Two sites showcasing hot new well-designed websites have chosen to feature Manning’s recently-released Snowflake Workshop on their top site charts.  We created the workshop for Brinks Hofer Gilson & Lione to give users a chance to create their own piece of intellectual property.  Try it out, if you haven’t already; create a snowflake and write a message to share with friends and family this holiday season. The snowflakes fall in a snowstorm gallery so all the unique designs are on display. The workshop debuted at number 30 on Design Chart’s illustrious top 40 sites.  We’ll see if it moves upward…

You may have also seen our post about the making of the workshop from the design perspective–look for another post soon on the development work that went into the site!

SnowflakeWorkshop.com

Whenever I come across creative work that I like, my first thought is often, “How did they do that?” As someone who works in the industry and knows all the moving parts that go into a great project, I find others’ processes fascinating. But the resources for discovering this information are frustratingly few and far between. So to do my part in providing more of this kind of background info, I am going to try to spotlight a few of our projects here on the blog. Hopefully someone will find it helpful (or at least interesting) to see us pull back the curtain a bit and reveal our creative process.

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Last week I posted my go-to planning methodology. If you are exploring a new project, you should start at the beginning of the process. However, here is a handy (though not extremely visually appealing) diagram to help you unstick projects that have been bogged down.

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As a project manager, planning is an important part of my job. Unfortunately, not everyone plans as well as they are capable of. Being a methodical person, I like methodology. Here is the simple planning method that works for projects of various sizes that I have employed for a few years, complements of David Allen.

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Courtesy of The Brokers with Hands on Their Faces Blog

As a sports fan, I am fully aware how unpopular the Bowl Championship Series is. It is a rigorously arbitrary way to crown a national champion, but also a very efficient way of making lots of money for the major conferences and media corporations who broadcast the BCS bowls. It is controversial to say the least, drawing the ire of Attorneys General and Congress. It is un-American to crown a sports champion in a beauty pageant, right? This surely isn’t how a free-market society determines who is the best.

Wikipedia tells us, “the theory holds that within the ideal free market, property rights are voluntarily exchanged at a price arranged solely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers.” Tell me, how successful was your last negotiation with your credit card company, or phone company, or the authorized Apple merchant? My guess is it wasn’t very successful at all, because America is not an ideal free market society. So how does the little guy compete with the mega-huge homecoming king? If that little guy is the Western Athletic Conference, he hires a PR firm.
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