Top 10 at 10 no.2
Jotted down by Brent on August 26th, 2009
I’ve had a resurgence of late with my posterous account. This due to a few reasons. My new iPhone, near new daughter Lola Grace and the excellant Pic Posterous app. Im also taking big steps into the IA world (I believe the saying is chucked into the deep end) so will chuck in a few useful posts for newbies.
Posterous, Pic Posterous and Tumblr
Information Architecture for beginners, sink or swim
Im a sucker for bold bright lavish design and Smashing mags latest post on festival design fits the bill.
And finally… Beautiful pictures, 8 Cities That Might Not Make It.
Reminds me of the Opiki suspension bridge in the Manawatu.
I would love to hear from anyone else digging deep into IA, any nuggets of wisdom or links would be much appreciated.
Weekly wrap-up number 2
Jotted down by Brent on August 21st, 2009
A small wrap of stuff this week. It’s been a busy one with barely a blink to capture stuff outside of work.
If your into Dj sets as opposed to band albums or tracks check out a new online music startup called mugasha. It’s pretty sweet though I Can’t find Shadow on there yet.
Google maps gets busy using locals to make the maps wiki style. Nice.
Crowdsourcing rocks! It’s what powers my favourite company Theadlesss
Check out this awesome bike cover. Im not so sure how it will work in a Wellington wind though.
Don’t let branding kill your brand
And finally. The Golden age of advertising. These are almost like some sort of weird alternate reality shift. Wicked!
Top 10 at 10, well 2
Jotted down by Brent on August 18th, 2009
Ideally this will be a quick post of my top 10 links at 10am on a Tuesday. In this case it’s more of an afternoon slot. Time being what it is not many things happen according to the clock, this is no exception. Enjoy.
Wicked stuff
!Free! Radiohead’s new track “These are my twisted words”.
The new Facebook for iPhone 3.0 app.
Unique tv shows that inspire creativity
Web world
Redesigning your own site. Let me say with the re-design of Lushai taking many months and itterations, I know the pain.
and on the subject of re-designs have a look at another artcle from ALA on the Erskin website redesign.
On the subject of art direction and web design. Have a look at Gregory Woods site. Gorgeous.
Good stuff
I love this! Shows what good people really can do.
Scotland does what NZ should be doing. It’s ethical duty.
It’s great t see a HUGE company taking a real stance and making a change for the environment. Go Walmart go!
Weekly wrap-up
Jotted down by Brent on August 13th, 2009
This the first of many (fingers crossed) weekly wrap-up articles I will be posting with and insight into the wild world of web as seen by me over last week.
Highlights this week include the news that Microsoft word is banned from Texas?! and
This edition is playing catchup as it was started a few weeks ago but I wanted to hold it off until our new site was released. Some of the links a re a few weeks old now but it’s all worth a look I say.
All that social media guff
Twitter has a new front page. Mashable ponder over what and why?
Hootsuite. The professional Twitter client.
General web news
YouTube finally launches their new interface for the masses. Have a read of their blog post about the updates.
Everyone loves firefox(well I do), it may not be the fastest horse on the track but it’s the most versatile. Firefox 4.0 is on the horizon and Mashable have some early screenshots.
Apparently Apple don’t do market research. Pretty interesting article from Bokardo on why the hell not. And here is the og quote.
UX UX UX
Myself IM a fledgling UX designer, Lulu is the jedi master. Nick Finck writes a good post about Starting a career in User Experience Design and this post on ‘10 Common misconceptions about User Experience Design’ offers a great understanding of what it’s all about.
Visual treats
Web designer depot talk about ‘The dos and dont’s of dark webdesign’.
In spite of the striking visual impact that these dark designs can have, many designers don’t know how to effectively pull them off without turning off the visitor
It’s a well written article with some great points.The one re-occuring theme seems to be white or dark space. They also reference the beautiful New Zealand based Black Estate website. Nice.
A nice read on the virtues of old tech from Jason Santa Maria. I always love the visual richness and variety in his posts.
I love colour so this little stumble is well worth a read. Incidently I can’t recommend highly enough Colourlovers.com, such a great resource for anything colour related and it’s fun to just troll on through.
You press the button. The story of Kodak
And thats a wrap.
myBLOCK
Jotted down by Lulu on August 12th, 2009
myBLOCK provides support and toolsfor offline communities to organise events and spread the word about their work within a locality.
myBLOCK needed a help from concept to vision. We have worked closely with myBLOCK founder Anne-Marie to unravel her vision of a better world, to our first milestone, the promotional website. We still have a long way to go, getting funding and building the main site. Watch this space.
GeekSpeak website
Jotted down by Lulu on August 11th, 2009
GeekSpeak helps local businesses get their presence and offerings online.
Lushai provides visual designs for the websites they build and deliver to their clients. We are proud to be their partner in helping businesses get value out of the internet.
Lushai carefully crafted GeekSpeak’s own website to suit their client-base and cms platform capabilities.
Visit Geek Speak live website »
Design Point Architecture – Geekspeak
Jotted down by Lulu on August 9th, 2009
Design Point architecture required a minimalist design introduction leading through through a rich detailed path of projects and history.
Design Point architecture is designed for our partner company Geekspeak
Visit live site »
NZ Post – Lifestyle Survey
Jotted down by Lulu on August 4th, 2009
Lushai provides various experience design services working closely with their Digital Channel. For this project, they needed a custom interface that was to be built on top of their existing survey tool RightNow.
Lushai provided NZ Post a set of guidelines and patterns for this survey and HTML templates for developers to easily integrate with the existing systems.
CWA – Te Tere Auraki
Jotted down by Lulu on July 31st, 2009
Te Terea Auraki is one of the communities within TKI, the bilingual education portal built by CWA.
Lushai re-interpreted the previous Te Tere Auraki brand and developed the visual identity for the new website.
Visit the live site »
Brand value and the user experience
Jotted down by Brent on July 13th, 2009
Like most designers I end up becoming almost subconsciously critical of the things I love. At Lushai its usually my latest ‘user experience’ and most of the time it’s not even digital, it’s anything from door knobs & potato peelers to cell phones and this weekend a new car. All of these experiences adds to the perception of a brand.
Every action builds on the experience of the brand as if it were a person. Recently we have been frequenting a certain drive thru and every time the same branch forgets the same thing. Every time! So much so that I’m beginning to think they just don’t care about me or my family – their customers. Do I really want to mix with this person anymore? Nope, not me.
I’m sure the user experience of a brand is old in branding circles but in the online world it seems so many companies and their branding partners just don’t get it. Their ‘brand’ goes as far as guidelines for logo placement, colour and typography but very rarely do they follow through to the actual experience of their end-users. So the perception of the company is someone who cares a lot about how they look but could care less how they interact with customers. They just don’t get how their persona(lity) is experienced, and ultimately perceived, online.
Try finding anything on a certain online yellow phone directory. The key words ‘Turkish’ and ‘Petone’ should surely bring up the most popular Turkish restaurant in my area. Hmmmm brezelmania anyone? Google does it with a snap but not the big yellow. Guess which one I never use?
That’s a big user experience fail, therefore brand fail. On a side note maybe Yellow need to do something about their SEO, they should be first on the list for New Zealand businesses in any Google search.
That’s only one of many examples where the experience and interaction just lets the brand down big time. How about online banking? My own bank makes everyday business a chore. As if the teller didn’t speak English and had to travel great distances to do anything. The whole experience is slow and unforgiving. If it wasn’t so hard to switch I would have moved out a long time ago that’s for sure.
This is just a tip of the iceberg post. I will be doing plenty of ux brand reviews over the next few months so let me know of your own experiences.
What online experience has hammered your brand perception recently?