Recently we have been asked to pitch more projects that include a “market research” component. While as a creative boutique we don’t specifically offer market research ourselves, we have partnered with a few companies in order to develop the preliminary findings and sifted through the data. Interesting, yes, but I find that most of it usually comes down to common sense. Plus, as a brand-conscious-designer, I find that our goal is more often to shape public perception rather than to bend to it, so these projects have really got me thinking about the actual value that often pricey market research holds.

I can certainly understand the rationale; if I was going to be shelling out a good portion of my marketing budget I would really like to have some good data behind what I was doing. But how often do designers sit down with a nice stack of market research when they are ready to start their design sketches? Spreadsheets aren’t exactly the most creative catalysts (blatant blog plug). I can attest that while I will often read the market research and help develop the strategy before starting a project, the real driving force behind our designs is common sense and creativity, and that research has very limited impact once pencil hits paper.

That’s not to say that market research doesn’t have its value. It can serve several purposes. It can often identify hidden problems or advantages of a project very quickly, saving time up front by either avoiding or embracing a particular direction without much discussion. It can also serve as a litmus test for all creative concepts. “Does this stand up to the research?” If yes, continue; if not, back to the drawing board. It’s also a great way for outside firms such as ourselves to absorb a lot of detailed information about a client’s business or industry in a short period of time. But how often could those items have been identified simply through an informal focus group or internal discussion? If you’re working with smart, strategic, and creative thinkers, then my guess is more often than not.

My concern is when the research is performed only as a “Cover-Your-Rear” tactic. If the project ends up being a colossal failure, at least one can use the research as a fallback. It is in cases like these that the research can actually inhibit creativity by always dictating the “safe” road to take. Maybe I’m missing the mark here, but I can’t recall any successful marketing that ever simply played it safe. Please show me a successful campaign that was produced in a large part thanks to the market research, and you win a cookie. 

Successful brands are able to dictate public perception rather than vice-versa. That doesn’t mean they don’t crash and burn once in a while, but it seems to me that taking a few chances is how you pull ahead of the pack. It seems to me that spending some extra money and working with a smart, strategic design team would pay more dividends than combining market research with mediocre designers.

In the meantime, if clients ask for it, we’ll provide it, but I will at least throw in this topic for discussion when we do. I’m sure that there are varying opinions on the subject, so I’d love to hear your thoughts. 

Well, we recently decided to submit a client piece to an award show, and we came back with a silver at the Summit Creative Awards for our mini-site for The Colonnade Hotel, which you can view at http://www.reinventedhotel.com. Our goal was to reintroduce the hotel and its multimillion dollar renovations to its past clientele, and do so within an interactive environment that encourages exploration of the actual rooms and bathrooms.

It’s a great award, and we have so many great pieces we are working on that are gold-worthy for next year, so it’s nice to receive some recognition for all of our hard work! Stay tuned for a lot more as we keep rolling into 2008…

Flash is a great web development tool. It’s interactive, animated, integrated, and has the potential to accomplish a whole lot more than other web technologies. As someone who has been working in Flash for over 10 years now, I have seen it evolve into something extremely powerful. From its beginnings as a simple interactive web animation tool, it has since become a robust application development platform, with broad support for dynamic database integration, video and audio publishing, and a host of other features that make it a joy to use for both designers, developers and marketers alike.

But just because Flash CAN do all those things, does that mean you should? That’s something that we as web designers struggle with on a regular basis: When and how do you use Flash effectively? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Flash? Here’s our opinion, and feel free to chime in with one of your own.

Good Flash: Enhancing existing content without sacrificing the content itself. Using Flash to enhance your points through animation or interactivity is always a good thing. It brings the content to life.

Bad Flash: Building animations and interactive elements that distract from the content. Animations that look cool, but overshadow the actual content are usually more annoying than they are enhancing. What would you rather have a visitor take away from your site: That animated 3D effects are really cool, or that your product/service is what they need? Unless you specialize in Flash development want to show off your skills, probably the latter.

Good Flash: Improving a standard HTML user interface/functionality. Standard HTML elements and tags have their limitations, and Flash allows developers and designers to rewrite the rules for how some of those items should function. The key is to make sure that it is a step forward, not a step backwards or too much a departure from the norm for regular users.

Bad Flash: Creating confusing/eccentric user interfaces. We’ve all run into a few of these. Where do I click? How do I get back to where I was? While creative, unless you are 100% sure that your target audience will understand what you intended, you should probably rethink your UI. The point of using Flash is to enhance the user’s experience, not make it more difficult.

Good Flash: Blending multimedia elements to enhance a good concept. When you have a concept that hinges upon multimedia elements (video/audio/photos) that Flash is your best option. A good example of this is the Porsche Bloodlines mini-site.

Bad Flash: Injecting audio and video for no good reason. I won’t give any examples here, but I think we have all seen these as well.

Good Flash: Remembering SEO. Google can actually index Flash files, but it takes a bit of configuring on the development side to make sure that it sees it well. It may also be advisable to include non-Flash versions of your content as well.

The list could go on and on, but I’ll stop here for now. What are your thoughts?

For those of you not familiar with the years old debate of CSS layouts versus table-based website design, here’s a quick recap. Tables, which are the same rows and column-based ones you use in your word-processing program, have been a staple in website design since the dawn of web pages. They are a quick and easy, accurate, and browser-compliant way to lay out items on a web page. Then came Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which sought to separate the design of a page from the content, so that style, design and layout changes could be made by simply editing the CSS file, making website design updates relatively simple, unlike the old method of having to change each table-based layout to the new design. Plus, the code was far simpler.

So the debate began. Some designers jumped into the “I love CSS” camp, others the “I’ll stick with tables until CSS is totally cross-browser compliant” camp. Here we are, several years later and the debate rages on. CSS is still not 100% browser compliant (thanks to the bane of most designers’ existence: IE), but people still don’t want to rely on tables when CSS makes things so much easier to stylize.

Having been knee deep in both situations, there’s no doubt in my mind that the best course of action is still a healthy combo of both CSS stylization and old-fashioned table layouts. Basic table layouts guarantee cross-browser compatibility, while CSS makes site-wide styles very easy to update and control. Until IE gets its act together with CSS, it’s probably the only way to maintain the accuracy of how your site is displayed.

I’m also finding that a lot of clients like to be able to maintain their own websites without the need for developing a database-driven Content Management System, which are great but can be costly versus simple static HTML sites. I had mentioned Adobe Contribute in another post, and Contribute works best with a good combo of tables and CSS, so that’s another reason I can hand a site off to a client and trust that they should not have any problems maintaining it themselves…

I’d love to hear other designers’ experiences, one way or the other.. What is your opinion of the CSS vs. Tables debate?

So you may notice that we have done a complete website overhaul for 2008… It’s been a long work in progress, but it’s finally here. We went back and forth on some design decisions for a while, and honestly it was a challenge to complete because we have had so much other work going on. But we’re convinced the site is that much better and will be much better for our visitors for the following reasons:

• CSS Layout: We spent some time developing a nice CSS layout that we were happy with. We still use tables in a few instances, but we spent some extra time going through the stylesheets so that our next website refresh will be even easier. It’s something that we put a focus on in our clients’ sites, so we’re glad to have it implemented on ours as well!
• SEO Galore: We’ve been doing so much SEO for our client sites lately that we decided to put some of our best techniques into practice. See if you can find some of them on the site!
• AJAX Fun: We’ve been having some fun with AJAX and some Google Widgets for our clients, so we decided to make use of it on our site as well.
• Flash Video: We’ve been doing a lot of Flash video lately as well, so we figured why not drop some on our own site! Check out the home page for an example of how Flash let’s you integrate quick-loading video with animations.
• Easy editing: We use Dreamweaver to create all of our sites, but we like to recommend Adobe Contribute to our clients who like to manage their sites on their own. We used the same techniques to make out sites nicely templated, which means an easy-to-update interface that separates the content from the layout. Translation: we’ll probably have a lot more recent work more frequently!

That’s it for now! We’re very excited for 2008… We have a newly redesigned office space that we’re getting settled into and are looking forward to big things this year… Check back and see what we’re up to!

It’s been a long time since our last post… It’s a case of the story of the cobbler with no shoes, which is one my old boss often used to tell in similar situations (hi Kevin!). If you’re not familiar with it, it’s the story is about a cobbler who has so much work that he goes barefoot as he has no time to work on his own. So that’s where we’ve been… Nose to the grindstone, burning the midnight oil, and any other cliché that you can think of that basically means… we’ve been pretty damn busy! So unfortunately the blog and the website took a brief backseat while we were helping a lot of clients get their projects going. We’re going to be better… I promise, but as always, our clients come first!

The good news? We’ve got a lot of great work to show for it, and a lot more in the pipeline. We even have a total redesign to OUR website coming up in the next month or so… I hope you’ll like it and we look forward to your feedback. There are a lot of things I want to touch on in the world of marketing, graphic design and web design and I hope that we’ll get to do just that very soon…

I also wanted to welcome Danielle Carriveau to the staff. Danielle joins us as a graphic designer with a great sense for color, and we’re expecting great things.

Keep an eye out for our new website very soon, and here’s a sampling of some recent websites we designed and launched recently to tide you over until we re-vamp the recent work section… And this doesn’t even include all the great print work we’ve been doing…. Enjoy!

http://www.mrsid.com
http://www.boosttechnologies.net
http://www.tnrglobal.com
http://www.dbdesignbuild.com
http://beta.internano.org/

More to come!!

Now that my wife and I are in the market for a new house, it’s amazing to me how much data is out there and available via the web. From sites like Zillow.com and plenty of other data compilations, it’s tough to imagine how buyers and sellers made decisions without having every angle completely covered with statistics and projections. And although the data itself may not really give any one person a competitive advantage over another, it at least makes people feel more confident in their decisions. And when you can make people feel confident, it usually means a sale. Read the rest of this entry »

I have the good fortune of working with many clients who know and appreciate the benefits of well-spent marketing budgets. However, I still come across business owners who neglect doing simple marketing activities that could offer a much needed boost to their bottom lines. Their biggest fear? Usually it all comes down to cost, or rather perception of cost. For these people “marketing” is usually synonymous with big fat dollar $$$igns. But I can show you a few simple ways to save some money that can start to make marketing more approachable and affordable. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you ever wonder why it is that you can identify some corporate symbols almost instantaneously, even without any accompanying text? Think about the Nike “swoosh” or the Apple “fruit” symbols. They don’t even have to use the name of their company in the logo, and yet consumers like you and me understand exactly what they stand for. You may think to yourself, “Those are some great logos that probably cost a lot of money and were created by expensive design agencies.” But do you know that Nike’s logo originally cost $35 and was created by a student fresh out of design school? It goes to show that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on an elaborately designed logo in order to create a successful brand. The real secret is consistency.

Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who has played around with Google AdWords and Analytics knows that search engine optimization can be frustrating. We could all use more organic search results, and we can. It’s like I mention elsewhere on this website, where following just a few simple rules can help improve your rankings. The whole basic philosophy is:

Relevant information, strategically placed, updated frequently, and gaining in popularity.

What does that all mean? Read the rest of this entry »