Fresh Batch: Holiday Campaign @SpaFinder

I'm so excited about my latest holiday campaign for SpaFinder. I'm so thrilled because I get to work with beautiful photography by Robert (Vahe) Maybalian. I just love the warm effect he was able to capture, not just with the lighting, but also with the expressions of each of the models. In the words of my boss, this Christmas, she's giving me some nice paints to work with, instead of the old broken crayons known as stock photography. But I do have to say that I'm really pleased with the illustration I found on iStock, which serverd really well as my first email (scroll below), and added some festive elements to the photographs (see fainted snowflakes in the backgrounds). I used Helvetica Neue font and gave the copy some contrast with a large "Joy." Overall, I'm really pleased with how it came out. Oh, and did I mention purple is the new red for the Holidays?

Here are a few faves so far...

Weathering the storm with art

I feel so lucky to have survived the storm safe and sound. It proved to be a good opportunity to get arty. Here are the results.

Spa-A-Go-Go!

I've been so pleased with how this latest collateral came out for SpaFinder's Spa-A-Go-Go event. SpaFinder puts on a spa bash each year in late August, and this time it had a mod theme. I have to say it's one of my favorites because it leaves room for both funky waves and simple straight lines. We adapted a simple illustration to work with our branding colors for background and got a groovy font to tie it all together. It was really fun to be the photographer at the party too since it gave me a chance to see all the elements in action. All together I made 6 different posters, the event program, print and email versions of the invitation, name tags, door signage for each of the office (referred to as the "experiential suites" to sound extra fancy), a bag, plus the logo. Keep reading to see the photos!

"Welcome baby sister" shirts

So as some of you know, I recently became an aunt again, this time gaining a long anticipated baby niece. As much as our entire family has been looking forward to her arrival, I thought about the transition she will bring about for her two older brothers. I wanted to honor them somehow during this special time, so I made them these little shirts.

Cool Spa Website: Pritikin Longevity Center & Spa

Pritikin crossed my radar today and I was impressed with their site. Seems quite standard compliant and light. It also has a neat home page flash which is an effective way of giving more information, and offering some interactivity.

Go see!
Pritikin Longevity Center & Spa

Confessions From a Team of One

This came in from Michelle - thanks! :)

Confessions From a Team of One

Long ago, when I first started working as user experience designer, my process went something like this:

During this time, I had a dirty secret. I didn't necessarily believe that the designs I was proposing where the best solution to the problem. They were simply the best that I had come up with. And so, to compensate, I focused on shoring up my arguments in the event that someone should question me.

I realize now that what I was experiencing was a common pitfall of designing in isolation. People who work on teams with other designers benefit from the natural exchange and evolution of ideas that happens when you put more than one mind on a problem, and I was missing that.

When I joined the team at Adaptive path, that all changed. Here, I saw designers working together, sketching rapidly and roughly, generating lots of ideas quickly and then mixing and matching them to produce cohesive solution. I soon learned that this way of working has a proud history in design thinking. I also saw that the more I knew about it, the more it changed how I approached creative problem-solving when I was working on my own, without other designers to brainstorm with. Did this mean you can bring the creative benefits of team thinking to a practice of one?

I believe so, and I'd like to share with you some tips and techniques that you can apply easily on your own. These are lightweight tools that anyone can employ in fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, or an hour.

TOOLS FOR BRAINSTORMING



The goal of any brainstorming activity is to generate a wide variety of ideas, but I find that I brainstorm most effectively when I'm guided by meaningful constraints. The following activities provide just enough structure to focus brainstorming while keeping options open ended.

Pen and paper (the most important tools you'll ever have): You'll find that the ability to draw a quick sketch of what you're thinking is key to much of what follows. Yes, I know. Sketching can be daunting. When I started at Adaptive Path, I would never have described myself as someone who could sketch. But I saw right away by working with people who could sketch that it brings tremendous benefits. It makes it possible to iterate ideas much more quickly than on a computer. And people really respond to sketches. There's something about the rawness of the form that seems to signal that this is the time for brainstorming and having fun, which makes sketching a dynamic facilitation tool.

Conceptual models: Conceptual models come in many shapes and sizes. Whatever their form, they can provide a useful structure within which to generate ideas. The key to using conceptual models effectively is to pick a structure that has inherent constraints built in, and then to brainstorm within those constraints. Some examples of conceptual models with good constraints are spectrums, two-by-twos, and the grids. You can see specific examples of these conceptual models and how they're used in this presentation from the 2008 IA Summit.

Inspiration libraries: No doubt many UX professionals already keep an inspiration library, but I included it here anyway because it is such an essential part of the practice. Inspiration libraries can take many forms. Some people just keep a list of bookmarks. Information Architect Peter Morville stores his collection of search pattern screenshots on Flickr. For my own inspiration library, I take screenshots of interesting examples as I find them (using the invaluable Firefox plugin ScreenGrab), and then store the images in iPhoto. I always start a new project with a meander through my inspiration library in search of interesting patterns that might apply.

TOOLS FOR WORKING WITH AD HOC TEAMS



You may be the sole representative of user experience in your organization, but you're probably surrounded by people who work in other capacities, and whatever their title, you can enlist their help for group brainstorming and feedback.

Sketchboards: Sketchboards are a simple concept. Starting with a big piece of butcher paper, you tape all your sketches to it, as well as sources of inspiration, and notes about requirements and strategy. Cluster the material into related groupings where possible. The real power of sketchboards becomes apparent once you put them on the wall and share them with others. You'll find that they give you a way to talk through a lot of different options and even discuss aspects of flow across different parts of the system. Prompted by the sketches in front of them, people become engaged and articulate in talking about the benefits and tradeoffs in various ideas. See Brandon Schauer's article on sketchboarding for more information.

Open design sessions: Open design sessions are an informal invitation for everyone to come brainstorm and sketch — from your product manager to your senior technologist. No ideas are rejected. The goal is to leverage all the minds in the room to bring different ideas to a problem. Surprising and inventive solutions often come from people who aren't UX professionals. Your role in the open design session is to be the facilitator, walking around, piping in with feedback or extra ideas when somebody seems stuck, and asking enough questions when people present their ideas for them to be tangible and real enough for you to develop further.

Template based workshops: When you're working with a group of people who aren't experienced with free form brainstorming, you can run a template-based workshop with basically the same structure and in the same amount of time as an open design session. Simply come armed with templates that give a little shape and guidance to how to think about the problem. Below are three templates that work well.

· The concept sheet is the most free form template. It simply gives participants space to draw a picture and describe the idea in as much or as little detail as they'd like.

· The design the box template asks participants to design the external packaging as if your entire product offering were to ship in a box. It's a valuable exercise for articulating the basic "aboutness" of what you are designing – what it is, how you'd promote it, what makes it special. This exercise helps everyone on the team think about what would inspire a buyer to pick it up off the shelf (which is in effect what they're doing when they visit your site or try out your software).

· The design the experience template is a language-oriented approach to describing the user experience that you'd like for your product. It asks participants to list nouns, verbs, and adjectives for the experience, which then map nicely to objects, functionality, and less tangible experiential qualities that would form the basis of the experience strategy and perhaps connect to brand strategy.

TOOLS FOR PICKING THE BEST IDEAS

Once you've done all this brainstorming, and you've enlisted the help of the rest of your team, how do you identify which ideas best address the problem at hand? The key is to anchor yourself to a handful of specific, meaningful objectives that this product or release should accomplish, and then to constantly gauge your progress against them. At Adaptive Path, we do this with design criteria, which Sarah Nelson has written about in previous issues of this newsletter. You can read Sarah's complete essay on design criteria here.

Designs that are based on design criteria and built upon well explored ideas help you craft a product with tangible benefits and a little bit or personality for the people who use it — and they it make it easier for you to do it with confidence and conviction. Whether you work on your own or with a big team, that ultimately is what it's all about.

A longer version of this article will appear in the forthcoming special information architecture issue of the ASIST Bulletin, to be published in August.

ORION | Home

ORION | Home

Super Clever site... I love this!

Cool resource >>> css tinderbox

What is the css tinderbox?

It's All About Open Source Design Templates

The CSS Tinderbox is an effort to support open source web design by providing very basic, yet solid, CSS/XHTML design templates that web designers and web developers can use as the foundation for their own projects.

Not Reinventing The Wheel

By all means, the CSS Tinderbox isn’t breaking new ground in CSS-based web design. Much of the elements used to create these templates come from well known sources and/or standards already found around the inter-web.

Supporting Open Source

All the basic CSS Tinderbox design templates have been released under the Creative Commons license. While you're not required to credit the CSS Tinderbox or have a link back to this site, I'd really appreciate either one if you intend on submitting your final design to Open Web Design or another free template site.

Send HTML Email Newsletters with MailChimp

Send HTML Email Newsletters with MailChimp

This resource came recommended by the previous article... I think I'm going to give it a try. Quoting from that article:

What Does it Cost?
Free to setup and comes with 25 free email credits to try. After that 3 cents per email (unless you are sending thousands in which case the price drops). What this means is if you are emailing 200 clients a month you’ll be spending $6 a month. In other words getting one job a year from your emails would pay for all of them!

Technical Knowledge Needed?
A very simple interface that you can learn in one sitting. As with any new application there is a bit of looking around but MailChimp provides a walk through and some helpful information. Overall you just follow their wizards and you shouldn’t have any troubles.

Advantages:

• Simple Interface providing a LOT of options
• Built in template designer, you don’t need to know any HTML and you can drop in images and make your email look very professional without any design skill
• Detailed Reporting on how your campaign went
• They provide an HTML signup box that you can drop in to your website for people to join your mailing list
• Good Mailing List Management (handles unsubscribes and imports etc)
• Sends multipart emails (text and HTML so no-one misses out)
• …. WAAY More Features than you can shake a monkey fist at

Disadvantages:

• Although you can track ‘opens’ and ‘link-follows’ apparently you have to pay $99 extra for it
• You can’t set up an account without a “Work” email address, i.e. a personalised domain. Addresses like @aol, @earthlink, @hotmail are not accepted. For most this is not a big deal, but it could be an extra hitch for some…

Learning lots about web design

I'm currently reading "The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web" and am quite glad for it. There are so many things that I'm getting from it both in the visual and the programming areas. Here are just a few of the tidbits that sparked my interest:

• To add professional polish to a design we have to make sure we are proficient in the use of light, space and shape of a design.
• The website of Professor J.L. Mortonfound at www.colorcom.com is said to be a good resource for color study.
• There are many resources mentioned to be found on the W3C's website at www.w3.org. One of the most important one might be a code validator at http://validator.w3.org. But apparently they have other good articles as well about the details of code standards.
• Bobby is a program that helps validate your code for access by the disabled (for screen readers and such) this resource can be found here: http://bobby.watchfire.com

And the goodness just keeps on coming! I'll try to note more tidbits as I progress through the book. But in the mean time, I'm giving it a thumbs up if you have the time/interest to delve in yourself.

Beaufiful

This inspired me today...

TAZO Tea

TAZO Tea - a great flash site... very creative! It won the FlashForward award last year.

Pretty Design >>> diana kane

diana kane - handmade jewelry - fine lingerie - designer accessories - boutique fashion

FAbulously CuriOuS

Buy Direct From Simple - Curious Gabe a great little logo that made me happy.
I'm listening to Madeline Peyroux and am quite happy about that too. And not to mention the fact that I'm about to go home, for a nice, warm, wonderful weekend in the mountains. Love to you all.

Color Info

Complete Color Matching Guide
"Research reveals all human beings make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment , or item within 90 seconds of initial viewing and that between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on color alone"
Find it here: http://www.elogodesign.com/color-matching-guide/

Top 10 FREE Software for Web Designers

Paid software is fine but there is always an alternative for free - Today we round up the best free software for web designers, includes CSS Editors, Font Management, Graphics Editing etc......



read more | digg story

Neat >>> Postscript5

Postscript5 | Freelance Web and Graphic Designer In Northern Ireland

"This is the home and online portfolio of Grace Smith, a 24 year old creative and enthusiastic freelance web & graphic designer based in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. My Focus is on creating beautiful web standards compliant websites built with CSS and XHTML that are simple and elegant."

Cool Site to know about >>> Shelfari

Shelfari - Welcome to Shelfari! Read, Share, Explore!
This is really neat, I might shift my reading queue to it...

Shelfari - postscript5's Shelf

Shelfari - postscript5's Shelf
- more books to read in the future...

A site to know about >>> Styleboost

is a gallery for showcasing beautiful web sites. It has been around since January 2001 and is created, designed and maintained by myself, Johan Bakken. I do this to learn and to promote stuff I like."