Emusic makes Scheduled Downtime a little more Courteous
A number of us Newfanglers are big fans of eMusic. They do a lot of things right, like DRM free music, an amazing selection, great design and social media tools. Despite the flack they've received for their acquisition to Sony, they still consistently deliver one of the best usability/customer experiences I've come across online...
Managing the Design Process
Yesterday, the Project Management team gathered in our newly renovated conference room at the North Carolina office for a professional development session on managing the design process. We covered a ton of information, ranging from the basic elements and principles of design to strategies for framing design discussions with clients. I think it was a really productive experience for everyone, and I was excited to witness the inner design critics emerge from our PM's as we reviewed some design case studies together. Here are some of the key points we kept returning to...
Creating great web content at the intersection of writing, inspiration and expertise.
What makes great web content? For the purpose of this post I am referring to content that marketers add to their site for the purpose of furthering their particular content strategy. I think the best content written for this purpose is found at the intersection of writing, inspiration and expertise...
Thoughts on the 2009 HOW Design Conference
Last week I was in Austin, TX. to present a few sessions at the annual HOW Design Conference. There were a few things that really knocked my socks off that are worth mentioning.
Another Advance Toward Conversational Synthesis
In this month's newsletter, The Future of the Web, Part 1, I spent some time talking about how in the future, we will manage data using conversational synthesis technology. By "conversational synthesis," I'm envisioning tools that receive data from various sources and condense it into one easily manageable stream. The conversational piece refers to how these tools will allow users to query the database with natural language, creating new types of reports on an ad hoc basis and not having to parse through pre-configued report results and combine them to get the answers they really need. This kind of advance is going to take some work in various areas, so I'm not expecting this kind of experience anytime soon...
Mood Boards
At Newfangled we recently began using Mood Boards as a first step in the design process to establish the branding, design components, typography, imagery, and color palettes that will be incorporated in a site's design. Mood Boards have proven very effective, but I have found that it is essential to clarify the distinction between these boards and the designs that will follow once a mood board has been approved.
The Future of the Web, Part 1
In his December, 2007 Techlog column, PC World Editor in Chief Harry McCracken wrote, "More than any communications medium before it, the Web is a permanent work in progress that's always new." Since I read it, I've probably parroted McCracken's line a thousand times to clients, colleagues, friends, and family to the point that many of them probably think that I came up with it. I wish I was that brilliant. Sadly, I am not, nor am I able to actually see into the future with any certainty, though that does not keep me from thinking and talking about it constantly.
Clay Shirky on Social Media
The past couple of weeks in the news have truly highlighted how influential social media are as far as how we communicate globally and spread news. From the post-election unrest in Iran to the lightning-fast spread of the news of Michael Jackson's death, social networks like Twitter and Facebook are outpacing traditional news media significantly. Clay Shirky, in a recent TED Talk, shares his thoughts on how social media is influencing the course of politics and history. The video is about 17 minutes, but well worth your time to watch:
Google’s Own Tips on Meta Descriptions
Some clear suggestions from Google's Webmaster Central Blog on best practices for Meta Descriptions.
Digital Preservation or Conservation?
Last week's episode of the Spark podcast featured a segment on digital preservation, a concept I'm interested in both from an organizational and practical point of view. The host interviewed Seamus Ross, Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. In the course of his interview, Ross mentioned "Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster," an animation about digital preservation, and the problem of bitrot, where storage media degrades such that software can't interpret the bitstream because some information has been lost. Ross also suggested that we should be storing entire databases of information (medical records, tax returns, etc.) for posterity because historians...