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 of these tastings are included in the $15 ticket price.

Dig-IN also will feature a stellar lineup of speakers, discussing everything from nutrition to gardening, from cooking locally to a farm-to-fork panel that traces the journey from field to tabletop. Urban gardening sessions with Laura Henderson and Growing Places Indy, delicious sweets for sale prepared by Indiana Artisans, Food for Thought exhibit by the Humanities Council, a Pedal and Park program, and musical performance by Jookabox, jascha. and Kate Lamont will be occuring throughout the event.

Check out Dig-IN’s newly launched website for more information, and follow on Twitter to make sure you are up on all the latest. Tickets can be purchased at Marsh Supermarkets, or online. Be sure to reserve your spot in advance – tickets are limited!

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.

Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.

Founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde, the weekend is a concept of a conference focusing on learning by creating. It is known for its quick decisions, ‘out of the box’ thinking (oh no, the buzzwords are attacking!), unique facilitation technique and letting the founders show what they can do. The program has already met with success in indianapolis, Toronto, New York, Hamburg, Houston, West Lafayette, indianapolis, DC and more.

The participants that attend a Startup Weekend decide what they want to tackle over the weekend and come out at the end with several developed companies or projects. Attendees are responsible for bringing the same desire and passion to the project and walk out of the room with the task at hand, in a short 54 hours. Sound intense? It is.

By all accounts the weekend was a success and the groups produced three strong concepts:

Zankit
http://www.zankit.com

GoBizSpeak
http://www.gobizspeak.com

NinjaButton
http://twitter.com/ninjabutton

You can view my presentation on “Designing A Startup” on SlideShare.

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 the clients expectations.

So before I start a holy war about the importance of research, process, and planning in User Experience Design (UX), let me be clear – all of the steps and deliverables mentioned above are, in many scenarios, important and useful elements of the design process. But as time has gone by, and we’ve continued to refine our own approach to design, we’ve begun to realize that by over-emphasizing their importance we’re doing a disservice to our clients and ourselves. Sometimes, some (and very rarely all) of, these deliverables are critical to delivering a winning design solution. But trotting them out in front of clients in an often vain attempt to either impress them, overwhelm them, or justify your fees often has the inverse effect.

In a brilliant post, titled “An Open Letter To The Design Community“, Marty Cagan at the Silicon Valley Product Group details some common traps that designers often fall prey to. In particular he extolls the virtues of getting to the real product, via Hi-Fidelity prototypes, as quickly as possible.

“Please people, if you want to succeed at your company, just remember this rule: the only thing that works to explain your design to execs and stakeholders are prototypes, the higher the fidelity the better.  Do yourself a favor and keep the sausage making within the design team.  Some execs will want to know how you got from here to there, and that’s okay, so long as you start with them understanding where “there” is.”

Do yourself a favor and keep the sausage making within the design team.

We’ve discovered a much more liberating way to engage our clients, do away with a ton of busy work, and deliver better design solutions in the bargin. In short, it’s about getting to the point. You can’t cut corners or entirely abandon the development of design support materials, but you can get much smarter about determining what design deliverables are essential to the projects success and which ones are only part of your process because you feel they have to be. I can promise you, at least in our experience, that most clients don’t care and aren’t nearly as impressed by many of the process-oriented deliverables that we, as designers, have come to hold sacred.

We’ve discovered a much more liberating way to engage our clients, do away with a ton of busy work, and deliver better design solutions in the bargin.

I’m not suggesting that you can go from a back of the napkin sketch to a fully functional product design without going through the painstaking process of researching user needs, mapping complex interactions, and creating comprehensive design specifications. What I am saying is that, that’s the stuff in the kitchen that you darn well better know how to execute on and that getting to something worthy of presentation in the dining room is where your focus should be. The faster you can get to a “real world” manifestation of the final product the happier your client will be and the sooner you’ll be able to begin the process of refining the design solution.

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, please go here and submit it. There are lots of really great young companies here in Indy, but for the time being we are predominantly focusing on technology and technology-enabled businesses in the web space (software, web-apps, etc.). For the time being, we’re not focusing on advanced manufacturing, life sciences, or service-based businesses – but that will come.

Once we’ve got a good handle on startup landscape in Indianapolis, we’ll begin to flesh out the other side(s) of the coin… infrastructure, support services, funding, etc. We’ve begun to detail some of that already, but its a work in progress. We’re using a really cool application called Mindmeister to create a mind map of the ecosystem. You can check out a truncated view below, or click through to see the whole thing. One the infrastructure and services tip we are really looking for businesses that specialize in working with and for startups. We’re really looking for businesses and organizations that are focused on the Indy startup space. Indianapolis is achieving critical mass in the startup infrastructure space and that is what we want to highlight.

If you have a startup or a technology/web-based startup to recommend or would like to ask a question, hit me up on Twitter @kristianindy and let me know about it. But take a look at the mind map we’ve set-up first so that you can get an idea of what we’re looking for.

Note: Regarding “stages” (e.g. seed, growth, established, etc.) These are pretty fluid terms, but you can use the following brief descriptions for context.

Early/Seed Stage – Building the product and proving the concept

Growth Stage – Growing the business and becoming self-sustaining

Established – Profitable, stable, managed growth

Once the mapping process is completed, we’ll publish the entire Indy Startup Genome Project online for public consumption.

Warning: This is a work in progress. There will be errors and omissions. If you find an error or omission, let us know in the comments.

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 its features with a multi-platform demo.

Wired’s Goal: Publish Once, Author Anywhere

The average Wired article takes 24 days to go from initial copy to finished layout—a tight timeframe considering Wired is a monthly publication. Luckily, the team responsible for the print version of the mag are able to repurpose the layouts for use on the iPad and other devices, with only incremental hours, and no need for any additional staff.

Whereas reading a print magazine is a single-axis, linear experience, Wired have succeeded in developing their digital magazine into a multi-axis, non-linear experience. Articles are navigated by swiping left and right, while pages within these articles are accessed by swiping up and down. In addition to this, readers can tap the screen to bring up the ‘Scrubber’, a scrolling navigation bar that allows the reader to scroll page-by-page through the magazine. There is also a ‘Browse’ mode, which provides a fully zoomed-out view, allowing easy access to any article or page with just a couple of taps.

It’s not just Print, it’s Print Plus

The digital app is not simply a straight, digitized version of the print mag, it is much more. The app utilizes audio and video, perfect for providing snippets of interviews, music clips and movie trailers. Illustrations, charts and diagrams can be animated and even allow reader interaction. Photography has a whole new lease of life with the use of galleries, allowing multiple images to occupy the same space, accessed with a swipe of the finger, and 360 VR imagery allows the reader to see more of a tested product than a typical 2D photo. The orientation of the iPad plays a big part in the layout of the articles too. Rotating the iPad from landscape to portrait (or vice-versa) can switch editorial images, offering different perspectives on the same image, or zoom in on interactive content that appears smaller in the alternative orientation.

Of course, it’s not just editorial content that gets the special treatment. Using the same features listed above, consumers can interact with their favorite brands in a whole new way. Fashion labels can showcase collections in one ad and can utilize high-resolution photography to allow detailed close-ups (using your finger and the ‘Rover Dot’ to move around each image). Automotive brands can use 360 VR photography to allow rotatable views of their vehicles. Music labels can embed clips of songs or albums, just as movie studios can embed movie trailers, clips and featurettes.

Reflective vs. Emissive Displays

Many skeptics have expressed concern that reading long articles on the iPad, which uses an emissive light display (LCD/LED screen), brings on eye fatigue much faster than on devices such as Amazon’s Kindle, which uses a monochromatic, reflective light display. Due to the high resolution display of the iPad, Wired are able to use the same custom typeface family they do in the print version of their magazine. Wired’s typefaces were specifically designed to minimize the amount eye fatigue reader. Further research into reflective vs. emissive light displays is being conducted in conjunction with Hoefler & Frere Jones, although they admit there could be years of work ahead in this respect. Also, the monochromatic display of the Kindle isn’t conducive to an engaging, immersive interactive experience like that of the iPad.

The Better the Design,
The Easier the Reading Experience,
The Deeper the Engagement,
The More Connected the User,
The Stronger the Brand Relationship.

Social networking is expected to play a huge part in Wired’s digital rebirth, with Twitter, Facebook and email integration directly within the app, with content sharing capabilities being implemented. The ability for ‘Favorite’ articles will also be present, as well as strong search capabilities. Content will have a ’sticky’ shelf life and will be available for purchase/viewing from within the app. Finally, user engagement will be tracked using Omniture (the web analytics platform acquired by Adobe in October 2009).

Wired’s iPad app is set for release this summer, through the iPad app store. Versions for other devices such as iPhone and Google’s Nexus 1 later in the year. Subscription pricing TBA.

Wired rocks audience at SXSW with iPad demo from Mangrove on Vimeo.

]]> http://www.kaplusa.com/blog/2010/03/sxsw-wired%e2%80%99s-digital-rebirth/feed/ 0 http://www.kaplusa.com/blog/2010/03/whats-your-point-social-media-at-its-best/ http://www.kaplusa.com/blog/2010/03/whats-your-point-social-media-at-its-best/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:08:19 +0000 Janneane Blevins http://www.kaplusa.com/blog/?p=3524 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 interfacing with one another. There is no script – only a topic for discussion. The host, who greets each guest with an abrasive, “World Have Your Say. What’s your point?” certainly orchestrates the conversation, making sure everyone gets their turn, but the meat of the show is listening to the people proffer up their opinions on a particular issue. Now often, you’ll hear something you don’t agree with, or the host’s bias will come uncovered – and that’s all intentional. The show aims to get you piqued, engaged (or enraged), and want to call, tweet, blog, text to defend your point of view.

I’ve seen many ways that people are using social media to engage people – but this one stands out. Doug Karr sums up well, why organizations like WHYS are so successful with their social media, in his recent post, “Social Media Marketing is about the Social, Not the Media.” World Have Your Say views the social media tools just like any other – Twitter is no better than the website, or even the radio as a medium. All of these are just different ways to reach a broader audience, and involve them in a unified, dynamic conversation. World Have Your Say places the emphasis on the social, and connecting the World to the truth.

Here’s how you can tune into World Have Your Say:

Tune in: 90.1 FM, 1-2PM weekdays
Email : worldhaveyoursay@bbc.com
Call: +44 20 70 83 72 72
Text: +44 77 86 20 60 80
Blog
Twitter
Facebook
Flickr
YouTube

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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 text by graphic designers and typesetters for the last 50 years (and possibly as far back as the 15th Century), Lorem Ipsum was chosen because it closely represents the ‘shape’ of modern text and can be dropped in place of real text for layout purposes. It is based on an excerpt of de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Goods and Evils), written by Cicero in 45 B.C. Its approximate translation is as follows:

“Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?”

I say ‘approximate translation’ because the standard Lorem Ipsum passage is full of grammatical errors and omissions, effectively rendering it as nonsense. Of course, because of its new intended purpose and the fall in Latin literacy this isn’t really a problem. Using Lorem Ipsum to fill in for a paragraph of text is by no means ideal but I suppose is acceptable. Using it to fill in for headlines, taglines or any copy that should inform a client of intended messaging is most definitely not.

There are plenty alternatives to Lorem Ipsum available online, but mostly all are comprised of random words to make up nonsense text. One example is the Malevole Text Generator, which generates paragraphs based on popular 80s TV show theme tunes. While this is certainly amusing, it is not really appropriate for, say, a mock-up of a law firm’s website.

Back in the days when QuarkXPress was the primary layout application for print designers, there existed a plug-in called Jabberwocky. Jabberwocky generated the same nonsense text as the majority of today’s online text generators, but it had one trick up its sleeve—the option for designers to specify nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., to generate custom paragraphs of text. That meant it was possible to generate copy that was specific to your target audience, e.g. by entering law-specific terminology to use in a layout for a law firm.

I suppose the redeeming factors of Lorem Ipsum are its wide recognition and the obliviousness of people to its original meaning. Reading the first couple of words is enough for most to understand it will be replaced with real text somewhere down the line. Bearing that in mind, would a web app based on Quark’s Jabberwocky be a good idea? I think it could work and would be a great side project. Until that day I suppose I’ll just keep using Lorem Ipsum.

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 the keyboard, avoiding the need for separate opening and closing quote marks. Straight quotes are commonly used in place of proper quotation marks or ‘curly quotes’. Many designers will tell you that straight quotes are used to represent feet and inches, but in reality, feet and inches should be represented using primes. Straight quotes are obsolete and should not
be used.

Incorrect Hyphenation and Sentence Breaks

Hyphens are the most commonly used method of splitting sentences and indicating ranges of values. However, hyphens should only be used to split words across lines or to connect compound words (e.g. double-barreled). To indicate a break in thought in a sentence, an em dash with hairline spaces should be used (an en dash with a space before and after is also acceptable, but should be kerned appropriately).

Horizontal and Vertical Scaling

Well-designed typefaces have varying degrees of contrast between horizontal and vertical strokes. For example, in most sans-serif typefaces the vertical strokes are optically thicker than horizontals in order for them to look the same width. Distorting type through scaling upsets the balance of a typeface. With vertical scaling the vertical strokes can become too thick, disrupting the left-to-right flow of a piece of type, and smooth curves can appear to ‘peak’ in certain areas. With extreme horizontal scaling the horizontal strokes become thinner than the verticals. If it is really necessary to distort type, it should be no more than 1-2% wider before it becomes obviously noticeable. It is best practice to use a typeface family with the appropriate widths for your needs – many now have multiple widths ranging from Ultra Compressed to Extended.

Auto-Styling

Many design and layout applications permit ‘faked’ bold, italic and small caps. The apps use mathematical algorithms to stroke, slant and scale individual characters. Adding a stroke to make a bold weight loses some of the details that aid legibility, and simply skewing the typeface affects the overall weight and can cause some strokes to virtually disappear. Fake small caps are achieved by forcing lowercase characters to uppercase and scaling them down, making them feel narrower and lighter than the original lowercase. Commercial typefaces are designed with multiple weights, italics and variants, each with carefully considered optical corrections and custom-designed glyphs. For example, bold weights have greater contrast between horizontal and vertical strokes, italics generally utilize a single-storey lowercase ‘a’, and small caps have been width- and weight-corrected for optical balance. Again, the best solution is to choose a type family with the appropriate variants for your needs. Please, steer clear of auto-styling.

Widows, Orphans and Rivers

“An orphan has no past, a widow has no future.” An orphan is a single word line at the end of a paragraph. A widow is a single line of text at the top of a column. Both result in excessive white space which interrupts the balance of a set piece of text. A river is a line of white space that appears to run through a paragraph of text. Creative kerning and letter-spacing, or rewriting the text is the only effective solution to these issues.

Poor Kerning

Typefaces are generally spaced for text usage (small) and not for display purposes (large). Manual kerning is required to make display type look evenly spaced, a practice which is non-existent outside the design community, and one which many designers tend to overlook. It is also worth noting that the majority of typefaces are designed with tabular figures – numbers which sit within an equal space so they line up perfectly in tables. For text and display purposes, this needs a lot of manual correction. Some typefaces have sets of lining and old-style figures, but again these tend to be spaced for text use, unless there are size-specific variants.

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. A lot of typographic knowledge can be gained in the workplace, but with the demise of the dedicated design agency proofreader, there is less chance of catching typographic errors before a project goes live or to print.

The average non-designer reading a newspaper or browsing online probably doesn’t care about typography and has no awareness of when something is wrong. For example, not many will be able to tell you the difference between dumb quotes, foot and inch marks, or quotation marks. Almost all standard installed system fonts use tabular figures so they don’t think about—and really have no method of—kerning numerals set within text.

Technology is a major barrier in the way of good typography. There aren’t enough keys on a computer keyboard to have separate keys for hyphen, em dash and en dash, or for separate open and closed, single and double quotation mark keys. Designers have to rely on keyboard shortcuts to find the characters they need, and some don’t even have keyboard shortcuts at all—in that case a character viewer such as PopChar on the Mac is needed, or several minutes of trawling through Alt character tables on Windows.

Some software developers have implemented a Smart Quotes feature in their applications that automatically substitutes dumb quotes for quotation marks. This is a step in the right direction, but really it only just masks the problem.

Online typography is a whole other issue as there is currently not a lot of typographic control available. That is changing, albeit slowly, as updates to HTML and CSS are rolled out. It wasn’t until HTML 4 that many of the appropriate characters became available for use, but it takes a lot longer to type ’ for a right single quote than simply ", so you can already see the route the majority will take. Kerning web fonts is still a no-go and for the time being it seems unlikely to stay that way. It’s unlikely there will ever be as much typographic control on screen as is in traditional media.

So, could you tell what was wrong with the type in the first image? It uses a horizontally-scaled typeface, ‘dumb’ quotes, double hyphen and forced bold auto-styling. Below is the way the opening statement should have been written, with appropriate typeface, ‘curly’ quotes and en dash:

Just as the boom in SMS messaging signaled a rise in bad grammar and punctuation, so too is technology at least partly responsible for the decline in typographic literacy. As a designer I feel responsible for raising awareness of these issues and educating people on the way things should be done. Here are some examples of common typographic errors and how to correct them.