I’ve just received the login details to the Loerie Awards entry system in order to start remote judging of the 2008 digital entries, and I can’t wait to dig in. Each year gets better and better: in terms of the number of entries, the standard of work, and in general the overall exposure and weighting the digital category receives within the awards.
Even though people complain in SA that growth and uptake of the medium as a marketing tool is slow, it’s awesome to see how agencies are making the most of limited budgets and low bandwidth and really pushing the creative within fairly hectic boundaries (and prove the naysayers wrong).
I’ll be sure to update the blog a few times during the course of the judging process - watch this space!
I’m flabbergasted. The Eco Zoo (by McCann Erickson) is quite possibly the most amazing Papervision 3D website I’ve seen to date. Roxik (aka Masayuki Kido) is a Papervision 3D guru and he’s really broken the mold with this site.
To be honest, I’m not really sure what the site’s objective is. From what I can gather, the characters that live in the websites’ virtual zoo are meant to give you tips on living in a more eco-friendly way. Even though the website doesn’t seem to feature a strong call-to-action or a clear message, it’s just incredibly beautiful and engaging and entices you to explore.
There are so many intricate little details that one barely notices that all add up to form this amazing experience. The environment’s physics is insane - the falling leaves, the trees blowing in the wind, and not to mention the flag that you can actually pull and stretch and manipulate.
And please, oh please don’t forget to check out the Pop-Up Book… INSANE!
Ladies and gentlemen - the digital landscape is changing rapidly. The sky is really the limit … isn’t it exciting!?!
I’ve just started reading Seth Godin’s new book titled “Meatball Sundae
“. His analogy is pretty simple (and brilliant). To sum it up, New Marketing - blogs, social media, word of mouth, viral, etc. are like toppings on a Sundae. Add these to a “sweet” organization and you have a winning recipe. Sadly, many brands want to embrace New Marketing without evolving and changing who they are and how they operate.
They are meatballs.
Here’s a short extract from Amazon’s editorial review:
Meatball Sundae is the definitive guide to the fourteen trends no marketer can afford to ignore. It explains what to do about the increasing power of stories, not facts; about shorter and shorter attention spans; and about the new math that says five thousand people who want to hear your message are more valuable than five million who don’t.
The winners aren’t just annoying start-ups run by three teenagers who never had a real job. You’ll also meet older companies that have adapted brilliantly, such as Blendtec, a thirty-year-old blender maker. It now produces “Will it blend?” videos that demolish golf balls, Coke cans, iPhones, and much more. For a few hundred dollars, Blendtec reached more than ten million eager viewers on YouTube.
Godin doesn’t pretend that it’s easy to get your products, marketing messages, and internal systems in sync. But he’ll convince you that it’s worth the effort.
This is really phenomenal stuff… HIGHLY recommended reading! Check it out!
And if you’re not familiar with Seth Godin’s work, be sure to check out his blog - he is a marketing genius.
If there’s one media site that’s been in desperate need of a makeover for quite some time, it’s the BBC. It’s trademark old-school content grid with left column navigation can still be seen within lower levels of the site, but the main site has been completely overhauled in favor of total user customization, executed absolutely perfectly.
EVERYTHING on the home page can be customized. While this is nothing new, few have managed to get it right, and BBC manages to allow complete customization of color, layout and content without sacrificing aesthetics.
The BBC offers an incredible amount of content via their website - promoting this mass of content and providing a means of customization and predictable return experiences to the user poses a significant challenge. With the new interface and user-centric features, I think they’ve achieved something truly remarkable.
Be sure to check it out.
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!
One of the biggest challenges a designer faces if simplifying the complex… creating order out of chaos. It’s our job to present data in an effective, visually elegant manner. More often than not, this can be accomplished with conventional methods of displaying data - paragraphs, tables, pie charts and the like, but from time to nature of the problem calls for a solution that’s far more creative and interesting. Add Flash to the mix, and throw in some Papervision 3D and you get Spectra Visual Newsreader.
It’s essentially an online RSS feed reader created by MSNBC.com in order to present masses of content in an interesting and engaging way. It allows the user select news channels grouped in categories and sub-categories, and then displays the headlines in a 3d space that can be explored.
As awesome as Spectra is, there method of displaying this data is one possible solution to the problem of presenting headlines in an innovative, non-linear way. The field of Data Visualization fascinates me, because the options are really limitless.
Here are a few links to get the juices flowing: