Recently in Design Category

One aspect of customer service that should be on every website is the Help Text.  And it should be easy to understand and to use.  I've tried the Help section on a certain search engine and found myself ready to toss my laptop off the balcony and into oncoming traffic because the help prompts locked me into a never-ending loop of "not quite what I was looking for".  To make things worse, they didn't offer an easy way to contact them with queries; everything had to go through their click-button, automated help system.

Lyle Mullican, in an article on A List Apart, offers some insight, tips and best practices for developing user-friendly help text.  Take a look: Good Help is Hard to Find.

Image from St. Johns County Virtual School

Here's a great idea - talented (and clever) Illustrator Kelly Light has banded together Illustrators both famous and not so well known, to help the animals harmed by the BP Oil Spill.

Kudos to her for donating all her time to do this, too. It looks like a ton of work.

Here's the concept: Kelly posts sketchcards and the first person to send her an email saying they'll buy it gets it. Then all the money (as the artists donate their time and talent to the cause)
goes to The Institute for Marine Mammal Studies and The International Bird Rescue Research Center.

The cards are usually $10, but she's doing something interesting for July by having a Great American Illustrator month and offering sketchcards for a $50 donation. Artists featured include Mo Willems,  Stephen Silver, Jarrett Krosoczka, and Stephen Marchesi.

As a fundraiser, this hits all the right marks, wouldn't you say?

All the info and art is at the Ripple blog.


(Seagull painting by Anne Kelley)

Just a quick one, from our last newsletter:

There's always room for improvement, and when it comes to networking, it takes more than handing out your business cards or signing up on a social networking site.

Forgraphicdesignersonly.com shares 11 great tips that Graphic Designers can use to become better networkers.

(Photo by Josh Oakes)

You know the feeling. You're in an elevator, or standing in line at the pharmacy, or waiting for the bus and BANG! it hits you. The million dollar idea! Shoes for cats. Video ads in elevators. Hot Starbucks coffee delivered to your door every morning.

I know I'm not reaching here. You've had the idea.

Then you thought, "I'll make millions!"

Then, "Or just be more broke than I already am."

You probably thought the latter then went to work, which is pretty wise.

But here's a weird thing. What if there was a company that let you submit your product ideas (say a traveling mug that carries two types of liquid for your morning commute) and had someone else do the "heavy lifting", i.e., draw the designs, run it by a focus group, deal with retailers to put it on shelves.

Well, someone came up with the concept and is running with it.

It's a "social development company" called Quirky. You sign up with them for $99 and post your brilliant idea on their site. Have the other members vote on that week's best idea. If yours wins, they create it and put it on shelves in a couple months' time. Then you get cash from the sales of your product.

Of course there's a lot of legal mumbo jumbo in there. But you get the idea.

Wacky? Yes. Quirky. Definitely. Workable? Got me.

Certainly worth seeing how it all shakes out.

Details over at the Quirky site.


(Photo by x-ray delta one)

So you're a Designer working for a corporation that makes other Designers drool when you mention their name. Or are a successful freelance Designer with a handful of good, well-paying clients.

But you keep saying to yourself, "Is this all there is?"

That thought was exactly what was simmering in Interactive Designer and Design Instructor Jon Kolko's brain when he saw former students who had great careers, but craved more meaning in their work.

So Kolko is opening Austin Center for Design, which "will focus solely on solving social problems while making a career path in humanitarian design financially viable", according to Design Observer.

The school is loosely based on Denmark's KAOSPilot program (an interesting site to look at in an of itself).

The Center's site touts that students will be focused on problems related to:

* Homelessness and transient housing solutions
* Healthcare access, affordability, and comprehension
* Nutrition, personal wellness, and consumption
* Education and job placement
* Poverty, as a general state of being
* Sustainability and environmental impact 

The one-year program is based out of Austin, TX and is, according to the site, "ideal for designers, artists and technologists with 2-5 years experience doing professional work, or for more seasoned professionals looking to change the trajectory of their careers."

If you're interested - they're accepting application for 2010-2011 academic year.

And if you go, let me know if they're picky about what you bring to eat in the lunchroom. Because I was wondering.

I love traditional animation and what masters like Ray Harryhausen, Hayao Miyazaki and the folks at Disney bring to the table. Nowadays, though, when someone discusses animation, the focus leans toward CGI (computer-generated imagery). Nothing wrong with that, especially when looking at many of the recent films and what they've contributed to the field of animation: special effects from Avatar to District 9 and anything of the full-length features from Pixar.

Does that mean the hand-painted cells or time-consuming stop motion graphics are going to soon become things of the past? I hope not, especially when I see something as mind-blowing as this stop-motion video for the techno-electronic song Grindin' by Nobody Beats the Drum. Amazing what can be done with some painted wood blocks and a little imagination.

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For me, one of the interesting things about design has always been how changing seemingly small items can have amazingly large results.

And I'm not talking about a 24% rise in sales because someone decided to make the logo bigger.

More about huge cost savings (and environmental savings) when there's a Designer clever enough to rethink a product's packaging.

Over at the GreenerComputing blog, Claudia Girrbach visited with several members of Cisco's supply chain team, who are working on an environmentally sound packaging program. In the pilot program alone, which only focuses on a few of their high volume products, promises to yield $24 million in annual savings.

She goes on to say, "...by focusing on packaging material content, volume and transport container efficiency, the company will save on materials and transportation costs as well."

When you're talking numbers like that, you can pretty much guarantee that your senior management might listen up, even if you're "just" a Designer working down in Creative.

In the article, Claudia outlines her three best practices for a product's packaging diet: Eliminate, Right Size, and Sustain.

Cisco was kind enough to provide a PDF outlining their process.

It makes me proud to own a Cisco phone, I tell you!


(Photo by Steve Keys)