Author Archive
Creative Culture & Success in Business
Adaptive Path (a user experience design firm in San Francisco) has a wealth of articles on their site which, as a designer, I find interesting. Many articles are of interest to a broader business audience – such as this interview with Chris Conley.
Conley notes Pixar as a great example of creative business success which “basically create[s] a new billion dollar franchise every four years or so”. Truly an amazing track record. He discusses what makes them so successful, which boils down more or less to:
- strongly adhering to a higher purpose – in Pixar’s case “To create great stories”. Fabulous storytelling is more important than fancy computer graphics. Mission and focus is paramount.
- dynamic leadership & a talented team – every project is led by a director-producer pair that brings complementary strengths to the table and is responsible for the project’s outcome in different ways. Their team is made up of artists and technologists that can make their work better through critique. A strong team is diverse and challenges each other.
- a highly iterative and tangible process – experimenting and sketching begins on day one. There is no waiting for mounds of research or scripts holding back the creative process. The great story they’ll tell gets figured out along the way. You needn’t have it all figured out from the start, get out there and do something.
Finally, Conley says
If corporations were to adopt these principles, behaviors, and values in their innovation-oriented work, they would be orders of magnitude more successful.
There are some good ideas in that list which resonate with me. What do you think?
Creative Promotional Video
With the popularity of YouTube growing, entrepreneurs are understandably excited by the potential of the medium. I’ve consulted with people who are looking at taking their basic web sites to the next level of web marketing, and heard things like “We’ve got to have video. Video is so popular now.” To which I say: maybe. It depends on the video and how you use it.
Unless the video content on your site is somehow great, nobody cares about that video except you and maybe your Mom.
“Great”, on the web, means meeting a need. That need can be to have a laugh, to learn something, to be inspired.
In other words to truly leverage video on the web, you have to create videos that will draw your customers to view them. At it’s best, the video will help new people discover your website.
A fun example of this is The Human Flipbook by the restaurant chain Ebert & Gerbert. This is so creative & wonderful, it was mentioned on a site that I subscribe to. Because the video was embedded in the page at Do Something Pretty I didn’t even realize I was watching a commercial until the end. By then, I was so impressed I didn’t mind.
5 Things you can do to boost your Blog's Success
One of our clients and a fabulous interior designer, Patricia Gray, recently began blogging. Perhaps she was inspired by Christine’s post on why you should have a blog. As a recap, the 3 reasons Christine cited were:
- Blogs create relationships
- Blogs improve your communication and writing skills
- Blogs allow you to promote yourself
Patricia Gray’s blog is living proof of these principles. She’s an avid and effective blogger, writing voraciously and including lots of juicy pictures in her posts. As a result, she’s creating relationships with the many readers who’ve found her site because of the compelling content in her blog.
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46 Productivity Tips
The 46 Must-Read Productivity Tips for Freelancers on FreelanceSwitch is full of great stuff. In fact there must be hundreds of tips if you click through to read all the links in the article. But really any business person can benefit from some of these ideas.
Here are five of my favourites:
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Gallery of Business Cards
Here’s another great source of inspiration for you: a collection of business cards on Flickr. They’re posted by DailyPoetics, who has a number of other inspirational albums as well. Enjoy!
Friday Fun – Some eCards
It’s been a busy week at Bluelime, busy enough not to have anything big to say. So, here’s a quick link to some edgy eCards. As the sites says, they’re for “when you care enough to click send”. Definitely not for everyone, they’re often ironic, sometimes distasteful, and not your grandma’s Hallmark cards. But, some of them sure are funny!
Highlights from An Event Apart Seattle
One of the things I love about being a web designer is that there is always more to learn, be it from other web specialists or your clients. Last week at An Event Apart Seattle Tzaddi and I had the chance to learn from some true experts. The speakers were not only masters in their fields, but engaging and generous with their knowledge.
Here are some highlights:
- Watching Eric Meyer write CSS (you know you’re a geek when…)
- Jeffrey Zeldman’s talk on “Writing the User Interface” confirmed my experience: the words in a web design matter much more than you might think and can really make a difference in how visitors use your site. So long as it invites clicking, it matters more what a button says than what it looks like.
- Peaking into other designer’s processes, from beautiful sketchbooks to user research.
- I enjoyed Jeff Veen’s succinct message which shows the benefits of doing your design research up front vs. the cost of changing your mind partway through the build. He also discussed why web design is so much more complex now than it was in the early days of the web, when everyone using the web were of the same type (geeks).
- Shawn Henry shared insights for ensuring your site is accessible to varying abilities; from folks who read the web with braille or speech readers to limited vision users — who magnify screens to an amazing degree, but want the same site that was designed for regularly sighted users. Bottom line: there is no substitute for engaging disabled users in the design process if you want to build truly accessible sites. Her book on accessibility is free online.
- Andy Budd shared how a delightful user experience is worth more than the sum of it’s parts in the loyalty that can create.
Serve your clients, no matter what they need
Over the last two days I attended a self-employment workshop at the Sunshine Coast Employment Center, offered by Cassandra Gierden of Prophet Coaching. A valuable idea she offered was to create your own personal “yellow pages” – get out and meet somebody from every possible profession you can think of.
The idea is to be of service to your clients no matter what they need. If they can’t make an appointment with you, don’t just ask to reschedule. Ask them if they need a mechanic and refer them to a great one.
You can make the creation of your yellow pages like a scavenger hunt for yourself: find X contacts by X time.
The concept of serving your clients, no matter the need, is similar to what this blog and indeed many successful sites are all about. Share a little information or service for free, and you become a valuable resource that stays top-of-mind. In the end isn’t that what marketing is all about?
Facebook is surprisingly useful
Recently a friend of mine sent me an invitation to join her network on Facebook. I ignored it at first, thinking back to my first experience with the social networking site; I had seen how my college-aged step-daughter uses it. She and her friends post tons of photos and notes for each other, mainly centering around recent parties etc. Theirs is a socially active world with time to spare, compared to mine. So Facebook didn’t seem like it was a place for me.
But recently the site has broken past it’s college bounds and people from all walks of life are signing up. I was convinced to try it out after reading reviews by Alexandra Samuel and Rob Cottingham.
The Meaning of Colours
Following up on Christine’s recent post on colour inspiration, I thought I’d share this neat tutorial I came across recently: Colour in Motion. The Movies section in particular is a good little bit of edu-tainment.
This site is an entertaining way to learn about the meaning associated with different colours. In addition to the feeling you might get from a colour, it’s good to keep in mind that colour meaning is not only an individual thing but a very cultural thing as well. The author alludes to that in “The Stars” section, by listing some associations from around the world.