(We don’t condone this sort of behaviour but love the outcome it creates!)

Our beta testers have been really impressed with the ease of use, functionality of the site and ability to create relevant brands. These are some of the brands that have been created so far… (let us know your favourite in the comments)

There have also been plenty of suggestions for the team to take on board and excellent feedback to help improve the branding experience; we are now working hard to make these last few tweaks!

Here’s a round up of our favourite feedback so far and we’re really looking forward to hearing more…!

- we LOVE @buildabrand – we made our brand in 30 mins flat! love it. thanks chaps @engagefirst

- Having so much fun with @buildabrand Beta that I am not getting any work done today. oh well, this is much more entertaining. LOVE IT!!! @McGrosheim

- @theycallmeShua: @iwearyourshirt oh and i got an @buildabrand invite today. its cooler than i expected i have to admit

- @TriFunk: thanks for the invite @buildabrand wow! just playing around in the site and I am blown away. this is going to change the world! love it

- Thanks a lot!! Just made my first logo. Really cool end easy at first glance. Looking forward to test it in full … andersbn

- jonlongoria: Davey, want to say ya’ll did a great job. Left a lot of constructive criticism in feedback, hope this takes off! @daveshanley @buildabrand

- @buildabrand Yes…I had so much fun…I’m wondering what to do with the last of it [credits] because we do other things here…so I’m saving them @TheMarciFactor

- thanks a lot for your email! I was really looking forward to it…Merry Christmas and thank you for the great gift - Aspiring Entrepreneur in Maritime Equipment and Services

- I starting playing around with the site and it is fantastic. Love the usability and design. Ariel Remer, Aspiring Entrepreneur in Clothing Line

- The whole process is really intuitive, I like it. – Benjamin Larralde, Apiring Entrepreneur in funding platform for individuals

- Thanks so much for the invite. Your team has built an impressive site – Dennis Lyandres, Early-stage non-profit organisation

- Simple and clean interface generally.  Good staged process – Philip Wilkinson, Founder & CEO at Crowdstorm

- I saw a few logos there that really inspired me, and that could become new the logo for our company! – Alicia Navarro, Company Founder and CEO of Skimlinks

- Worked really intuitively and easily – Kate Siddiqui, Marketing and Editorial Manager at start-up company – www.leaveitout.co.uk

The report highlights the trends set for 2010 in different markets, including design and predicts the impact this will have on brands.

Author Jason Little, creative director in the Paris office of Landor Associates writes:

Computers have given rise to a means of creating visual graphics without direct human involvement; designers can set general conceptual parameters and then let the program do the rest. Soon software will be capable of generating every element of an identity system: logo variations, color palettes, imagery, typography, you name it.

Check, Check and Check! buildabrand is already capable of this and we are really excited to see it as a trend for 2010!

It’s definitely worth a read and nicely rounds up the brands that will stand out in 2010 for each area, so take a look:

Jason Little on trends in design

We plan to have the design page framed anyway!

Buildabrand is complicated. In fact, it’s very complicated! To give an example; we used quite a lot of JavaScript on the site interface to make the brand building experience clean and swift. Some people have even assumed that we were using Flash because of the fluid interactivity. There are currently over 5,071 lines of custom JavaScript used in our interface. Just to give you some perspective; you can write JavaScript versions of classic arcade games like Pac-Man and Tetris in less than 400 lines!

There might be some Finnish super hackers out there laughing at 5k lines of JavaScript code, but this is just the start of the story! We have used a lot of different components to build different tools and services. Our architecture is primarily Java based. Naturally that meant lots of pure Java code. As a matter of fact, right now there are 35,231 lines of pure Java code in our closed beta.

On top of all that code we have over 300 different configuration, language, and visual display files. They contain: 12,356 lines of HTML/JSP, 1,358 lines of XML and 6,185 line of CSS / XSL. So as you can see, it is now a case of making sure that 35k+ lines of Java, 5k+ lines of JavaScript and all our configurations, content and display code work together. It also means making sure it works in your browser and that you get a fluid experience.

For a comparison, lets take a look at the source code statistics for the worlds favorite web browser Firefox: http://www.ohloh.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest.

As you can see, the scale of the inner workings of builabrand are not all that different to something like Firefox!

Another important fact to mention is that we don’t have a large team of developers (yet). We are still only a small team. I have personally tried to grow more arms so we can ramp up our products and features quicker, but no matter how much glow in the dark paint I eat – it just won’t happen.

Since our Techcrunch article we have added over 9,000 lines of Java to the project, new features, new enhancements, and a complete e-commerce system (not running in the closed beta). However, I can safely say that it’s almost ready! Our closed beta testers are rolling in now and the last few quirks will be worked out. We’re be throwing open the doors to everyone very soon!

If you have any questions about the technology or if you would like our advice with your own architecture, then give me a shout at hellodave@buildabrand.com.

Cheerio for now,

- Dave

A Closer Look at BuildABrand’s Closed Beta

BuildABrand.com is a new online service available shortly which will empower you to create and develop your brand, be it for yourself, your company, or whatever. The basic premise is, you give the app a bunch of details about the brand, such as the industries it relates, plus other related info, and the app will quickly generate some brand designs (ie a logo and font design) for use anywhere you want, as well as some pre canned options which we’ll discuss later.

BuildABrand say that the ease and speed of creating a new brand is as fast and simple as registering a domain name. I’m gonna test that, so here’s how it works:

BuildABrand – Step 1 – Related Industries

The first thing you have to give BuildABrand is some idea of what industries your brand relates to (that is, after you’ve told the app the name of your brand). The app uses a simple horizontal scroll navigation for you to cycle through the industry sectors. When clicking on a specific sector you are given various options within it to select.

The navigation is smooth and sleek, the icons have been well chosen, giving clarity to what you’re looking at.

I think one area I’d love to see modified slightly would be to allow you to see all the sectors you can choose from, rather than blindly scrolling through them, not knowing what’s coming next, and if it’s relevant. A minor tweak though… to read the rest of the Steve Reynolds’s review please head to his site www.reynoldsftw.com, you can also catch him on twitter at @stevereynolds

We’ve appreciated the positive comments, but we’re also taking some of the constructive criticism seriously. Reading through the discussions online, it became clear to us that we ought to clarify a few things about the buildabrand service. So here’s a bit more information about how we work.

We’re a small team, based in Soho, London. We’re entrepreneurs ourselves, and what we set out to do with buildabrand was provide access to branding for other entrepreneurs: we want to make branding accessible.

Here are the questions that have been asked, and the comments that have been made, most frequently in the last 24 hours:

Are you trying to replace traditional branding agencies?

We don’t want to replace traditional agencies. We’re looking to open up an entirely new price point for branding and identity solutions. Traditional services aren’t really our competitors.

Buildabrand will allow entrepreneurs and freelancers to acquire branding as a cost, rather than an investment. It will allow them to take a punt on their idea much more easily.

We at buildabrand see ourselves as entrepreneurs, and we’ve built a service we’d like to use ourselves. We see it sitting comfortably alongside traditional design services.

There’s a lot more to branding than a logo.

We know that. But before a company gets to the big umbrella stage, it has to start somewhere. “Buildabrand” is as much a description of what the service will aim to deliver as it is a call to action to our prospective users. To inspire them and to help them build the foundation for a brand.

We are trying to lower the barriers to entry for startups by providing them with accessible and affordable tools. Eventually, we would like to provide branding knowledge and support as well as products.

We will not solve the complex branding problems a large enterprise might face.

Automation will never replace creative thinking.

Of course not. But our algorithm and the way it has been constructed is the result of years of branding experience and a lot of strategic research. All our designs are originated by designers, from the symbols to the colour palettes.

Our goal is to match business ambitions with brand suggestions.

How big is your catalogue?

We’ve done a lot of strategic research into startups and into creating brand symbols that will fulfil a startup’s needs. We’ll have 1,800 difference business / segment types to choose from in total. During beta tests, the number will be smaller, but we’re planning to grow organically.

We’re confident that we can keep feeding new designs into the database fast enough to cope with demand. We also have plans to open up our system as a marketplace for designers to sell their work.

We’d love to hear what you think about the product. Leave a comment below or contact us if you’d like to know more.

Given the level of interest in buildabrand, we’re increasing the number of beta invitations from the original 50 offered by TechCrunch to 200. They will still be dished out on a first come, first served basis. We’ll be in touch if you made the cut.

Every now and again, you come across a service that promises to disrupt and change the entrepreneurial landscape for good. Buildabrand could do just that. The service provides high quality “strategically correct” branding for your startup for about the same price as domain registration, effectively bypassing what is a traditionally expensive and time-consuming process.

Answer a few questions about your business and buildabrand will provide a selection of brand identities: logos, fonts and so on. You can then apply that branding (after customising it, if you choose) to downloadable graphics, stationery, website templates and even – eventually – merchandise like pens and beach towels. You just pay for the items you order or download. The service requires no creative skills from users.

How does it work? Well, once you’ve entered a bit of information about your company at the “create” stage of the process – your “brand values” – buildabrand’s algorithm will exclude all the brands, including logos, in its extensive (and ever-growing) catalogue that aren’t appropriate or relevant and just show you the ones that are right for your business. You can choose from the selection it gives you, tweak the logo a bit – say, if you want it in a different colour – and you’re good to go.

CEO and design director Justin Champney was formerly head of brand innovation for McCann Worldgroup. Justin brings 15 years’ branding experience to the start-up, but he’s going to need every year: buildabrand must get the algorithm right, because it’s the quality of the recommendations that will determine whether buildabrand stands or falls. If Champney pulls it off, buildabrand has the potential to be one of the most disruptive elements in the start-up ecosystem for years.

buildabrand was formed in 2008 and completed a round of angel investment from a sole investor last November.

Selected Comments:

“Sounds like an amazing concept for an often too-expensive process.”

“It sounds like it will save a lot of time in getting an initial brand built without having the pain of explaining everything to a designer.”

“It’s one more example of how the web is making it cheaper and easier than ever to start-up and compete on a level playing field with much bigger companies.”

“Build creation is sometime an extenuating time-consuming process, so some nice tool in the area is always welcome.”

“This could save us thousands … we are always needing brand creation.”

Firstly, let us introduce ourselves: we’re Justin Champney, Founder, CEO and Design Director and Dave Shanley, CTO and Chief Engineer. We want to talk a little about some of the technology behind our product and some of the vendors and products we use to make it all happen.

We love to learn and share. One of our founding principles as a company has always been: retain transparency in everything we do. While we can’t give everything away, here’s a list of some of the technologies we’ve used:

• Java (Lots of it, nearly 26k lines at last count)
• PHP (Not so much of it, but some none-the-less)
• Apache Tomcat (Hosts our Java apps)
• Apache HTTPD (Hosts our PHP apps and static content)
• Apache Struts 2 (The web framework we use with our web apps)
• Spring / Spring Security (The glue between our web apps and buildabrand’s core engine)
• Hibernate (ORM for our engine)
• MySQL Cluster (Database)
• Terracotta (Clusters web nodes to share a JVM – very snazzy product)
• PDFLib (Generates our high res output)
• Amazon EC2 (Buildabrand lives in the cloud!)
• Amazon S3 (Nice, fast, stable and secure data storage)
• Re-Captcha (Provides us with robot/spam checking facilities)
• RPXNow (Wonderful single-sign-on authentication provider)
• UserVoice (Top notch user-generated feedback product)

We also use a massive array of libraries and utilities (some open source, some commercial).

The majority of the supporting framework for buildabrand is written in Java using Spring, Hibernate and Struts 2. We chose Java because of its awesome portability and power when it comes to heavy lifting. We could have gone with Django and Python, but integrating all of the external components into a single engine would have been very time-consuming.

We have chosen Amazon Web Services (AWS) as our hosting technology provider. Why? Well, because the Elastic Compute Cloud and S3 storage service are nothing short of amazing.

buildabrand needs the ability to scale our infrastructure horizontally (meaning add more servers/nodes) and not vertically (add more memory to servers). We intend our product to be available in a multitude of markets so we will need to deploy hardware to those regions (which is why horizontal scaling is better for us). Amazon has built an incredible service that shoots any cloud based competitor out of the water in terms of power, configurability and flexibility.

I had the pleasure of attending a seminar with Dr. Werner Vogels (CTO/Vice President of Amazon.com) at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco eariler this year. I heard him talk about how he structured a AWS department using a noded approach to product development and how it integrates with the rest of Amazon’s technology services. After Werner’s talk that I knew we had made the right choice with AWS.

During our closed beta we will be running a scaled down server architecture consisting of a single node (1 server configuration). When we launch our open beta later this year we will be ramping up the server architecture to something much more robust:

• Two large load balanced web nodes, both clustered using Terracotta.
• Three small, load balanced data & query nodes. All clustered using MySQL Cluster Edition.
• A staging and continuous integration node to keep things moving.

Here is a little diagram of how it all works.

We are always open to questions, inquiries, and general tech chatter. If you have any questions, send us an email.