The name and logos are too often not paid the attention they deserve. A good program must have a name easy to remember, easy to translate, easily spoken in any language. A symbol easy to reproduce or recreate, and with meanings.
The Symbol
The northeastern Brazil is the country´s poorest region. In a desert like climate, rain water is only seen once a year and irrigation only once each four years (when elections come). But, for a reason yet unexplained, television seems to be the mostly wanted commodity.
In those areas, where tv reception is extremely weak, except for the few who have parabolic tv antennas. In a creativity not uncommon in the world poorest areas the locals managed to invent what is largely called the antenna pan-abolic, an old pan, perforated by a nail, attached to a copper wire, connected to the television set, which is claimed to be as good as a parabolic antenna.
It´s this sort of creative use of means when one has none, we wish to evoke. We believe in Radio Jaba as a personal home made antenna, which connects your voice to rest of the world.
The name
Jabá means a lot of things in Portuguese, but what they mean is not so important. Jabá (say as jabah) is short word, without any previous meaning. It´s easily spoken in French, Spanish, German and English.
If you are really curious what it means in Portuguese we can tell you: it means two things. The first is a plate made of sun-dried-meat. The second is the unethical way of choosing which artists will be played on radio, interviewed on the newspaper or appear on TV by the sole merit of how much money is being pumped behind his marketing. Exactly the kind of thing we want to make obsolete by giving the word the opposite meaning.
Marketing
What´s the best way to promote a new program?
Make the users love it so much as to make them want to convince friends to use it. Of course, if you have a symbol that may look cool in a t-shirt and a logo that can be stenciled on the wall it help to spread, specially among the high school dudes.
A brief history of the project design
Unless you like to discuss interface design, you´ll probably won´t be interested in this section. Even if you do like, I bet you won´t be so much interested neither. You may continue, but I warned you.
Early 2004: The first paper sketches of the interface had some interesting features that were abandoned. One of them for example was the ability (on the bottom) to filter music by region (a map that could zoom from city to continental level), and year.
mid 2004: After the few carefully ink and marjer drawn sketches proven to be to slow to draw, we moved into quick pen modules, in such a way we could move the different pieces around while discussing on the table. I guess that´s what´s called paper prototyping right?
Late 2004: As the project got mature and we started searching for local programmers or supporters we had a finished vector art interface. But the layout was neverthless too winamp-iTunes-like, and the classic layout navigation-on-the-left-playlist-on-the-right-controls-on-top was actually hiding the main features.
Early 2005: The actual stage of the project manages to have a unusuallayout. The Interfaces was thought not as a music player metaphor but more as a visual diagram that explains the user how the program cycle works. We have identified some problems, as the non-standard interface seems too much non-standard and some users get confused. We´ve been criticized over the seeming random position of the player buttons. And also, each button has a different appearance, wich is problematic for the whole branding. More critics are welcome!
