Category : Various & Sundry

It amazes me that more organizations don't show pictures of their team/staff/employees on their website. In a world where we've come to loath giant, faceless corporations, proving that there are living, breathing, caring, people behind your organization would be a good thing. A great thing. What's there to be afraid? Stalkers? Is the team really so ugly that their mugs can't appear on the site? Or is the team so transient that upkeep would be too much of a challenge? If you really want to create two-way dialogue and meaningful relationships with your customers (i.e. join the conversation on the social web), then give your customers access to your people. We don't have relationships with abstract entities in the same way that we do with flesh and blood people. Not even if…

Jared Brown is the founder of Talentopoly.com, a web startup improving the job hunt by helping talented candidates be found. Candidates can free their resumes from the pay walls of other job sites by hosting their resume publicly on Talentopoly.

We all know about outsourcing and offshoring. If you're like me the word offshoring conjures up thoughts of talking to someone with a thick accent in India while trying to understand why your computer beeps twice then flatlines when you press the power button. But if that's offshoring, what's INsourcing?

Indiana has lots of great universities. In fact several of them are top 10 for certain majors. The list includes the University of Notre Dame, Purdue University, Indiana University, Ball State University, and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. The…

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…

Every year, as we arrive in Austin, we usually head immediately to our favorite spot, The Boiling Pot, for some spicy crawfish and Shiner Bock. And every year, our guest list continues to grow. We didn't have any trouble finding Hoosiers in Austin this year as we were pleased to have over 40 of our friends join us to kick off what ended up being a very memorable and engaging week. With everyone's hands and eyes cemented to their iPhones for the remainder of the conference, the menu at The Boiling Pot seemed the appropriate choice to start it off, forcing us to put down our phones for some real socializing and interaction.

Joining us this year was the Formstack &…



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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.

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…

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…