Branding musafir.com

Work from Musafir.com on April 27, 2011

Musafir.com was founded in August 2007 and branded over a three month period from December 2007 to February 2008. Although some brands begin by identifying their structure and then hunt for a name that fits the profile, we jumped right into word formation exercises.

I began by running through a list of every possible combination involving the words travel and trip under the sun; however, with most meaningful English dot-coms snapped up, our choices were whittled down to absurd names or obscure TLDs.

It was then that I came across the word musafir (pronounced /mʊ saː fIr/). Unlike the others, this dot-com was available, even if so for a ransom. The word meant traveler in Arabic, Hindi and Urdu, and was practically a part of popular culture in the subcontinent, thanks to a song from the seventies.

We traded our bag of silver for the domain in September 2007 and I worked on the brand through to the end of February 2008,  which you can read about on The incredible Brandini. If there was  one challenge worth noting, it was our wordmark, which had to be redrawn because of Meta’s awkward ‘fi’ ligature and the unusual balance of characters in Musafir. Our golden wings too only came about after 128 iterations involving everything from sunshine to shooting stars.

Although there have been a few tweaks in shade over the years – the most recent being in September 2010 – nothing has fundamentally changed about the brand since March 2008. It’s served us well as a startup and we’re looking to build on top of it for a new product this summer. In the posts that follow, I’ll share more about how Musafir.com was designed and the hurdles that e-business startups have to overcome in the Middle East.

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Showtime arabia

Work from Proximity Dubai on April 1, 2007

Showtime Arabia (now OSN) is the Middle East’s leading pay-TV network. The company approached Proximity for solutions to its growing digital communication strategy in spring 2004, and has grew from strength to strength in its customer relationship management ever since.

Showtime came to Proximity in early 2007 with a brief to redesign its website and deliver a brand refresh which had been in the works since late 2006. In contrast to its previous image, the brand’s new message was clean and simple.By questioning every aspect of the old site that had at times turned into an information hub, Proximity put in a passionate effort to bring focus back to the person that mattered the most – the customer.

It didn’t come easy though. The sheer complexity of bilingual and country-specific customization meant that most pages took as much as ten seconds to load during the early stages. A stringent series of optimization exercises leading up to the site’s launch helped reduce that to under a millisecond by the time the site went live. The site was also integrated with MasterCard’s MiGS payment gateway and was powered by Proximity’s bespoke content management platform, Intertwine.

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DWTC

Work from Proximity Dubai on February 1, 2007

The Dubai World Trade Centre account was Impact Proximity’s largest, if not most challenging website development project. It involved the analysis and re-development of DWTC’s thirteen websites, in addition to the development of software tools to manage these websites and their associated online marketing campaigns.

The key software tools developed in this project include a Content Management System, an Ad Server and an Email Engine. Enhancements include measures to enforce online data privacy in a country with poor data legislation, the achievement of WAI AAA Accessiblity standards across all websites and the implementation of mobile content accessibility.

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ADCB

Work from Proximity Dubai on August 1, 2006

Designed as a part of ADCB’s corporate identity overhaul in August 2004, the original site featured a purpose-built Content Management System developed in classic ASP, with over 150 pages of detailed information on the bank’s services and facilities.

The site was redesigned in August 2005 to account for the bank’s rapid expansion. A key feature included in the new version was the ability to deliver live financial data as made available through Reuters. Although the english language site was developed in HTML 4.0, the arabic language site was developed in XHTML 1.0 Strict using table-less layout, semantic markup and DOM-generated navigation.

The site won Gold in the Banks and financial institutions category at the 2006 Pan Arab Web Awards, and is currently maintained by another agency.

The project also included a site built in Flash for ADCB Excellency, the bank’s  exclusive banking division for high net worth customers. The website was particularly unique as it needed to be optimized for bilingual search engines and plain text user agents.

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Intertwine

Work from Proximity Dubai on September 1, 2004

Intertwine was originally intended to be Proximity Dubai’s CRM data management platform. The first generation was developed in ASP, and provided customer management, campaign analytics and a centralized data collection platform. It also supported post-campaign activity tracking, real-time data alerts and sophisticated cross-campaign analytics.

However, Intertwine soon outgrew itself and a second generation was built as a complete digital communications suite in our .NET lab with website content management, online advertising and email marketing modules. The platform was used to power several leading websites such as the Dubai World Trade Center’s exhibitions, Showtime Arabia and several others that Proximity Dubai has developed since then.

Download a sample report from the first generation

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