Lately we’ve been talking a lot about the elements of a successful design project. We thought it would be interesting, and helpful to other readers, to hear a bit more about other folk’s successes and how they were achieved. Tell us about the client, the challenge, and the solution.
A curated collection of blog posts and web links that address branding, user experience, and interface design.
Check out Mag+, a concept video on the future of digital magazines by BERG. This concept is killer in its own right, but what really impressed me was the quality of the product visualization itself.
Pentagram is hard at work proving that “traditional” design firms can compete in the user experience arena. Check out the work they did for litl.
UserPlus.org has created a pretty cool forum for web designers, developers, information architects, interaction designers, and usability specialists to share their design best practices.…
The gang over at SmallerIndiana, have posted all of the video content from the Bigger Ideas Conference. If you missed the event, head on over here, to catch-up on what you missed out on.
I thought this was a pretty interesting presentation by Mint CEO Aaron Patzer. The same Mint that just sold to Intuit for 170 Million. He shares his thoughts on selecting co-founders, how to dole out equity, what to pay employees, etc. It’s a pretty revealing look into Mint’s early days.
The slide presentation, compliments of TechCrunch, can be found below.
I finished “The King of Madison Avenue” by Kenneth Roman, a few months ago. The book is probably the most comprehensive (and accurate) biography of David Ogilvy ever written. I’ve been meaning to turn a couple of the choicest, dog-eared pages into blog posts for some time now. I still plan to do that, specifically around his views on the importance of good writing in the creative industry, but for the time being I thought I’d just pull a couple of quotes out of the book that I thought were especially compelling.
On committees:
“Search your parks in all your cities, you’ll find no statues of committees. Committees can criticize design (advertisements), but they cannot create them.”
On showing multiple options to clients:
Points were made…
I rarely swing off of Seth Godin. I get it – he’s a smart, charismatic, little guy, who’s figured out how to write a dozen 50 page books a year built around one catch phrase. He’s made a mint and garnered legions of devoted fans in the process.
But today, I’m giving it up for Mr. Godin. Big ups for his chat on thrashing, shipping, and blowing up balloons.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’d be publishing a post based on my notes from Harry Kraemer’s talk on leadership at Camp Hern. Below are my sketch notes from the presentation (sans analysis and commentary).
About Harry Kraemer Harry is an executive partner with Madison Dearborn, a private equity firm based in Chicago and also a clinical professor of management and strategy at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois. He is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Baxter International Inc., a $9 billion global healthcare company. He became Baxter’s chief executive officer in January 1999, and assumed the additional responsibility of chairman of Baxter’s board of directors in January 2000.
A Mobius strip is a surface with only one side and only one boundary component. The story goes that if an ant were to saunter along the entire length of this strip, it would return to its starting point having traversed both sides of the strip, without ever crossing an edge. A Mobius strip falls into a category us designers like to refer to as an “impossible shape”. It’s a ribbon that is so convoluted you can’t determine where it stops or starts. It’s the absolute opposite of flat.
The Mobius strip serves as a fitting, albeit contrarian, visual metaphor for our globalized economy.
I recently had dinner with Jared Brown. Jared is a friend of mine and a local iPhone…
This weekend, I had the opportunity to moderate (which is a bit of a stretch) a panel discussion on Web 2.0 and the future of software development at Camp Hern. Camp Hern is an informal gathering of mid-career executives and seasoned business leaders that takes place in various locales every year. This year’s event took place from August 28-30 in Chicago, IL.
Our expert panelists for the discussion were Jason Fried, of 37 Signals (developer of BaseCamp), and Chris Baggott, of Compendium Blogware (and one of the founders of ExactTarget). The discussion was highly interactive and felt a lot more like a casual conversation, rather than a typical panel discussion. We gathered around an outdoor fireplace, at our host’s home…
Recently we were informed by a client, with whom we had been working for several months, that they were moving their account to a design shop, located in a very large city on the east coast. It wasn’t ugly or contentious, there were no angry words, or overt slights – it was all quite civilized. But that didn’t temper the sting of rejection. This particular relationship was, by our standards, extremely short-lived. Of course, we’ve had client relationships die slow deaths of attrition. It’s a fundamental law that in this profession, client/agency relationships will come and go… and oftentimes come back again. But this experience was something all together different. The terminus of a less than ideal working relationship typically…
