Design

So read the headline of a New York Time's article a few weeks back, you probably saw some coverage of the dizzying slide showing linkages between various constituencies in Afganistan.  Without going any further into that slide, or the article about it and the relationship of PowerPoint and military strategy, I'd like to highlight some ideas about slides and presentations.

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"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." Anonymous, often attributed to Dan Quayle

Determining if your website project will be a success or failure is tricky. It's like trying to decide if the pizza you're about to eat will be good or bad (which can be a trick question- when is pizza ever that bad?). 

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As part of any major web redesign effort, CivicActions recommends a brand re-assessment. Cone Inc., a communications company specializing in "cause branding," recently stated that because of undeveloped branding efforts, "some organizations may be leaving millions of dollars in potential unearned revenue on the table." The company recently released a report of the 100 top Non-profit brands.

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Smashing Magazine posted a really great "best practices" piece about web design for non profits. They then provided 20 examples of great non profit websites, among them, two CivicActions clients, Amnesty International, of which they said:

The Amnesty International site makes great use of color, including a bright yellow header and accents mixed with shades of gray and black. A slideshow on the home page shows current news and research. Links to join, donate, or take other action are featured prominently in the sidebar and a link to media information is included in the header. The home page also includes plenty of current news and resources below the main content up top.

And Witness.org, for whom we built the Video Hub. We are very proud of our work for these two worldchanging clients, and happy that they are being recognized not only for their great work, but for their websites as exemplars for the non profit sector.

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Like any relatively new field of study Information Architecture is still trying to define itself. Is it a practice in and of itself? Or is it/should it be part of a broader field that uses other tools and produces additional artifacts? The IA Summit endeavored to create a dialog around what this practice can actually encompass when considering users' interactions with information. The summit itself intimated at our need to begin bridging the gap between traditional IA (links and pages) and the burgeoning social and semantic web (contexts and connections). First, the theme of the summit was "Expanding Our Horizons," suggesting the practice look beyond those tools and techniques we've come to know and love (hi sitemaps).

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For a long time I have wondered how the teams that design car stereos can fail so miserably at making car stereos easy to use. The function of a car stereo is not complicated, and there are few tasks that need to be considered in the design of a car stereo interface. Approximately in order of importance these tasks are;

1. lower the volume
2. kill the sound
3. raise the volume
4. select the source (e.g. FM, AM, CD, Auxiliary)
5. skip tracks
6. change the frequency

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If picture is worth 1000 words, that would make this 5 minute, 15fps video worth at least 300K words on Photoshop tips.

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What is one of the best tips to get out of the creative slump? Need to find that extra juice for your Drupal theme? It may be simple, but I love to use Flickr for my inspiration! Flickr has millions of photos, and thousands of groups to showcase amazing work. Vandelay Design has compiled a list of 99 Flickr groups to help get you unstuck, such as: http://flickr.com/groups/webdesign-inspiration/ http://flickr.com/groups/illustrationnow/ http://flickr.com/groups/psdtuts/ http://flickr.com/groups/photoshop/ http://flickr.com/groups/designtype/ http://flickr.com/groups/yourvector/ Inspired! That's the way we work!

What originally began as one man’s blog showcasing his personal collection of non-profit ads, has in three years developed into a clearinghouse for social marketing campaigns from around the globe. I was first brought to this site through another rad source of socially conscious designers I’ve been affiliated with over the years, the Graphic Alliance.

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