Our Zeitgeist tagged with “Interactive”
I’m basically a print designer, and even though I have done web design I worried that they would be “talking in code” and I’d be lost. I was pleasantly surprised—the presenters who showed some code did it in a way that I could understand. Even Eric Meyer’s chat on “CSS for evil” was presented in a way that made sense to the print designers like me!
Monday morning started with AEA founder
Jeffrey Zeldman giving a history of Emoticons. From the simple smiley face to winking emoticons with hats and mustaches to the difference between eastern and western styles, we were impressed with Zelman’s vast knowledge.
Just joking :)
Seriously, you know that the next two days are going to be great when you hear things like “Beautiful no longer means flash-based.” Zeldman’s passionate opening on the history of the web—
Web 2.0—set the tone of the conference. He kicked off AEA by showing inventions from history that led to the web, and showing why we stand at the dawn of a newer and more mature web powered by standards.
Following Zeldman, we heard from
Sarah Parmenter on
Crafting the User Experience. She discussed principles from human psychology, such as speed, simplicity, surprise, social behavior and stirring emotions, and she gave practical advice for using psychology when thinking about web design and user experience.
Rounding out the morning was
Jason Santa Maria’s session
On Web Typography. He began by talking about what makes a good web typeface and major typography considerations, such as dimensions, special features, prolonged reading and internationalization. “Good typography is invisible. Don't make me think about reading, just let me read!” Then he talked about the advances and choices we now have with web fonts. Even though those advances are exciting, he cautioned, we still have to use good design and web standards.
The afternoon started with
Scott Berkun talking about
Why Designers Fail and What to Do About It. He gave us his thoughts on how we’d never learn and move forward without failure. He said all designers fail 95% of the time, but design suffers from a lack of failure analysis—how to look at the reasons we fail and what to do about it.
One of my favourite sessions was
A Content Strategy Roadmap with
Kristina Halvorson. She provided valuable insights into how we spend a lot of time on strategy, wireframes and design before obtaining content for our websites. Content often comes last, when it should come first. The bottomline: “Start designing from the content out, rather that the canvas in,” she said.
Finishing off the day was
Luke Wroblewski, whose presentation
Mobile Web Design Moves left me eager for his full-day mobile web design course. It was exciting to hear about the huge growth in mobile usage, the immense possibilities of mobile web design and how we need to think differently when designing for mobile devices.
Day two started off with
Eric Meyer and his talk
The CSS3 Anarchists’ Cookbook. Basically, he gave us tips and tricks on how to use CSS for “evil”—how to mess with your co-workers by changing up code in their browser’s user stylesheets. I was a little scared of this talk, but whenever Eric showed the code he showed examples of what it did so it made sense. It was a cheeky way to show the new tools in HTML5 and CSS3.
Jeremy Keith followed with a discussion of
Design Principles. He talked about how your principles and design should match, and how this will help you reach your goals—“The more you can boil down your design principles, the better.”
Aarron Walter then did a presentation titled
Idea to Interface. It was great to learn how those iPhone apps you have in your mind would translate from just an idea into actuality. He said you need to give yourself permission to be the person with the idea, and he outlined how you would carry it through.
The afternoon continued with
Andy Clarke and his presentation
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes about CSS3 web animation. We learned about the latest
CSS animation techniques, and he showed some entertaining videos, such as the
Flash vs. Web rap battle.
Alexa Andrzejewski, the founder of Foodspotting, followed with an intriguing presention
The Dimensions of a Good Experience. She talked about evaluating experiences using 10 principles from urban planning, and how these same qualities could be applied to digital experiences—“Design influences our experience of the world.” It was the process that led her to create the Foodspotting app.
Finishing off day two was the humourous and incredibly passionate
Tom Coates talking about
Everything the Network Touches. He reminded us all about how exciting and powerful the web is and how the network is not only extending to people but to objects and places. His final thought: “I am going to say something controversial: I don’t think we should have web standards. It’s only with the ability to explore and not be bound by rules and regulations that we going to create and discover new realms.”
With our minds on overload from these two days we headed into day three,
Mobile Web Design with Luke Wroblewski. Again, I had no reason to worry that we’d be doing something super techincal. It was all digestible information. Talking to a crowd of 300, Luke did a great job of getting us to interact with him and each other. He started by asking the audience what we’d like to learn. We also did a few interactive projects by sharing in small groups. Throughout the day, Luke took us through the major considerations when designing for mobile: what the constraints are, stats on usage, what behaviours drive the use of mobile devices and how they are used.
AEA, you know how to throw a conference: 12 exceptionally fantastic speakers, a live
Twitter feed, three parties and a
soundtrack! If you’re looking to attend a fun web design conference that runs seamlessly with loads of exciting and passionate people, check out
An Event Apart. Having attended many design conferences I found AEA to be among one of the best experiences I've had. I went from not knowing anything about this conference to coming back with practical experience and tools ready to be put to use in our office.
Further reading:
A List Apart
World Wide Web Consortium
Luke Wroblewski’s Notes on AEA Presentations
[post_title] => An Event Apart
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An overview of An Event Apart, the design conference for people who make websites.
Posted by: Sylvia Rigakis on Tuesday, May 10th, 2011
Categories: Design, Education, Events, Inspiration, Interaction, Interactive, Learning, Social Media, Technology, Websites | 1 Comment »
Discovery, Identity, Communication Design, Interactive
[gallery order="DESC"]
WHERE
In the years preceding Vancouver as a host of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, our client envisioned a unique high performance training facility called The Multisport Centre of Excellence. A facility that would bring together the talent and resources to not only allow the best athletes to hone their skills, but also foster young, up and coming talent.
IDEAS
The identity we created represents the multi-disciplinary approach concentrating on individual athletes' goals for achievement. The vibrant colours suggest dynamism and victory and the overall effect is one of confidence and professionalism in sport.
By far the most critical component of the project to support print collateral and the media attention and promotion of the project is the website. It features a CMS with a modular approach to the design allowing for new images to change seasonally and rotate through various sports. The press section features downloadable images and media kits as well as online sign up for email updates.
WORK
The concept for the Multisport Centre of Excellence and subsequent attention it garnered in the press, with various levels of government and the public was unfortunately not enough to propel the project through an economic downturn in 2008-9. However, as a testament to its viability, in early 2011 the centre is once again gaining momentum and is an inevitability.
Launch website:
www.multisportcentreofexcellence.com
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Creating a brand identity and website for a world-class sports training and rehabilitation centre.
Two complementary websites designed to serve public and private education institutions in BC.
A website designed to help employers identify and hire skilled immigrants.
Asking the right question reveals innovative thinking for this engineering website redesign.
The concept behind Typekit harnesses @font-face but protects the font files on a separate server. The designer/developer/client would purchase a license (per site? per month?) to use the font. With an expected to launch sometime this summer, the major draw back seems to be the issues surrounding the storage of the font information on a different server from the website. (required to satisfy DRM licenses) The anticipated problem with this surrounds the issues associated with the uptime (and downtime) of this font server. No server is up 100% of the time, it just doesn't happen. But what happens when this server goes down? Potentially all websites linking to this central database will lose their font definitions.
Sharing code snippits on a central server hasn't presented a prohibitive problem in the past as the
jQuery library,
CSS Resets and other snippits are all available hosted on a central server and used on major sites world wide and downtime hasn't presented itself as a problem. Although we might be comparing apples and oranges between Google's servers and Typekits. Time will tell. Certain some exciting developments for sure!
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Big news in the web world as Typekit was launched last week. For those of you who missed news of the launch, it serves to bridge the copyright issues associated with the CSS3 Property @font-face (hotly debated issue among foundries and deve [...]
Posted by: Steve Mynett on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
Categories: Design, Interactive, Learning, Websites | No Comments »
After engaging our discovery process, which looks past assumptions and digs deeper into the real situation and goals, we determined that they required a site they could easily manage themselves for use not only as a marketing tool, but for recruitment and communications too. So we developed a project plan that included the creation of a
CMS-driven site (in this case
Drupal) with an aesthetic emphasis on simplicity, intuitive information access, and messaging that better told the story of the Chatwin brand to their unique audience.
Considering their audiences' needs and what it is that a multi-disciplinary engineering and planning firm does, it was also important to use the site to emphasize their work. We created a modern, clean
portfolio system separated by their three main areas of expertise—civil, building, and environmental—with a gallery of rotating images and case studies of their highlighted projects.
Engineers do love to produce lots of words and data, so by our launch date, the site was populated with copious amounts of information and contiues to grow. Thankfully our well-considered information architecture and site structure, which included a powerful serach tool, multi-functional footer and intuitive navigation system, a user can access any of the content with two mouse clicks.
Our entire team deserves congratulations, Steve Mynett in particular, who worked very hard with our developers on this project to see it through to a successful launch. Now that it's complete, the Chatwin Engineering website appears simple to me, betraying all the work that went into it's design. I think most websites that use smart
interaction design thinking to organize and present complicated concepts and content fall into this category. Engineers can be a picky bunch, but in this case were terrific to collaborate with and work for, and they are thrilled with the new online presence and interactive tools we created for them.
Check out
the new Chatwin Engineering website and
tell us what you think!
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One great thing about what we do as brand and interactive designers is the variety of clients and projects we get to work on, each very different needs, goals, and audiences. One day it’s a brand and collateral aimed at investors or a [...]
Posted by: Mark Busse on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
Categories: Articles | No Comments »
Re-engineering an engineering firm's website to better better reflect their mission and services.
A website for one of our favourite restaurants whets everyone's appetite.
Many architects express thoughts & stories purely through the buildings they create. Not so here.
Ever since reading Speak Up’s Landmark Web Sites, Where Art Thou? two years ago, the concept of the differences of print vs. interactive have been simmering on low on my mind. There are obvious differences, between these two mediums t [...]
Posted by: Steve Mynett on Monday, May 4th, 2009
Categories: Technology, Trends, Uncategorized, Video, Websites | No Comments »
We create an online interactive brand tracking and visualization tool.
1)
Be aware of what's our there. (Google yourself) Depending on how common your name is, other people may be mixed in with your results. Increasingly potential employers, and other people looking to check your references, turn to Google. It's an honest representation of who you are much more than a closely tailored
CV.
2)
Reserve your digital touch points. Even if you don't have the desire to micro-blog to Twitter or post photos to Flickr it's important to reserve these names. You might know that the Twitter account with your name isn't yours, but will others? Take this a step further and register your name as a domain even if you don't think you're going to need it. And while you're registering domain names, get rid of that old Hotmail address you've been using forever (I'm talking to you
[email protected]!) and make use of a professional email address.
3)
Use and standardize an avatar. Avatars are the logo of your digital brand. Whether you're twittering, or commenting on a blog, it is important to have a uniform 'face' to your online persona. Standardize the photo you use for all online services, and don't change it. While the effects of rebranding your digital persona are significantly less than rebranding your company, the principals are the same. People that you interact with on a daily or weekly basis, will not recognize your new avatar and it will take time to build that recognition up again. Register for
Gravatar (a service that ties an avatar to your email address) and make sure that the same avatar is being used for your Twitter account, Flickr page etc. Take what you know about the importance of Brand Consistency and apply it to yourself.
4)
Increase Search Engine Visibility. If you're serious about developing a digital shadow and online visibility you need to be involved. This means creating and using as many digital touchpoints as you can. Become a thought leader in your industry and start publishing original content that people will want to read. (side note: starting a blog with content that people will want to read is
very different from simply starting a blog). Start Twittering, posting pictures to Flickr, videos to Vimeo, bookmarks to del.icio.us and cross promote. Participate and interact with other twitter-ers and bloggers in your areas of interest and start conversations with them.
5)
Set Facebook Privacy Settings. We're all on Facebook, well most of us at least. But how many of you have altered the privacy settings on your account and locked it down? Familiarize yourself with the options under Settings -> Privacy. The major ones to check are the Public Search listing (Under Search Options) and making sure that Beacon Websites is checked (Under Applications). One final stop under section and you should be significantly more secure then before. (though with Facebook, nothing is entirely secure!) More information available on articles from Wired Magazine
here and
here.
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Personal Branding is not a new concept (see Tom Peters’ great primer called The Brand Called You). As personal identities move online, managing them becomes increasingly important. As online personal identities evolve they leave a tra [...]
Posted by: Steve Mynett on Monday, March 2nd, 2009
Categories: Articles | 2 Comments »
‘In the Kitchen’ goes independent. Taking the Industrial Brand food blog to the next level.
Data Visualization seems to be all the rage these days and there is a great summary of some of the instances of it from 2008 over at Flowing Data. (via MS on Twitter) Some of these were already familiar to me (Wordle and House of Cards) but [...]
Posted by: Steve Mynett on Monday, January 5th, 2009
Categories: Art, Industrial Brand, Inspiration, Interactive | No Comments »
