Category : Miscellaneous

Over the past year and a half, KA+A has been in league with Indiana's leading minds in the local agriculture and culinary worlds to bring back a revitalized Taste of Indiana, Dig-IN. (Read more about our re-branding process here.)

Set to premiere this August 29th, Dig-IN will take place at the White River State Park, featuring a rockstar lineup of Chefs (Neal Brown, Chris Eley, Greg Hardesty, Regina Mehallick, Eli Anderson, Scott Wise and many more) who are paired up with local producers to masterfully create an all-local dish. In addition, there will be over 20 local wineries and breweries brought together for you by the Indiana Wine Grape Council and Brewers of Indiana Guild. All…

I was recently introduced to The Underwater Project, a photographic series depicting people, as you might guess, underwater. Most of the shots show people in the middle of, or directly underneath, a wave. As you can see above, the results are stunning, often times otherworldly. This image series isn't just beautiful, it's representative of how changing your perspective and truly immersing yourself in something reveals that, often, things and situations aren't as you imagined. There's a lesson for designers and UX folks somewhere in there…

I had the opportunity to be the final speaker at the 2010 Indianapolis Startup Weekend event on Sunday afternoon. For the uninitiated, I've included a bit of background from the Startup Weekend website below.

I'll admit it – I'm a recovering design process deliverables junkie. Historically, the generation of process maps, usability audits, wireframes, site diagrams, application flows, mental models, task-level scenarios, user stories, standards documentation, conceptual frameworks, content audits, navigation maps, and countless other examples of design ephemera, were so central to the work that we created for clients that we began to view them as the work we were creating for our clients. In reality, as important as many of those deliverables may be, they are just means to an end. The end – is a finished product that customers want to purchase and use and a solution that meets or exceeds…

Over the past few years Indianapolis has quietly been growing into a bonafide  startup hub – boasting an impressive array of tech startups, service providers, funding sources, and industry events and organizations. It's gotten so robust in fact, that it's becoming difficult to keep track of everything thats going on. As many of you all know, the gang at KA+A has been working on a really cool project for the past couple of weeks that we're calling the "Indy Startup Genome Project". In short, we're attempting to map the entire Indianapolis startup ecosystem.

We've started by pulling together a list of all the tech-oriented startup in Indy. Currently it's an incomplete list. If you are a founder of an Indianapolis-based startup or you are aware of one that is not our list…

With the upcoming release of Apple’s iPad (April 3rd, 2010), there has been an increasing amount of buzz recently around the change in the way we will consume media. With an estimated 40-50 tablet devices set for release by early 2011, Wired Magazine, in partnership with Adobe, has seen this as an opportunity to rethink the way we connect with magazine brands, leading to a fundamental shift in the way Wired is produced with it’s new digital app. At the SXSW panel After Magazines: Wired’s Digital Rebirth, panelists Scott Dadich (Creative Director, Wired Magazine) and Jeremy Clark (Senior Experience Design Manager, Adobe) explained the production methods of the app using Adobe Air, and showcased…

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…



Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

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…

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…