Malte Paul's Blog

On 1 November, in time for the 2010 browsergames forum, WWG has launched its new corporate design. The re-design (or actually the first real desgin ever) came with a full pack including a new WWG corporate website and an new WWG corporate brochure. Aim of the re-design is to sharpen our profile as an international independent publisher of free-to-play browser based online games. Being nearly three years old, we basically have been the first mover into this market segment, now, finally we start being proud of it.

Why did we decide to create a new corporate design?

To answer this question, it is key to answer the question “what actually is our core business”? Our core business is that we create a huge network of international media partners that have traffic and are in need of gaming content. On the other hand we license browser based games from developers and market those games through our network. Hence, we clearly pursue a double-sided B2B business model. Besides connecting developers with marketing partners, we have also built a technology that allows us to create tailor-made online game communities for our media partners. Over time, our own showcase of this technology, playnik.com, has become such a huge success that most people in the market heard about playnik.com rather than about the “real” company behind it, which is WWG. However, playnik.com is cleary a B2C CRM-oriented business. I guess it is clear to everybody that being mixed-up with a B2C business while actually pursuing a B2B business is not really helpful. Hence we decided that an own CI for WWG is urgently required.

How we did it

We did it very quickly! In September we decided “yes, we need a new CI, and: we want to launch it at the browsergames forum in early November!”. So we really did it the start-up way. First we crowd-sourced our new logo and stationery using Crowdspring for a few hundred bucks.  Really cool! This process took about three-four weeks but was really lean and effective with not too much work on our side. In parallel we had one of our front-end guys redesign our existing page (we have a wordpress CRM behind it). After we received logos and stationery the next part of the mission came: corporate brochure and our first trade fair booth ever! So we got an external designer that can do print design (better to get external help here as we are only web guys…). We wrote, designed and reviewed the whole brochure in less than a week and shot it out to the printer, same with the booth materials.

And now Murphy’s Law – what can go wrong, will go wrong – came into the story. We had exactly calculated at what day we need to send the brochure to the printer to get it back in time. The strange thing to me: printing 500 pieces of a little brochure takes 5-8 working days – hey, one minute, how do they do the thing with the daily newspapers? Anyways, a minute before sending the brochure out we got the killer news: the printer was located in a different federal state of Germany. This other federal state had a public holiday we, the hard-working Hamburg people, do not have. So we fell short of one day! After some six weeks of tough project time with late hours reviewing the brochure!

So we found a new printer and Murphy’s Law came in a second time: the brochure arrvied at our office one day before we were to go to the fair. We were all very proud. For about two minutes. Then we figured out two huuuge typos on the back side  of the document. The annoying thing: one typo we had already corrected some five times, the designer just forgot to do the change. The second typo was in a word that actually was not needed on the brochure! So, what should we do? Re-printing the brochure was not possible. Destroying it would have sucked. And here comes the idea: we created a nice sticker saying “check out our new website at ww-games.com” and measured it in a way that the upper left corner hides error 1 and the lower right hides error 2.  And it actually looked good!

Check out the sticker!

By the way: browsergames forum was a huge success, we had one of the coolest booths and we rule anyway!

Lessons learned

One would think that the lesson learned is “what can go wrong, will go wrong”, but that is not true. It is rather

a) if you have less time than necessary, things will require less time than necessary

b) if something goes wrong, go for plan B!