Entries Tagged 'Design' ↓

Today I am thrilled to announce the launch of Chattarati, a collaborative Chattanooga news and opinion blog. We’re going to be “blogging everything we love and hate about Chattanooga.”

Chattarati began as a small idea I had several months ago for a daily photoblog to chronicle Chattanooga’s evolving downtown. After much discussion and planning with other local bloggers, the idea grew and evolved into a full-blown hyperlocal news and opinion blog in the vein of Gothamist or, closer to home, Nashvillest.

Chattarati is being published by a great team who have all put in a tremendous amount of work to pursue our goal of not only creating a great Chattanooga-centric blog, but becoming a vital part of the flourishing blog community in our city. I’m honored to have such great minds collaborating on this project, and we have loads of compelling content planned to inform–and entertain–our fellow Chattanoogans.

Naturally, we’ve gone through the social networking checklist and integrated everything from multiple Twitter feeds to an Alltop-inspired RSS aggregator to a Flickr pool and Facebook group.

If you live in or love Chattanooga, I hope you’ll check out Chattarati.

Oh, and yes… I did design the bold, classy logo and stylish web site. Thanks for asking!

Hyperlocal Blogging
SEO consultant Matt McGee discusses the growing trend of “hyperlocal” blogs. He mentions the big names like Gothamist, but surprisingly left out a number of localized blogging communities like the Chattanooga-founded Terrablogs, which has been around for years. Coincidentally (or not), I’ll be announcing an exciting new group adventure into this space in just a few days. Stay tuned!

Can Android Vanquish the iPhone?
In a word, no. Seriously, though, Business Week is asking the question. Fair enough, but the fact is that Android is just a software platform at this point. There is no “gPhone” and there probably won’t be a handset manufactured by Google. Perhaps one of the big handset makers will take Android and do something great with it, but I don’t expect any Android phone to be as big a hit as the iPhone. Apple’s “closed system” — which is often lamented by that same crowd waiting for Android — is what makes their products successful and beloved. They control the user experience more than anyone else in this space, and they are the hands-down experts.

Sketch Notes
If you, like me, missed the SEED 3 conference put on by 37Signals, you’ll want to check out these incredible sketch notes from the event. There’s also a great profile of the conference in the Chicago Reader. I’m still processing the vast amounts of info and insights…

Summer on Prince Edward Island
Chattanooga may be the “scenic city,” but PEI looks absolutely gorgeous. I suppose Dan deserves summer vistas like this after enduring the frigid Canadian winter.

I’m speechless. This must be a joke: Are You Generic? It’s straight out of the Stuff White People Like playbook — hating corporations and loving t-shirts. (hat tip: Guy Kawasaki)

37Signals tells us why they skip Photoshop when developing a user interface. The reasoning behind their methodology is solid and it certainly supports their focus on usability. On the other hand, it put a spotlight on one of my few complaints about their work: the lack of visual appeal. Clean, user-focused design doesn’t have to look dull, and I’d love to see them bring as much refinement to the aesthetics as they do to the usability.

A high school classmate of mine, Joe Brown, is a locavore blogger who recently traveled to Cuba and explored their local food culture. He also confessed to what many of us have always suspected: “all academics are secretly communist.” Good to know.

And finally, it sure is nice here in Mayberry.

The Association of Visual Artists (AVA) Gallery on Frazier Avenue is now featuring an exhibit called “Design @ Work”, sponsored by AIGA. The exhibit features commercial graphic design case studies, including one co-developed by yours truly. The case study, developed with my friend (and future business partner… shhh!) Wes Barker, examines our packaging revamp/re-branding for the flagship Clarity Professional telephone. The exhibit is open through the end of June and also features design work by the illustrious local firms Coptix, Widgets and Stone and Tricycle. If you’re on the North Shore, stop in and take a look.

Note: I haven’t had a chance to snap any photos of the exhibit, but I’ll post some as soon as I can.

Animal House - Clever Product and Packaging Design
Originally uploaded by JHawbaker1800

Having helped launch a telephone whose industrial design was inspired by an ice cream scoop, I knew I had to write about this clever ice cream spade I recently saw in Target.

I love the concept of the Animal House product line, which takes ordinary kitchen gadgets and gives them a sense of fun through the animal-inspired forms. The packaging takes the concept one step further by placing the shapes in context — take a look at the ocean/iceberg illustration behind the “tail.” Clever, fun and definitely memorable.

For a near-daily dose of packaging design reviews, be sure to visit The Dieline, which has become one of my favorite blogs.

I just eFiled our family’s federal income tax return this week using TurboTax online. (Confidential to Ella: Thanks for the additional tax credit!) This was probably my fourth year using TurboTax and I was struck by the fact that it has gotten consistently better every year.

I wish I’d thought to take some screen captures along the way to demonstrate a few particular things I liked about it, but I honestly wasn’t expected to be quite this impressed. Intuit is doing a really nice job with usability; Specifically: setting and meeting expectations, guiding users through a lengthy process, writing copy that is clear and concise without being condescending). I remember hearing Avinash Kaushik speak about their impressive analytics and testing programs a couple years back at a Frost & Sullivan conference. He may have moved on, but it seems Intuit’s sharp customer focus is firmly intact.

Another nice feature they’ve added is a community questions and answers section that ties in to whatever section you’re currently working on. I thought that was a perfect example of taking a “Web 2.0″ concept and making it relevant and useful, and it seems to be fairly popular, based on the number of questions and answers available throughout.

Full disclosure: Wait a sec… This is an honest-to-goodness unsolicited rave review. Seriously, if you haven’t done your taxes yet (Hello, procrastinators!), check out TurboTax.

Thursday night at AIGA Chattanooga’s InForm panel discussion, Coptix designer Chris Johnston said something that really stuck. Asked about how to handle a situation where a client, or a boss, hated a particular design, he said “sometimes you have to have that fight.” He clarified that it shouldn’t be about your personal attachment to the project or how cool you might think it is, but rather about why that design solution is the right move for the business. In those cases, he said, you have to have that fight.

It’s easier said than done, but I can say from experience that the opportunity to defend your design work can be very rewarding. One of my favorite design projects at Clarity was developing the packaging for a new line of cordless amplified phones. It was such a departure from our established look and so unexpected (I’d taken it upon myself to try something new) that my boss asked me, along with the product manager (my partner in crime), to write up a defense of the work. He didn’t even say whether he liked the design or not, he just asked us to explain why we thought it was the right thing to do.

I knew in my gut that the shift from our existing sytle was appropriate for these new products, but the exercise of putting it on paper went a long way in getting everyone on board. The product manager and I explained how the new visual strategy was, at heart, a natural evolution of the brand and an extension of the new technology and industrial design present in the phones themselves. Our design brief was tightly integrated with what we knew to be the values of our brand, our target market and our aspirations as a company. In the end, the new visual design scheme was adopted for the product line — not just for the packaging, but in collateral materials, print ads and a flash piece for our website.

The day the first packaging sample arrived from the factory was one of my proudest days there, and it probably wouldn’t have been quite as sweet without having gone that extra mile to justify the design.