Exceptional design
The Toke 3-in-1 portfolio
I thought the interface design for The Toke portfolio site is simple but I like the way the used the same elements to create 3 different information design layouts for their portfolio.
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Facebook facelift
I was cruising through Behance today and came across Barton Smith’s self initiated re-design of Facebook. The comps and video are a little small but can you see his design is a really nice, streamlined and organized take on their site. Things like the publisher toolbar that let’s you post content from any page, the streams’ 2 tiered filter and bottom ticker are smart changes that Facebook would do well to consider for their re-design. This type of thinking would move the site forward by keeping and enhancing functionality and stop their trend of stripping their site further and further down into a more and more generic mediocrity.
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Beyond Word – A death clock resume
I interview and talk with a lot of young designers who always smile as they hand me a business card they have spent 80 hours designing, printed with a 6 color process, a spot varnish and a die cut on hand made paper which they have then stapled to a an off center Xerox of their resume that they created in Word entirely typeset in 12 point Courier. Your resume is the first design impression you make on a new client or employer so why are we all content to “design” it in a word processor? Word, and really all Microsoft Office programs, are where design and typography go TO DIE!
I want to create a site called The Visual Resume project that would a platform for me to launch my personal crusade to change the thinking of designers that they have to represent themselves and their talents with something as vanilla and unimaginative as a Word document. We have to use our talents to create something more visual, more imaginative and more engaging to represent ourselves. I took a first pass at doing it to my own resume two years ago with moderate success and I have a new version in the works that will be finished soon.
My favorite example of a designer who has done something really unique with his resume is Dustin Curtis who created a death clock that tracks his progress through his life in real time to his predicted death on March 23, 2068. I love it because it is completely original, it is a living document and would if it was mine it would remind me everyday that I need to get off my ass and do something with my life.
I challenge you to stand out from the crowd and put your talents to use to create a resume that truly represents you and your talents. Post in the comments any examples you like or an example your have already created for yourself.
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Now if I could just invent digital taste buds…
Anyone who has followed my blog for a while knows that I love to cook and get a lot of inspiration from the process. I recently started writing another blog on cooking and that process made me realize how few well designed sites there are for cooking equipment and ingredients. The best one I have found actually just launched for Chocolatier Pierre Marcolini. The site has a really nice minimal design direction and interface that consistently heros the product throughout the site. I also like the way the design will dynamically adjust to different window sizes so the placement of the site elements always stay well positioned in relationship to the photography. It is surprising that for a subject matter that is so photography rich that you don’t find more sites that take advantage of the material. If you have any favorites post it in the comments.
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Obama’s Design Director of New Media talks about how design and interactive helped win the White House
Over the past year I wrote more than once about how much I liked what the Obama campaign did with digital design and media during their run to the White House. A few weeks ago I had the chance to meet and hear from the guy behind that work named Scott Thomas who spoke at the 99% conference. This video culls the highlights from his presentation at the conference and catches up with him afterward to find out more about his theories on simplicity and his plans for working in politics in the future.
I also have to give props to Scott Belsky who I am lucky enough to know, is the founder of Behance.com and one of the masterminds behind the 99% conference. I had sworn off conferences all together because of my previously documented conference coma but this one conference I will return next year. Also if you have a chance to hear Scott speak take advantage of it because he has a lot of great insights from talking with a lot of great creative minds and groups about how to make ideas happen.
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Fallon skims into a slick social media application
As more and more people engage with more and more social media outlets developers are creating more and more aggregators to pull all that information into one place. The latest and probably the best one I have seen in a long time has been released by the ad agency Fallon out of Minneapolis of all places. Their new desktop application is called Skimmer and aggregates Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Blogger in one very nicely designed social network dashboard. It gives you the ability to organize, search and view all the feeds the way you want to and also has nice functionality like the ability to browse your Flickr photos in a full screen mode. Publishing content is limited to Twitter and Facebook status updates and being able to respond or email your friends posts on Twitter. You can also create your own home page that aggregates all of your information that can can them embed where ever you want to.
At a time when Facebook seems to be content to continue to dilute and screw up the the interface of their site solutions like this are a nice alternative. I had tried using other solutions like the Flock social web browser but found the browser interface and performance too problematic to make a full time switch to using it. I tried other application like Nomee that aggregates over 100 services and your RSS feeds but found the interface and the time needed to get it up and running too much for me to use it every day. It is the simplicity and adaptability of Skimmer that actually has me using it every day so I don’t have to switch between multiple sites to see what people are up to. I need something simple that will make it easier for me to get this information than switching between who knows how many different web pages. The fact that you can also customize the layout and the colors of Skimmer also appears to my inner design whore who needs things to be functional and look good too.
I don’t know if this marks the return of what what we saw 4 or 5 years ago when every agency you can in contact with, including my former employer, all had their own custom intranets, software solutions and productivity tools they would sell to their clients to try and generate an additional revenue stream. I think in large part this practice died away because good project management software was created at an affordable price and Adobe finally got their act together to create consistently support platforms that didn’t require everyone going off to invent their own worlds all the time. Both Skimmer and Nomee are developed on the Adobe Air platform which I think has a tremendous amount of potential that hasn’t even begun to be realized.
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Grammy’s make music with typography
The Grammy Awards were last night and I had seen their ad campaign around the city and I really liked what they did with it. It is a nice use of color, typography and simple design. They work like a Chuck Close painting where it stands out from any distance because it looks like an illustration and up close you see the complexity of the typography design. as a guy who really appreciates simple design and great typography it is really nice to see work like this still being created for major clients on a national stage.
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Nick Jones – a portfolio that is the best of both worlds
One of the things I wish I would see more of are personal portfolio sites that are well executed and filled with really good work. You see some sites that are well executed but none of the work they are are showing off can keep up with the portfolio. Other times you see the bare bones site filled with good work but then that makes it hard to get a sense of their role in the project. It took me 2 years to update my site so I know how hard it can be to find the time to put anything together.
I saw one this week that did catch my eye from designer Nick Jones. The site has a really nice but simple interface that lets you scroll through all the projects and then see the corresponding work. It keeps that interaction on one screen which makes it easy and fast to get a sense of the quality and scope of his work. That was the one problem I wasn’t able to solve and I think is a big weakness of my portfolio site as you can do something like this within the body of work for one client but you can’t do it between the bodies of work or different clients. It is good stuff and worth checking out.
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ESPN.com brings in-house ad network to life in new site re-design
The new year has brought a big change at ESPN.com who took the site re-design out of beta yesterday. This comes after a very interesting 2008 for the site when the site made a major move to end their relationships with all their ad networks and declined any new offers. They made the decision because they felt that the networks use of arbitrage and algorithms for ad placement was hurting their brand so they pulled they are now doing it all in house. It is obvious that decision plays a very large role in the redesign as the first thing you see when you get to the site is a home page takeover that is a combination video from ESPN and ad from Ford. An ESPN anchor talks about the site redesign and just as he says the site is “faster” a Ford truck pulls in below him and a Ford spokesman walks onto the screen and picks up with “tougher, stronger and smarter. Introducing the all new ‘09 F-150.”. ESPN is saying that this type of ad where the media placement or adjacent content play just as large a role in the creative as the ad itself will be a large part of the site. They also re-worked the site design so the traditional banner ad that has been a staple of the site has been replaced by a large button ad that can run video ads in the adjacent video player. I think it’s a smart move because this type of placement that is more relevant does something new and gets the users attention is appealing.
Looking at the usability and visual design, the first thing you will see is the main navigation and that they finally simplified and consolidated the navigation in better drop down menus and they hide the inactive sports. This means that right now NFL, MLB, NBA, Soccer College Football, College Basketball and NHL appear at the top of the page and everything else falls into an ‘All Sports’ menu. This has been a long time coming a makes a huge difference to the usability of the site.
They have also done a nice job by adding the ability for you to personalize site with the “My Headlines.” feature where you can adjust the information you see and making it much easier to get the news you want. The placement of the functionality on the right side of the main nav will get more people to sign up and that will drive longer site sessions.
Overall there is a good balance of design and layout improvements that make going through all the content easier as well as new functionality and usability improvements that will keep you on the site longer. All of that combined with fewer but smarter ads makes it one of the best and most successful major re-designs I have seen in a long time.
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ACSII art is back with a vengeance
It is true that everything old becomes new again and you only have to look at the recent return of the original computer graphics ASCII art to see that is true. This site and unique animation are just two of the most recent and best examples.
March of Dimes – What Are You Wondering?
This site from the March of Dimes runs an animation of a crawling new born shown in a screen full of questions about parenting and babies. The interface is simple and well executed as you are able to type in a question into a form field and the corresponding questions light up in the field of questions also being used for the baby animation. The combination of style and functionality is too rare and a nice example of how the two can be combined and retain the best parts of both.
AC/DC Rocks Your Excel File
The most recent album from AC/DC dropped recently and the first single ‘Rock n Roll Train’ had a video unlike anything I had ever seen before. I first saw it on YouTube and someone sent me the actual file shortly there after. The unique thing is that the video is done completely in an Excel spreadsheet file (you can download it for yourself here). They took the video and converted it to ASCII art and when shown like a flip book creates the video.
If trends like this continue I will be back programming my own 8 bit video games out of computer magazines in no time.
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