Gone are the days of selling a product or service simply by communicating it’s benefits / unique selling proposition. Brands need to work harder at connecting with new customers and building stronger relationships with existing customers.

Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts talks about this in his book entitled “Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands“ in which he states that without some kind of emotional connection to a brand, the relationship will dry up like a generic raisin in the sun.

One of the oldest and most effective ways to communicate an idea is through telling a story. The online environment has evolved, and it’s the ideal place to take the user on a journey (that they can control) and weave a story around a brand or product.

A fantastic example of this is a new campaign for Dove. It’s called “Waking Up Hannah” and here’s a brief summary courtesy of Creativity-Online:

With “Waking Up Hannah,” visitors can choose from three storylines–Energize, Refresh and Cool Moisture–then watch the adventures of the title character as she recovers from a drunken night and gets ready for a blind date. Each of the narratives corresponds with different Dove deodorants and body washes. Within the interactive film experience, visitors can click on Hannah’s phone to view her pics and text messages, hear commentary and get Dove coupons. In fact, each scene offers four different views and there are seven different endings overall to Hannah’s day.

Additionally, you can send the film to friends, learn more about the products and participate in forum discussions.

It’s INSANE! A very girly example indeed, but a great one none the less. Even though this example happens to include a crazy amount of video and no doubt has a seriously large budget behind it, an online experience need not look like a big-budget movie in order to hinge around a story. All a website needs to do is take the user on a journey.

Our objective as people creating online experiences for brands should always be to MAXIMISE the length of time users spend interacting with the brand. So next time you have the opportunity to create something truly amazing, think about how you can weave a story into the experience. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results.

I had the opportunity to attend the launch event for the all new Adobe Creative Suite 4 today… man, it totally freaked me out! I would have never expected an upgrade as big as this - CS4 is a quantum leap from where CS3 left off.

Here’s an outline of my favorite new features:

• Illustrator
  • Multiple “artboards” (pages) - it’s about freekin time! Freehand users can finally migrate across. This artboard functionality is super-cool - in a single Illustrator document, you can have an entire campaigns artwork layed out over the entire stage, e.g. an A2 poster, a flyer, a sticker, a CD, a web banner, etc.
  • The gradient tool has been totally upgraded - rather than using the gradient panel, the gradient slider control appears right on top of the object you’re applying the gradient to. You can change the gradient, add colors, move it around and change the style right there. Very nice
  • Blob drawing (Flash’s method of painting and creating shapes) has been incorporated.
• Photoshop
  • More sophisticated 3d object controls
  • Content-aware scaling - you can stretch out or compress an image without objects distorting (and people getting fatter / thinner).
  • Photoshop can now make use of your GPU (the processor built on to your graphics card) which speeds things up hugely. This enables slick, smooth zooming and panning (reminiscent of Microsoft Seadragon) and general speedy rendering and processing.
  • A new panel specially for custom and preset Adjustments.
• Flash
  • Tweening and animation has been totally reimagined. No more creating multiple keyframes for tweens, and no more guide layers to tween objects along paths. Creating a tween is a single-click process, and moving an object creates a bezier curve that it completely editable for creating complex motion paths. There’s also a handy “Animation Presets” panel to quickly create common animations, like ball bouncing, zooming out, etc.
  • There is also a Motion Editor panel that allows you to fine-tune motion easing.
  • For those of you who are familiar with creating animation in After Effects, Adobe have basically canned Flash’s method of animation in favor of After Effects methods and tools.
  • This also means 3D! Objects now have X, Y and Z positioning, so you can animate objects using 3D techniques. Divide a scene into a foreground and background to give the illusion of depth, or create more complex animations with objects flying in within a 3D space. Hectic. Only problem is that THIS functionality required Flash Player 10 to play. Sucky.
  • You can import an After Effects composition into Flash in order to add interactivity to a scene / animation. Freekin brilliant!
  • A new Bones tool allows you to join multiple objects together by creating a skeleton which can be animated really easily. This makes character animation such a breeze.
• Premier
  • Managing loads and loads of video clips is a total mission, particularly when you need to find a particular clip. Premier now includes a transcribe tool that… wait for it - scans video clips, performs voice recognition and transcribes the voice, to be used as meta data allow for quick easy searching. Seriously sophisticated stuff.
• Integration between the products totally rocks… a few examples:
  • Create an After Effects comp directly from Premier - edit the comp in After Effects and the clip immediately updates itself in Premier without rendering.
  • In Dreamweaver, drag a PSD onto the stage and you’re able to Save For Web and create a JPEG (or GIF / PNG / etc.) right then and there. Later, if you edit the original PSD in Photoshop, the JPEG created from it in Dreamweaver updates itself.
  • Open a video file in Photoshop and edit individual frames… *gasp*
• All of the applications now feature a consistent appearance with the following features:
  • A “breadcrumb” trail detailing where you are within an object “nest”.
  • Tabbed file editing (much like tabbed browsing in modern web browsers)
  • Stack modes allowing easy rearranging of assets within the workspace

Sincere apologies if I’ve gotten some of the terminology completely wrong, but I’ve done my best.

There really is so much more, but let me stop waffling on and on and leave the detail up to the professionals. Check out the following sites for much more detail:

• the Adobe website
• Adobe TV
• Adobe unveils CS4 suite (Macworld)
• Photoshop & Illustrator CS4 Video
• A whole whack of other videos available on YouTube

Presenting work to a client can be pretty scary. No matter how much you believe in a particular direction, design is a very personal and subjective thing, and chances are that you’ll often get thrown an unexpected curve-ball. Some of my all time favorites include:

• “I don’t like it.”
• “Hmm… not quite there yet.”
• “A good start - looking forward to seeing the final options!”
• “Why can’t I click on anything? It’s not working. Fix it.”
• and let’s not forget… “I played around with it in Photoshop a little - let me know what you think of this!”

Humor aside, it’s important to extract quality feedback from clients in order to move forward and lock down a final design direction. I often send the following instructions to clients in order to aid in the quality of design feedback and help in narrowing down the options presented:

An interface design consists of a number of facets. These include:

• Communication - more of an emotional facet, this relates to the overall message you’re left with from viewing the design.
• Styling - This relates to the overall look-and-feel and it’s art direction, i.e. rough, slick, corporate, surreal, etc.
• Elements - different objects / groupings of objects that form part of the overall interface, e.g. logo’s, navigation, paragraphs of copy, images, etc.
• Composition - the way these different elements are positioned around the interface
• Colouring - the overall composition will make use of a particular colour scheme.

When providing feedback on a particular design or set of designs, it’s important to dissect the design and comment on each of these facets INDIVIDUALLY. In other words, comment on the design as a whole (Communication - the emotional feedback) but also analyze the design in terms of the other facets. As a guideline, these are the questions you should be asking yourself:

Communication
• How does this design make me feel?
• What is the message I’m left with after viewing this design?
• Is this the desired message?

Styling
• Do I like the way this particular design is styled, or should it be styled differently?
• How would I describe the styling? Use as many adjectives as possible to communicate the desired styling.

Elements
• Do all the elements work well together?
• Do any elements require more emphasis?
• Which elements do you like / dislike?
• Are there any elements missing that should have been included?
• Has an element been included that need not be there?

Composition
• Do you like the overall composition of the design?
• If not, what don’t you like about it?
• If you’re happy with the composition, is there anything you might change within it?
• Think about your users – does the composition work in terms of the user experience? In other words, is everything logically positioned?

Colouring
• Do I like the colour scheme used?
• If not, is there a particular colour scheme I would like to see?
• Break this down to the individual elements - Is there a particular element that isn’t working with the current colour scheme? Would I change the colour of any particular element?

In asking yourself all these questions, you’ll get an idea of what you like / dislike about each design. When multiple designs are presented, you might find that one particular design is 100% correct and you’re able to sign off that particular mockup in order for us to move on to the next phase of the project.

If this isn’t the case, please think of the first round mockups as a MENU from which you’re able to pick and choose exactly what you would like, i.e. elements from design (A) mixed with styling and colouring from design (C), composed as per design (B). This allows us to gain a much better understanding of what you like / dislike and allows us to mock up a second round design far more efficiently.

I’ve found this approach to help a great deal in improving the quality of feedback I receive from clients. Feel tree to try it yourself - I hope it helps!

1eighty has only been live for a grand total of three weeks, and I’ve already redesigned it. Isn’t that just typical? When producing a new piece of work, I always go through a sequence of emotional phases that go something like this (and I don’t think I’m alone):

• Start working on the interface
• Start loving a direction
• Decide that “this is my best work ever… Damn I’m good!”
• Start rolling the thing out
• A few days before completion, realize that the design sucks…
• …but it’s too late to turn back…
• …so there’s no option but to launch it.
• It’s live, the response is good, and people seem to dig it…
• …but the thought still persists… this could have been better.
• Maybe next time?

Does this sound familiar? I sometimes even experience this with other designers’ work I oversee. Is it just a coincidence that C.D. = Creative Director = Cognitive Dissonance?

Luckily this time the site is my own, and I can change it as often as I like. So why did I opt for this type of look and feel? Watch this space - I’ll chat about that in an upcoming post…

I’ve just finished reading a fascinating article published by Business Week. It’s about how employees in many major corporations are demanding requesting Mac’s instead of PC’s. Here’s the amazing thing… Since 1997 when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, they’ve avoided the corporate market, choosing to focus all their attention on the consumer market… and the results are staggering. Here’s a short excerpt from the article:

In the March quarter, Mac sales blew away all forecasts, soaring 51% over the previous year, or more than three times the rate for the personal-computer industry. Throw in the iPod and iPhone, and Apple’s total sales have surged from $5.2 billion in fiscal 2002 to $24 billion last year. Its share price has risen 2,300% over the past five years, giving the company a market capitalization, at $154 billion, that tops those of tech giants Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Intel.

So… sales of $24 billion, without focusing any energy on the corporate market! Market research shows that Apple only holds about 2.19% of the business market share, but in today’s increasingly employee-centric market, corporates will have no choice but to submit and give employees what they want. And when that happens, Stevie’s smile will no doubt be even wider.

Ingenious business strategy or a massive stroke of luck?

Make sure you check out the article: The Mac in the Grey Flannel Suit

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the word design. I think it’s a word that has been completely bastardized of late, particularly in the context of web design and web designers.

Design, usually considered in the context of applied arts, engineering, architecture, and other creative endeavors, is used both as a noun and a verb. As a verb, “to design” refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component. As a noun, “a design” is used for either the final (solution) plan (e.g. proposal, drawing, model, description) or the result of implementing that plan (e.g. object produced, result of the process).
Ref: Wikipedia

It seems that these days, all you need in order to be considered a “web designer” is a pirated version of Photoshop and Dreamweaver (and let’s not forget a bookmark to TemplateMonster).

To “design” implies a rational process of problem-solving. To solve a problem, one needs to define what the problem is. Yes - the problem might be that “this interface looks crap”, in which case the solution would involve a big dose of style. However, more often than not, the work we produce involves a user experience of some kind - and user experience involves far more than just style.

It seems I’m not the only one frustrated with this issue. Here’s some food for thought:

• F*ck style
• You are not a designer