It’s a term that, for me, conjures up feelings of nausea and disgust as much as “root canal” and “Microsoft PowerPoint.” It is a practice wrought with numerous flaws and ethical dilemmas, its concept undermining the core principles of brand design, the very industry in which it operates. For small start-ups with limited funds, design crowdsourcing may be a perfectly affordable and even suitable solution to their design needs, but for established companies hoping to grow their brand, it is wholly inappropriate, and an ill-considered solution such as this, could be detrimental to their brand in the long run.
Crowdsourcing is “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it
I created this a while back for our studio tour, part of AIGA Indy’s Studio Tour Series. The original animation looped seamlessly, starting and ending on the same screen, which had a pretty hypnotic effect. I could probably watch if for days.
Over the past several months, we’ve had the opportunity to consult on a variety of projects with FormSpring, from developing a new identity to designing a new website that just launched this weekend. FormSpring enables organizations of all types to easily build online forms to collect data and then leverage that data through a comprehensive suite of tools.
Learn more about the smart way to collect and manage data here.…
Tomorrow the team from Kristian Andersen + Associates saddles up and heads to Austin, TX for a few days of pixels, podcasts, angry academics, lonely gamers, geeky tech-moguls, mexican food for breakfast, and Shiner. Stay tuned for daily dispatches from the front lines…
Gravity Ventures, LLC., an angel capital fund focused on investing in early-stage, high-growth businesses, was featured in the Indianapolis Business Journal this weekend. Gravity Ventures emerged out of discussions we had been having around the studio for several years. For several years Kristian Andersen + Associates had been in the process of formalizing the process of making equity investments in our clients. We knew that there was a larger opportunity (and demand) for a fund that would allow mid-career executives to make smart venture investments. Six months ago I, along with the other managing member Mike Fitzgerald, launched Gravity Ventures. Since then we have successfully raised a committed fund (in arguably the toughest fund raising environment in the past 75 years)…
Stanford University and Neutron (an SF brand consultancy) recently asked 1,500 top American executives to identify the wickedest* problems their companies face. The number one problem? Balancing long-term goals with short-term demands.
As the role of design in business has shifted over the past decade or so (and KA+A’s focus has shifted along with it) we’ve seen firsthand how this is indeed a persistent and perplexing issue. As we integrate more tightly with product and marketing teams we often get a close look at how the struggle to balance immediate and felt needs with future goals and ambitions can play out in an organization.
Just a few days ago, I finally succumbed to Sudoku – the famous 9×9 grid logic puzzle in which you disperse digits 1 – 9 in each column, row, and 3×3 box only one time each, invented by Indy’s own Howard Garns of the Dagget architecture firm in 1979.
Other than the sheer satisfaction of declaring myself winner after completing each puzzle, the tangential benefits to my job as KA+A’s Account Manager is a big plus, or a least it’s one way of rationalizing the copious amounts of time I spend with the game. At its core, Sudoku is a game that exercises our reasoning and intellect, and our ability to account for the simultaneous unique happenings of each box, which is why I’ve selected it as a lens through…
Or at least it becomes well documented. During the nearly two years that I have been Account Manager for Kristian Andersen + Associates, our project management system has evolved from instinct and concepts to tangible archives. While intuition is still very much a part of the process, we have freed up our time to focus on the right concepts, by putting the details on paper so to speak. This act of documenting action items and ideas makes them official and accountable.
After several months of browsing and trying on different project management suites, we settled into 37Signals’ Basecamp – and boy does it feel good! The biggest value Basecamp has added to our project management is documentation. With its intertwined system of Milestones, To-do’s, Messages, and File posting, Basecamp…
I was listening to a great interview with Don Norman, by the folks over at AdaptivePath (listen here), this afternoon, and was taken aback when I heard him say that he advices all of his students to “not attempt to solve the problem that is asked of you (by clients)”. It didn’t take long for the point of his statement to sink-in. He went on to explain that they (clients) are almost always asking you to solve the wrong problem and that the most difficult part of design is to determine what the real problem is that your designing for.
We’ve been practicing and preaching this (albeit with a less antagonistic tone) for years. A client’s reaction to this approach can often be very telling, and in many…
This year the staff at Kristian Andersen + Associates traveled from Indianapolis to New York City for our annual Holiday party . It was a whirl-wind 48 hour trip for the KA+A team (excepting Clay and Erin – who decided to prolong their holiday). We started with a little consumer marketing research (aka shopping) and finished with dinner at Nobu. We were blessed with a perfect NYC Christmas experience, including copious amounts of snow, sleet, and the tangy scent of urine on the subway.…
