In today's competitive market it is essential for companies to have a clear brand identity towards it consumers and users in order to be successful. Consumers have often a variety of products to choose from and the challenge for a company's products is to be discovered and remembered. An important factor is recognition of a product and how it is conceived through our perception which is mainly an identification process based on familiarity, resemblance or similarity. Furthermore, the visual part of the brain organizes the surrounding into patterns which are used as a guide for us, and to capture the surrounding is called getting its gist. The process of finding resemblance in a design space is often done by the designer as an implicit part in the design process. If this implicit knowledge could be more objectively visualised it might be a helpful tool to create a visual baseline of how consumers would experience the product segment. To show similarities and differences of design features quantitatively can facilitate the communication in a design development project. This paper explores how the concept of a product gist may be used to create a conceptual product sign and also how it could be used to analyse what the design space looks like in a given product segment. By quantitatively overlaying transparent pictures in a product segment visual pattern emerges that can be used as a communication tool in a design process when discussing brand recognition. In this paper a power drill is used as a simple application to illustrate the usage of the proposed product gist.

This paper will investigate the strategic design decision-making of an in-house designer in a company with a large product portfolio, with respect to how designers plan for future visual alterations of the product. In-house designers have to think strategically about the creation of recognition and differentiation through design because they influence the company’s overall strategies. Therefore, while balancing aesthetic and semiotic qualities of the product, designers have to consider current as well as future needs for recognition and product differentiation. The ability to do so is affected by cost and brand positioning strategy. An exploratory study was setup to investigate what design strategies could be found in an industrial design team employed by a company. The study exposed how in-house designers could strategically incorporate aesthetic flexibility in product parts in order to create opportunities for faster facelifts or redesigns. The importance of managing carry-over details in larger product portfolios was also discovered. To carry over parts from different products is an important way for a company to save money, development time and at the same time increase brand recognition through repetition. Carry-over can be an aid to enhance visual recognition, but it can also be a hindrance when the designer needs to create differencing design values. Most products have a lifespan before they need to be updated or redesigned, which depends on the competition in a product segment. This makes it extra important for designers to have an understanding of when to incorporate carry-over details and when not to. A model was created to describe how carry-over details, design cues and aesthetic flexibility could be managed in a product portfolio. The model is based on Rune Monö’s works and brand management literature, with an emphasis on the brand positioning framework of Point of Difference, Point of Parity and brand extension by Keller et al.