Zande+Newman Design’s blog about anything and everything. Sometimes even design. But mostly about cool stuff, New Orleans, and a dog named Keaux Keaux.
A 25 year old Hungarian designer, Martzi Hegedűs, gave himself the challenge of designing a typeface inspired by M.C. Escher. He wanted the typeface to be legible but also for each letter to contain some move that is impossible. He is calling the typeface Frustro.
More details over at Co. Design
Our clients include many professional services companies so I was interested to read Top 10 Branding Ideas for Professional Services Firms by Lee W. Frederiksen. His quick read contains some insights that many of our professional services clients will benefit from hearing.
Frederiksen’s big idea is to change the way you think about what counts as marketing for professional service firms. Traditionally, this has included trade shows and cheap give aways such as coffee mugs, t-shirts, etc.
Instead, think about creating content that is valuable to your potential customers and then give them that content for free as a means of establishing your expertise in the field.
While potential clients may indeed take your free coffee mug and keep it in the company break room, wouldn’t you rather they be reading your white paper on important trends in their industry and thinking about how they could partner with you to improve their business?
Not all of Frederiksen’s 10 tips will feel right for your particular business or industry. But I recommend reading the article and thinking about how you might be able to adapt one to improve your business.
My friend, Ed Melendez, hipped me to a recent post by Jakob Nielsen outlining his latest thinking on investing in mobile applications vs. investing in the development of mobile sites. I found it interesting because the first insight was not what I expected:
Ship mobile apps if you can afford it.
I had not expected this recommendation but I after reading his analysis I get where he is coming from. Today, we can often deliver a user experience via mobile applications that is superior to that which can be delivered via a mobile website.
However, the nuance of his discussion comes as he looks forward. Insight number 2:
Be aware that the cost of mobile apps will increase as platforms proliferate.
Not only the cost of developing for an increasing number of platforms but the ongoing maintenance of applications and the data. This should be a serious concern for many organizations and underscores the second half of his original statement: Ship mobile apps if you can afford it.
Insight 3:
In the long-term, mobile sites are the way to go.
While there are some user experience trade-offs today, developing mobile sites rather than investing in mobile apps will help you avoid excessive development and maintenance costs associated with mobile apps, will allow you to avoid paying money to various app store owners, and — perhaps most importantly — will allow better integration with the larger world of the web.
In the end, Nielsen reiterates what he said back in 1999, the internet will defeat smaller, closed environments.
And in the end, that is good for us and for our clients. I recommend reading Nielsen’s full analysis
We have been advising our clients for some time now not to waste resources coding to support Microsoft Explorer IE-6. Now Microsoft is saying the same thing: Good Riddance.
“Time to pop open the champagne because based on the latest data from Net Applications, IE6 usages in the US has now officially dropped below 1%,” blogged Roger Capriotti, Microsoft’s director of Internet Explorer marketing.
“We hope this means more developers and IT pros can consider IE6 a ‘low priority’ at this point and stop spending their time having to support such an outdated browser,” he added.
We couldn’t agree more.
I’ve always been a big fan of Terry Gilliam’s work. His utopian, dystopian, and just plain interesting worlds have fascinated me since I first discovered the Monty Python as a kid. His mixing of past and future, mythology and modernism is unparalleled. So I enjoyed reading some of his thoughts on the creative process.
I refuse to intellectualize, or try to understand how it happens. It happens, and I just try to ride with it. And the frightening thing is when it doesn’t happen, it’s actually terrifying because you realize, “I’ve dried up. It’s finally happened: the well is empty.” But, then if you get through those periods, then something starts happening again. A lot of what happens, it’s like doing a painting without actually doing a sketch in advance. You just start and you got this, you add another thing, boom, boom, boom.
This post contains two things I love — neither of which am I terribly good at: surfing and photography.
Be sure to check out both videos. One shows the final product but the other gives a bit of the background — at least as well as a bunch of surfers can explain it — of how they did it. Great intersection of technology, creativity, and waves.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to remark on this, but I can’t get over how poetic this intersection is. Only in New Orleans would Jefferson Davis Parkway dead end at Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard.
Once again Roger over at 2d Code points us to a cool new possibility for implementing QR codes. QRpedia.org is a website which will generate QR Codes for any wikipedia entry. Beyond this, the QRpedia code resolves back to their servers where the information from the HTTP header is used to determine the mobile devices’ preferred language and deliver the Wikipedia article in that language. As Roger points out, this technology is
ideal for museums and far superior to resolving to an entry in the same language for every user.
2d Code has a great example posted so you can see this in action . I believe there are interesting possibilities for this technology in retail settings — especially in a place like New Orleans (or other tourist destinations) — to provide shoppers with relevant information when people may not be shopping in their native language.
I first read Chris Palmieri’s article, “How Responsive Web Design Becomes Responsive Web Publishing,” a couple weeks back. Since then I’ve found myself thinking about the implications and opportunities of his exploration.
Rather than thinking about mobile devices first and foremost as ‘mobile’, Chris asks us to think about them as personal devices . This has profound implications for how these devices might interact with the web to deliver a customized user experience. Beyond that, however, it begs us as designers to think about how we might reframe our content to deliver meaningful information to users we now know just a bit more about — such as where they are.
Chris created a demo showing how content of a news story — in this case a map of the recent riots in London — might be improved by incorporating location information from a mobile device. Be sure to visit his demo at “ http://aqworks.com/articles/responsive/ from your mobile phone and see how this new content approach increases understanding of an event that for many of us was distant and abstract.
If you are interested in responsive web design, responsive web publishing deserves some consideration. And Chris’s article is a great place to start.
Draw your own stickman and go on a HTML5 adventure. In order to play, make sure you have a modern browser !