A case

Dominant color wireframes

The design comparison starts with the dominant color wireframes. For this purpose, the dominant color wireframes of the countries (from left to right) United States, China, Argentina and Germany were selected and compared.

A selection of dominant color wireframes for the countries (left to right) United States, China, Argentina and Germany for left: Accenture and right: Price Waterhouse Coopers.

The selected dominant color wireframes clearly show the difference in design when comparing the two companies. Furthermore, it is evident that Accenture has a rather uniform design of the landing pages. Price Waterhouse Coopers is characterized by a rather varying design of the landing pages.

The uniform design at Accenture and the deviating design at Price Waterhouse Coopers could indicate different strategies in addressing and attracting customers. At Price Waterhouse Coopers, it seems likely that content is specifically adapted to individual countries.

Fonts in use

The fonts in use comparison shows which fonts or typefaces are used by Accenture and Price Waterhouse Coopers. The differentiation of the fonts in use takes place according to the identity levels. The respective identity levels should provide information about the extent to which the font selection creates a differentiation to the competition.

Distribution of fonts used on the landing pages of Accenture and Price Waterhouse Coopers.

Accenture and Price Waterhouse Coopers essentially use identity level 3 (iD-L 3) fonts. This indicates that the fonts were selected from a wide range of commercial fonts to strengthen the differentiation from the competition. Price Waterhouse Coopers also uses the ITC Charter font (iD-L 3). This font mix supports the differentiation assumption.

The graphic below gives an insight into the extent to which each font was used. Since Accenture uses only two fonts, ヒラギノ角ゴ for the Japanese landing page and Graphik for the rest of the landing pages, the font distribution is clear. Price Waterhouse Coopers shows that Helvetica Neue is the dominant font. ITC Charter plays a minor role.

Distribution of fonts used on the landing pages of Accenture and Price Waterhouse Coopers.

The comparison of the fonts in use by Accenture and Price Waterhouse Coopers shows that the font choice seems to play an important role in the design of the landing pages and thus in the differentiation from the competition. The lack of core fonts (iD-L 1) and open fonts (iD-L 2) seems to support this assumption.

Measuring design similarity

The length in pixels is used as a rough measure of the similarity of a company's landing page design. The measurement of design similarity based on landing page length is based on the following assumptions: A deviation in the content of landing pageof one and the same company content entails a deviating design of this content. If the landing pages of one and the same company have different content, this will affect the length of the web page. It follows that a different length of landing pages indicates a different design.

In addition, image analysis algorithms for calculating color similarity and structural similarity were used to measure the similarities of landing page designs. It turned out to be extremely problematic that the similarities between two landing page designs calculated by the algorithms sometimes deviate strongly from the similarity of the landing page designs as perceived by a human being. For this reason, no further experiments on measuring design similarity based on image analysis algorithms will be continued for the time being.

Price Waterhouse Coopers has a high degree of variation in the length of its landing pages. The high degree of variation indicates that the design of the landing pages varies from country to country and from culture to culture. Accenture, on the other hand, seems to have a more consistent design across the respective countries and cultural areas due to the low range of variation in the length of the landing pages.

On the one hand, the wide variation in landing page lengths and different landing page designs could indicate that Price Waterhouse Coopers is targeting customers in different countries and cultures. Accenture, on the other hand, seems to be using a one design fits all strategy with a low spread of landing page lengths and consistent design, which also results in a uniform customer approach.

Conclusion

Accenture uses a more globally consistent landing page design across all countries and cultures. The strong uniform design makes the landing page a single core design element and promotes a strong visual identity.

Price Waterhouse Coopers seems to combine core design elements (e.g., colors, header and footer elements) that define visual identity with content that varies from country to country. This varying landing page design is reflected in the dominant color wireframes and in the similarity by length page length. Regardless of the varying landing page design, Price Waterhouse Coopers achieves a global landing page design that reflects the visual identity across countries and cultures through the use of core design elements.

By using commerical fonts (iD-L 3), it can be assumed that Accenture and Price Waterhouse Coopers specifically strengthen the visual identity. The absence of core fonts (iD-L 1) and open fonts (iD-L 2) reinforces this assumption.

Accenture and Price Waterhouse Coopers Accenture ✕ Price Waterhouse Coopers