Recently in Design Category

Being someone who:

a) lives with a vegetarian
b) works closely with the design industry
c) buys a lot of organic items on a weekly basis

I have to say how surprised I am that:

a) the organic movement has taken off the way it has
b) many organic foods I see are still sold in non-recyclable containers

I always thought that if the organic/green movement grabbed hold, it would follow that many of the companies selling these organic items to consumers would naturally (ha!) choose recyclable materials to package their products. But that doesn't seem to be the case, especially in the organic food aisle. Baby carrots, bagged lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, onions, garlic, etc. all shipped and sold in non-recyclable plastic bags.

And yes, I cringe every time I crumple one up and throw it away. (Thanks, Olivia.)

According to the "one of the world's leading authorities on plastic pollution," Dr. Anthony Andrady, Sr. Research Scientist at North Carolina's Research Triangle, "Except for a small amount that's been incinerated, every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains. It's somewhere in the environment."

That figure might not be so scary until you realize we only started making plastic 50 years ago.

Anthony is, I believe, one of the people who has been talking about the island of plastic the size of Texas (yes that Texas), floating in the South Pacific.

I'm not sure what the disconnect is, quite, and maybe any of you Packaging Designers can enlighten me - why would a company that sells organic produce not think about the waste generated by their packaging?

I don't think it's cost. It doesn't take a business whiz to figure out that the people who buy organic foods are willing to spend a lot more for their food products - a couple pennies more on packaging wouldn't make or break the sale.

A few years ago, I got to see Chris Hacker, former Creative Director for the ultra-eco company Aveda, and to see some of the amazing, creative (and yes, outside the plastic bag/box) thinking his team was coming up with for packaging their products.

Maybe, like organic farmers themselves, it will just take a few rugged companies to be brave enough to set the standard for selling their produce, start the revolution, and have everyone else follow in their green tracks.

Otherwise, I'm afraid that track is now heading toward a giant floating island of polymers floating somewhere in the Pacific.


(Recycled milk crate image by SOCIALisBETTER)

I was planning on blogging about our annual AIGA | Aquent Survey of Design Salaries (which is a bit of a misnomer, as it includes Web Developers and Copywriters), but I don't know if I'm late already.

See that's the problem with Twitter, I'm doing a million other things and getting ready to write about the survey and I see that's it's already been tweeted a hundred times. Now I know how those document copying monks must have felt about Gutenberg.

But maybe I'm just being stubborn. The point is to make sure everyone knows about it, right? Not to be the first person to tell everyone about it.

A warning before you try to print this whole doc up from the AIGA site: it's 48 pages long.

Might want to read it as a PDF.

Be the first to tell your friends!

(From guest poster, Greg Carter)

The night, I purchased tickets online for a theatrical event. Yeah, I know, very exciting, but why I'm bringing this up is because of the checkout process.

Thanks to the email from the theater troupe, I found the show listing with relative ease. But after selecting two tickets and clicking checkout, I was asked to create an account (or login if I already had one, which I didn't), click the link to create an account, and an exasperating five separate pages later, I was finally able to order the tickets.

Lucky for the troupe, I really wanted to see this particular show, or else I would have given up the process long ago.

It's a glaring design flaw such as this that authors Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus hope to combat with their book Web Design for ROI. (ROI stands for "return on investment", or this according to Investopedia.)

True, the theater probably does need all that information to process the ticket order, but a simpler process, something that takes into account the user and his/her reactions, would probably decrease frustration and increase online ticket sales.

Your company may have hundreds of fantastic products for which the public is hungering, but if the home page is too cluttered with information and images, or searching for a specific item turns into a hunt for Dr. Livingstone, or the potential buyer can't tell the "Add to Cart" button from the "Exit" button, then your site may not be doing its job. However, instead of spending thousands of dollars to re-design your entire site, Loveday and Niehaus suggest perhaps a little tweaking to the design, how pages are laid out, will show a quicker and better response.

Take into account your users. Most people quickly skim a homepage, looking for information important to them. Long paragraphs probably won't hold their interest, so why not try headlines in a bolder type, stronger color and have the headline link to another page with that information or story. People also tend to read from left to right, top to bottom, so creating your pages with that flow in mind will make the experience a more pleasant one. Or, as a rebuttal to my ticket purchase example, give the user the option of creating an account or not.

REI's checkout process does exactly that, and I can say from my own experience, I liked not having to create a password and enter account information just to by a one-time gift (for my brother since I'm the farthest thing from outdoorsy you could imagine). Design a good user experience, and the user is likely to return or to even recommend your site to their friends.

Web Design for ROI offers other simple, common sense techniques to re-work the design of a site to make it more productive and effective. For anyone who designs sites or has a say in their creation, this book would be an incredibly useful tool.

(Photo by haydnseek)

A few weeks ago I logged in to my first webinar ... a really informative session hosted by Adobe as part of their Creative Festival.

It was a really interesting experience, seeing hundreds of "user names" appear down the left hand side of my computer screen and knowing that literally hundreds of people were taking part in the webinar with me. Aside from a few sound and image delay issues I really enjoyed it. But at the end of the session I didn't have anyone to talk to about it. I just got back on with my work. Sure I could have posted some comments to an on line forum or blog, but to me it's not the same as walking out of a seminar and mingling with other delegates over a drink or biscuit and having a good old de-brief!

This has prompted me to ask what the new preference is in terms of being informed and educated? Do you prefer sitting at your desk, in your office, or at home and seeing an industry guru on your computer screen? Or would you rather attend a conference seeing the guru in his or her element, surrounded by a crowd of like-minded people that you can interact with during and after the event?

Interestingly, Microsoft is combining both options at the upcoming ReMIX 09 on June 11th in Sydney, which Aquent is sponsoring.

Not only will the event be held at Sydney's Star City, but some of the content and sessions will be broadcast on the REMIX Online site as well. (By the way, if you would like to attend ReMIX 2009 at Aquent's discounted price (AUD$149.00), check out the ReMIX link and type in the special code "syd0xdis149" when registering online). When you register, ensure that you DO NOT tick ReMIX AUD$199.00 inc GST. Simply write the "syd0xdis149" ticket code in the field provided.

This promises to be a highly informative web industry event in Australia for designers and developers seeking to be on the cutting edge.

No doubt Microsoft will have some nice drinks and buiscuits available at the breaks ... So see you there!

Image courtesy of: sridgway

No, this is not a miniature. It's the Met, taken through some serious Tilt-Shift Photography Faking to make it look much, much smaller than it actually is.

If you're looking at shrinking the world around you without angering the Justice League of America or buying special lenses, pop over the Creative Pro site for this article on achieving the effect through Alien Skin Software's Photoshop plug-in, Bokeh.

If you'd just like to see more examples (and roll over to see a before and after of the pictures), pop over here.

The folks at Tuesday Creative were nice enough to extend us an invitation to their inaugural Tuesdays@Tuesday Happy Hour.

Mmm, tacos, margaritas, Rock Band (complete with fog machine), clever signage, and something that almost made me drop my rice and beans: the coolest white boards anyone has ever seen.




I talked to Beau Gieson, their Sr. Designer about how he made them and he was nice enough to provide the pictures! They wanted to utilize some old white boards they weren't using (what a green idea!) and didn't want them to look like... well, the white boards everyone else has. One of the owners of Tuesday is a skilled woodworker and was able to chop the old boards up without injuring anyone.

I still can't stop talking about them.

It's easy to be a critic.

Everyone's a critic, right?

And do you know why?

Because it far, far easier to be a critic than to be a Designer, Writer, Actor, or any other kind of creative. Actually, it's far, far easier to be a critic than to be the person crossing a busy street during a rainstorm.

But I digress...