(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

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

Yesterday Jason Sadler from iwearyourshirt.com hung out in Jacksonville Florida wearing our buildabrand.com t-shirt for the day. Whilst filming, blogging and taking photos he generated a storm of new twitter followers, new beta testers and our first YouTube video, pretty impressive!

You can check out his blog here featuring his daily recap and the buildabrand.com photo “I’m on my DeerPhone at Angies Subs” which made it into Jason’s’ top 5 out of 1,251 taken so far this year!

Jason used buildabrand.com to create an identity in a few minutes, describing one of the best parts as “you don’t need ANY design or technical skills to use it” – see, it really is that easy! You can see the what he created on his blog!

We also gave Jason 10 beta invites to give away to startups who need support with their branding. His tweeting, blogging and videos amassed an amazing 4500% increase in beta sign-ups – we hope the lucky winners below are taking advantage of being chosen!

• Leslie S – Personal Chef
• Christien – Golf Articles
• Andrew Brodsky – DMB Pictures
• Mike – Apartment Locator
• Christopher Hiller – Social Camping Retail
• Nate Clark – Dog/Cat Salon
• Wes Wyatt – Word of Mouth Works
• Becca Tieder – Unite for Change
• Andrea Wrentz – Women’s Apparel
• John Hill – Massage Studio

Thanks to Jason and everyone who followed, tweeted or signed up for buildabrand.com yesterday. Here are some of our favourite tweets:

‘Had an invite to try out @buildabrand. i love it. nice content–actually made me think.‘ @kganderson

‘buildabrand.com looks like a promising brand building site http://tinyurl.com/mgwfco @iwearyourshirt streaming now http://tinyurl.com/546hp6.‘ @Renee3

‘A Closer Look at BuildABrand’s Closed Beta: I don’t think I can say much more about how cool this actually is, othe… http://bit.ly/8v67iO‘ – @CCMSWebDesigns

‘Just been using http://bit.ly/UM7Kv (buildabrand) – very impressive‘ - @PJWilikinson

‘Just had a play with www.buildabrand.com @buildabrand - so slick, can’t wait for @champney and @daveshanley to let this baby out‘ – @eski009

‘@iwearyourshirt dude that www.buildabrand.com is awesome…did all the beta invites go?‘ @alunevans

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

But before we send the invitations out, we’d be really grateful if you would first complete a quick survey to help us put the finishing touches to buildabrand before you get your hands on it. There are only a few questions.

If you’ve already had an email from us about this and you’ve completed the survey, thank you. You can expect to hear from us very soon.

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.”