has been great. Chaperon publishes an yearly travel magazine that guides visitors to popular sites,venues and general information in the San Francisco Bay Area. Chaperon wanted their branding for their publication to celebrate their 20th Anniversary, be consistent among all six languages and have the ability to view their magazine online. Our team handled the print, web and social media design for our client.
Print Still Relevant
One of the biggest challenges was to give consistency to design detail to Chaperon’s multilingual print guides across six languages. We analyzed all languages for layout consistency and worked to make sure that all design elements in the layout were treated uniformly.
Our lead designer Angela recalls, “It was our goal to enhance Chaperon’s existing look by paying close attention to design details including using consistent heading text treatments, fonts, paragraph spacing and section tabs. We also wanted to update the look by redesigning some elements like section tabs, tables and charts.”
It seems like it is always the small details that make the biggest impact to the look and feel of the design. Angela said, “Just by making sure that all the details are consistent across pages and books, it gives the look a more organized and clean feel, which adds to the value of Chaperon’s brand. The content is valuable and helpful for visitors to San Francisco and we want readers to feel that the information is presented well and is easy to read.”
Website Facelift
The website was revamped by our company a few years ago and this year’s update included adding the ability to read the print magazine in flash. The original website did not mirror the look and feel of the magazine.
We wanted to give the website design a look that complemented the printed magazine. Angela said “We designed the web site and content to emphasize the multilingual aspect of the magazine and picturesque images of San Francisco and surrounding areas.” This is what gives Chaperon its unique value proposition among the local travel magazines.
For their latest website update, we wanted to create the same magazine experience online so we decided to make the magazines available in digital reader. Angela added “The effort we took to make the magazines more consistent also looked great digitally! Now users can view Chaperon online and flip through the pages even before they pick it up in San Francisco.”
Socializing a Travel Magazine
Chaperon wanted us to create a Facebook presence for their brand. Greg, our social media manager, said “We wanted a landing page that celebrated their 20th Anniversary, engaged people and explained who Chaperon is in multiple languages.” The teams solution was to create a multilingual Facebook page that allowed visitors to view the magazine in multiple languages while staying in the Facebook environment.
Thea Leonardi, owner of Chaperon, said “I was very happy with the attention to detail and the client engagement that the btrax team had with me. I always knew where the project stood. The Chaperon magazine really looks good and having the ability for my magazine to be viewed online really gave me an advantage over my competition.”
Even though we discussed the individual elements (Print, Web, Social Media), we had to integrate all the elements to make the branding consistent for the client. The marketing is the how you communicate about your brand and the branding is the response of how your audience feels about your company. Elements we take seriously at btrax.
