I have long admired the BBC program World Have Your Say (WHYS), hosted on WFYI(NPR) in the afternoons. The conversation they can pull together on the fly, with real people discussing the latest topics, is remarkable. If you aren't familiar with the program, the show airs a live conversation that weaves guest callers with real time bloggers' comments, tweets, texts, Facebook posts, and emails.

It's a social marketer's dream, the way they can incorporate all of these mediums into a succinct show. It's accessible, fresh, and leaves you with the closest estimation to truth by providing you with so many points of view.

What's most unique is how dependent the show's content is on the listeners…



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In all likelihood you probably read the first five (or perhaps only two) words of the first paragraph before skipping down to here. Many of you can probably recite the first line off by heart, but most likely all of you know what the text's name and primary usage is. Used as placeholder…

You'd think this wouldn't be the case, but it's an awkward truth about SXSWi that darn near all of the interactive materials designed for it are pretty bad. They don't look good, and they usually don't work very well.

Case in point: The SXSW iPhone app. I guess it's supposed to serve as my SXSW HQ while I'm in Austin. It's a modest little app, comprised of a scheduler, GPS map, newsreader, electronic business card, and micro-messaging app rolled up into one neat little cluster of a package. Oh, and it's really slow. And I'm in Indy right now. I can't imagine how it's going to perform when the geek-horde invades Austin.

But don't worry, there's a web app to save you from that app! It's called…

Rapportive is a new Gmail plug-in that replaces ads in messages with information about the sender, or anyone else who was copied on the message. Rapportive pulls information from RapLeaf, a company that scours the social web for open information and builds products and analytics on the data it finds. Sources include Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, and more. The Twitter piece will even show you a list of recent Tweets. Very cool. If you're a Gmail user, check it out.

"Customers, although they might be able to articulate the problems with an interaction, are not often capable of visualizing the solutions to those problems. Design is a specialized skill, just like programming. Programmers would never ask users to help them code; design problems should be treated no differently." Alan Cooper About Face 3, The Essentials of Interaction Design

Longtime KA+A client ExactTarget announced in December that they had been named a leader in email marketing in Forrester's 2009 Email Marketing Service Providers Wave report. They were called a "leader of the pack," and received perfect scores in six categories, including: Strength of Management Team, Executive Vision, Product Roadmap, Total Employees, Vertical Strategy, and Customers Most notably, ExactTarget was the only ESP to achieve a perfect score in the Customers category. According to the report, "with high satisfaction scores and online community, ExactTarget can successfully meet marketers' complex business needs." That's particularly exciting for the KA+A team, since we had the opportunity to work with ExactTarget on the creation of their user community, 3Sixty. With over 16,000 members, 3Sixty has become a model of what an…

During a recent trip to Europe (London, Paris, Florence), I often found myself flummoxed by the inability to make simple consumer decisions - what to buy, where to eat, where to shop. Obviously the "foreign" factor was there, but I was acutely aware that in this sea of new brands, I felt off kilter because I had no conception of their value.

Sure, there were the American giants present - McDonald's and Starbucks. And international fashion stars Chanel, Dior, Prada, YSL, etc., had no problem catching my eye. It was the other 90% (that I could afford) that left me clueless.

Complicating it further was my desire to experience Europe as a local -…

Typographic literacy is on the decline, and subsequently a whole host of errors are now accepted as ‘the norm’. Below is an exploration of some of the biggest typographic faux pas, and the ways each should be corrected.

Double Spacing This convention harks back to the days of monospaced typewriters where it was common practice to insert a double space to distinguish the beginning of a sentence from the surrounding single word spaces. When using proportional fonts this really isn’t necessary, and is, to be brutally honest, just plain ugly.

‘Dumb’ Quotes Typewriters are also responsible for the introduction of ‘straight quotes’, non-specific quote marks designed as a space-saving measure for…

Can you see what’s wrong with the statement above? Bad typography is everywhere. It can be found in magazine articles, outdoor signage, restaurant menus, billboards, newspaper and TV advertisements and all over the internet. Spend just 30 seconds looking it’s easy to find a whole host of typographic faux pas—incorrect hyphenation, ‘dumb’ quotes, double-spacing, widows, orphans, poor kerning… the list goes on. Typography is something every designer should deeply care about, which is why it pains me to see it abused so profusely. Typographic literacy seems to be on the decline, and as many designers who are not well-versed in typography move into teaching, they pass on little typographic knowledge to their students…

thesixtyone, a Y-Combinator funded music exploration community, launched in early 2008. The service began life as a pretty typical web-based social networking site. Over the last couple of years, it has gone through some interface updates and improvements, but for the most part it seemed to toe the social network line with its user interface.

The image below shows the service immediately before the latest redesign. It was definitely clean, well organized, and functional. There are even some sweet keyboard shortcuts to make controlling the music easier!

Last week thesixtyone distinguished itself from the web's pile of music recommendation sites by completely redesigning their service. The new design is bold and immersive. While a song plays, the…