More importantly, Microsoft has made some bold moves to make sure Internet Explorer stays relevant. Here’s a few reasons why website owners and designers should take a spin with the new browser:

Display Improvements in IE9

IE9’s goal is to get out of the way, and focus on the webpage. To that end, Microsoft’s revamped the user interface and invested a lot in hardware acceleration to make sure sites look their best. It’s also more compliant with HTML5 and CSS3, though it doesn’t support as many elements as Chrome or Firefox. IE is still playing catchup in many ways. Still, it’s a big deal when the bottom line moves up a few notches.

Newly supported features include:

• Embedded Audio (MP3/AAC Codecs)
• HTML5 Video
• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
• Prettier fonts! The hardware acceleration makes for better text and graphics rendering overall, which is a boon to typography nuts.

The browser also boosts a totally new JavaScript engine that, in some speed tests, has surpassed current versions of Firefox and Chrome.

Pinning: Your Site as an App

IE9 introduces a really interesting way to make every page seem more like an app: pinned sites. Chrome has a pinned tab option, but the IE9 implementation takes it a step further.

Drag a tab down to the Windows 7 taskbar to pin it in place. The site’s icon now lives permanently in the taskbar, ready to be launched at a click. More advanced sites can even use this icon to notify you of a status change, like a chat notification or new piece of email. Developers can even add extra features that appear when someone right clicks on the icon.

Take a look at Amazon’s “jump list” for example. It provides one-click access to the most important (and most important to promote) site areas.

Click the taskbar icon to launch the icon, and check out the changes:

• The site’s icon now shows up in the upper lefthand corner, where you normally see browser branding.
• The back and forward buttons take on the color of the icon.
• The Home button disappears from the menu bar.

Though these display changes are done automatically, they can also be customized by the developer to further extend site branding.

Reversing a Reputation

These changes are a big deal for a company that’s been accused of resting on their laurels since the Netscape browser wars. Once IE4 bested Netscape (sometime around 1998), Microsoft had the majority web browser share – peaking at a whopping 96% in 2002. Thus began the stagnation of IE. After all, when 96% of customers use your product, it’s hard to get excited about innovation.

How often did Microsoft update its system? Not very often. Consider this: Chrome was released in 2008 and is already on version 18. IE was released in 1995 and is only on its 9^th version.

That attitude lead to a shrinking market share and a terrible reputation. A reputation that IE9 admits, and actively sets out to reverse. The company’s based the entire campaign about this, including the hipsterish Tumblr The Browser You Love to Hate… complete with categories titled “Curious” “It’s Good Now” and “No, Really.”

More controversially, the browser takes a cue from Apple in regards to innovation. Microsoft usually releases incredibly backwards-compatible software with legacy feature support (does anybody really need Fax options in Outlook 2011?). Not so with IE9: Windows 7 and Vista only. IE9 and all future versions of the browser will not work at all in XP.

Some people call this a risky move, but I agree with Ars Technica on this. Windows XP was released in 2001 with IE6. IE6 is so out of date that Microsoft has created a campaign to reduce worldwide usage of the browser to 1%. Quoth the Microsoft: “Friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer 6.” With Windows 8 on the horizon, it’s wise to give an incentive to update… especially when it looks this nice.

Chimps, which was written, designed, illustrated, and developed by Manning, takes advantage of the iPad’s touchscreen interactivity to create a memorable, engaging experience for both children and adults. It’s a great example of how technology can be used to enhance and deliver a more effective message.

The iPad is a perfect publicity tool, with an instant worldwide distribution network and strong appeal to an influential target market. The app’s novel approach attracted the media and generated buzz, key elements for a successful campaign.
– Patrick Mouser, Manning Art Director

Chimps has received widespread critical acclaim from traditional media, bloggers and eBook reviewers, and has been downloaded thousands of times.

To learn more about the app’s role in the communications campaign, check out our case study or download Chimps Should Be Chimps in the App Store.

Manning recently partnered with one of nation’s leading litigation firms Girard Gibbs LLC, to re-launch the firm’s brand, strengthen its digital identity, and provide a stronger connection with potential clients.

The approach centered on minimizing the typical “legalize brochure speak” found on many law firm websites and avoiding a web information architecture based on the organizational structure of the firm. Instead, we embraced an identity defined by the way clients look at the legal profession, and the needs and interests of this audience.

Attracting New Clients

The new Girard Gibbs site launched in the spring of 2012 has already proven very effective at attracting new clients. One of the core benefits of Girard Gibbs’ client-centric digital strategy is its ability to generate client leads.

The web has become a firm’s most important tool for marketing communication and outreach. The Girard Gibbs’ site leverages the web by automatically aggregating content according to the viewer’s interests, providing a richer, more engaging experience. The site provides multiple channels to interact with the firm thus generating client/case leads. The end result is longer time on the site, additional page views, and most importantly, additional contact submissions.

Turbo-Charged Search Engine Organization (SEO)

This site structure also enhances the firm’s SEO, as each dynamic page can be a new “front door” for clients. Prospective clients can quickly find assistance for their legal problems no matter how they access the site. Content creation is a snap, as virtually anyone at the firm can update the site quickly and easily through a custom content management system (CMS). Just as importantly, the CMS gives each page an SEO boost by standardizing content into Google-friendly formats.

Digital Differentiation

The strong new digital brand has already proven to be effective for Girard Gibbs. While law firms have traditionally been slow to embrace change, those that understand the value and importance of an effective online strategy can profit from creating a strong digital brand that truly differentiates the firm from the competition in the eyes of clients.

Towards the end of my senior year in college, as we all anxiously awaited our imminent expulsion into the scary real world, our class received an assignment: “find your tribe.” That is, if you could have a group of people (still living or not) by your side as you go forward in your creative career – your heroes, you could say – who would they be?

Right off the bat, several artists in our “Inspiration Folders” immediately made the list, so that we could channel them as muses; successful illustrators and designers throughout history, for a good-luck charm in the harsh world of business and fame; artists who succeeded in the earlier stages of their post-graduate careers, for navigational skills.

But before you mentally assemble your own list, hold up a second. Those whose creations found in you an appreciative audience do not necessarily qualify for your tribe. And of course, while it is never a bad idea to surround yourself with successful, talented people, what outside of their having achieved renown really makes them your heroes?

It’s very likely many of your heroes have indeed become wildly successful, and even more likely that they have put out work that you appreciate, or wish you had made yourself. As Patrick wrote, it’s natural to say you want to be able to do that thing that they did just like that, and thus they are your hero whose footsteps you wish to follow.

But to want the finished thing in and of itself means to dismiss why the person made it, and it’s the why you always want to find for anything you make. Not necessarily the why in the mission statement sense of “because I want to save the world” or “because I like making art” – but the why in the sense of What point am I trying to make? What story do I want to tell? What is my voice? What ought to be the purpose, audience, need, and spirit of the thing I am making? Then, the execution stage boils down to the elegant question: How do I make it do that?

The underlying task with this “tribe”, in actuality, is not necessarily to find people whom we admire or whom we wish we could be, but to find people who did what they did for the same reasons as we seek to, asked the same questions as we are asking, aimed to actualize the same goals we want to actualize. Their role is to model how those questions may be grappled with and answered. (Defining all these questions and reasons is also a nice teacherly way of getting you to explain to yourself why the heck you’re in this field to start with, which can’t be all that bad.)

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When you finish this exercise, it’s possible that your tribe ends up being largely made up of people outside of your field, and that few of the artists in your “Inspiration Folder” even made it in. That’s good. Coaching and developing your creativity means expanding the number of connections your brain can make between ideas, and that almost always means soaking up things outside of what you think you’re all about. So, if you’re an artist searching for your “tribe”, don’t be shy to befriend scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, philosophers, actors, and mafia men. For example, maybe you are an illustrator, but the way you tackle your creative stream is similar to writers of hard apocalyptic sci-fi. Maybe you are a web designer, but your creative mantras are in line with those of certain film composers (in the way their medium translates to your craft). Keep this in mind as you “interview” people for the VIP seats of your tribe.

I still have my tribe from my senior year of college. Though it has since welcomed new members and lost older ones, adjusting and evaluating my roster of thought influences has been an invaluable creative GPS. A few of my unlikely tribe members, for example, ended up being writers, historians, filmmakers, and political figures, despite my having expected many more illustration-related individuals to hold their seats. The result of the exercise was one of my first clues to what I’ve since pursued as a central interest in image-making: illustration’s capacity for narrative and experiential storytelling.

If you do this exercise too, it goes without saying that this list shouldn’t be folded up and forgotten, but revisited and revised as a living document as often as the need arises. It’s not once or twice, but countless times that the same creative questions you’re asking have demanded solutions throughout history, from a myriad of angles and perspectives. The bearers of these myriad angles and perspectives are the heroes you want to find. The first few may very well already be hiding in your “Inspiration Folder”.

We’ll be back at full capacity on Tuesday, but in the meantime, here’s a few pictures of the space to tide you over.

Before

After (well, work in progress…)

Get Your Reps In

Malcolm Gladwell famously popularized the “10,000 Hour Rule” in his book, Outliers. In researching the commonalities among the world’s most successful people, Gladwell found any individual who had distinguished his/herself by becoming an expert in their field had accumulated at least 10,000 hours of practice. Regardless of whether the field was law, or music or even hockey, the truly great rose to the top through hours and hours of focused training.

So if you want to become a successful creative, you might as well accept that this applies to you as well. Let’s say you average 40 Hours per week for 50 weeks per year. That’s 2,000 hours per year. At that rate, you can expect to work five years before really establishing yourself. So my recommendation: do work.

Do What Others Are Unwilling To Do

Everyone who enters art school imagines themselves graduating, getting a great job, being handed juicy briefs, and award winning work just spewing forth. But once you graduate, reality sets in pretty quickly. You work in a cubicle, you get the hand-me-down assignments, there’s never enough money, the clients are difficult. This is not how it looks in the movies.

But if you want to crawl out of the newbie pit, be the person who is willing to do anything to get better. Take on the busy work, and find a way to do it faster. Take the crappy brief with no budget, and come up with a solution that goes way beyond expectations. If you’re a designer, learn how to code or do animation. If you’re an editor, learn typography and color theory. Ask to sit in on meetings that aren’t even for your projects. Work all nighters. Learn your clients inside and out. Distinguish yourself by doing what others can’t or won’t do. Someone will notice, I promise.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

To succeed in this field, you generally have to be a self-assured sort. So many young creatives proceed with confidence that exceeds their status. And in many ways, rightly so. They’ve likely already mastered new technologies that the old farts are still trying to figure out. They eat, sleep and breathe their discipline. And they just paid six figures for their degree, so they damn well should know everything, right? Wrong.

New grads often are wildly talented. They are experts with software, they have great ideas and they have youthful energy. But in the real world, that’s only a small part of doing creative work. The realities of getting work made are daunting: business development, budgets, proposal writing, client interfacing, tight deadlines, brand standards, working with a team…. there’s a million little skills required to do each of these things well. And all those little things are what separate the geniuses from the hacks. So the sooner you accept that you don’t know much, and start trying to learn the ‘business’ of being a creative, the better you’ll be.

Embrace Failure

Award winning ad agency, Wieden + Kennedy have a mantra that I love: Fail Harder. What they mean by this is that creatives should embrace the failure required to create successful work. Thomas Edison make 2,998 unsuccessful attempts at electric light before getting it right. It took the Wright Brothers a full five years after their Kitty Hawk test to achieve sustained flight. If they had been discouraged by failure, where would we be today?

Creativity isn’t so much picking a solution out of thin air as it is a process of whittling a series of bad ideas down. Young creatives tend to be very precious with their ideas, and this blinds them to what is and isn’t working. The best way to have a good idea is to treat nothing as sacred. Work loose. Don’t be afraid to abandon things. Don’t dictate your ideas, arrive at them.

Start With Why

Most creatives can readily point to their biggest inspirations. The movie, or commercial or print ad, or game or website that made them realized they wanted to do THAT as a career. They obsess and fawn over these works, trying to figure out a way to make something just like them. And this tendency is completely natural. In fact, it’s how you learn. But a lot of times, young creatives are asking the wrong question.

Most people see something inspiring and ask, “How’d they do that?” A young creative might spend weeks researching a film special effect, or imitating a type treatment. They’re trying with all their might to figure out how the work was created. But the better question is, “Why did they do that?”

By asking, “How” many young creatives learn these techniques and then want to use them in their own work, regardless of whether they fit the project or not. The point they miss is that this was not the process used by the person who created the work they were so inspired by. Great work arises from the demands of the project and the creative techniques develop organically from the process of meeting those demands. By asking why these decisions were made, young creatives can learn how to make great work themselves rather than simply imitating the work of others.

Create With Your Brain, Not Your Mouse

Most creative work today is done using computers. And you have to be an expert at computers and software in order to be successful in this field. But knowing technology only facilitates creativity, it is not the source of it. To really make great work, learn how to create with your brain. This means learning how to research, how to write and sketch, how to have brainstorming sessions that bring the most out of people. This is where the real magic happens. Most times, the success or failure of your project is determined before you ever touch the mouse.

Process Makes Perfect

I suppose it’s conceivable that someone could catch creative lighting in a bottle once. But if you’re going to be successful in this business, you’ll have to be creative with remarkable consistency. You’ll be expected to produce no matter what the budget, client, timeframe or resources. You won’t have the luxury of sitting around waiting to be inspired. So if you want to create with any regularity, my recommendation is to develop a system.

A young creative might find the idea of routine or consistency to be the antithesis of creativity, but the opposite is true. Creativity is often the ability to be able to play conceptual ‘connect-the-dots’. By using a process, what you’re actually doing is limiting the variables as to ‘how’ you’ll arrive at a solution. This frees your brain to focus on the ideas themselves.

Learn How To Sell

A lot of young creatives tend to assume that if they simply absorb themselves in the work, its genius will be self-evident and the ideas will sell themselves. This could not be further from the truth. Like most other things, even creativity must be sold.

There is a lot of skill in being able to work with a client: understanding their needs, helping them imagine as-yet-non-existent work, explaining decisions, and ultimately convincing them to trust your vision. If this part of the process makes you squeamish, this may not be the field for you. Your work will only ever be as good as your ability to get it made. And so honing your presentation, speaking and writing skills will be an essential part of your development.

Google Places is a service offered by Google to help businesses take ownership of their locations and improve their search identity. It enables businesses to come up in Google Maps searches, or as location results in standard Google searches. Google Places is especially important if you have a physical location that is relevant to users. An e-commerce site may not be concerned with a local client base, but a restaurant will.

Businesses can verify and claim their listing and then add information on that page. The more thorough and specific the content, the better your company will do in relevant search results. Google allows you to specify business categories, add pictures and add video. The service is free, easy to set up, and will allow users to quickly access relevant, local information about your business.

Why is Google Places important?

97 percent of consumers search for local businesses online. One of the goals of an online presence should be to create and share the most relevant, useful information possible for potential customers. According to data released by Google, 82% of online activity is related to local content. Businesses should vigilantly monitor search results to ensure that their contact and services information is up to date and accurate. Given that Google Places verifies all claimed locations, you easily keep reliable information at the top of search results.

As an added bonus, a good Places listing can actually help your website SEO by giving users an external source that offers them relevant information related to your website. If your SEO is set up well, the top search results should be your company page followed by a list of the top 3 relevant and nearby locations, so they know exactly where to go and who to call for more information.

How to Get Started with Google Places

Google Places, like most Google Products, has excellent step-by-step guides and tutorials to help you claim your location and get set up.

The most important first step is to claim and verify your listing via phone or postcard confirmation. As you expand your listing information, research what is best for your audience. Google Analytics will give you a good idea of what people are searching for to reach your site now, and can also give you an idea of what services you offer that people are missing.

Then What?

Once your Places page is set up, businesses can monitor user behavior to learn more about what people are searching for and how they currently interact with that Places page. The analytics within Places shows the top queries and top zip codes that were interested in your business’s Places listing. This information can be vital in evolving your online strategy. Once you see how users are using your Places listing, you can add coupons or integrate your listing with Google AdWords.

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Like all parts of your digital presence, Google Places is a tool that should be used in conjunction with a larger strategy.  Both large and small businesses can benefit from making their local listing clear and relevant for their future customers.

I often get (and love) the opportunity to take a design all the way from its Photoshop comp stages through its front-end implementation. As a result, I’m always on the lookout for tricks and tools that help me unify and expedite the larger arc of the web design process. One of the spotlights today is on the 960 grid system, a grid paradigm that provides your mockups with a versatile and reliable grid ready for easy slicing and implementation with HTML and CSS. The second is on LessCSS, a more dynamic take on writing CSS that not only near-eliminates what makes CSS a comparatively-disjointed part of a design’s front-end implementation, but also teaches it a few new tricks.

The 960 grid system
Layout and page design would be nothing if not for grids — all those invisible intersecting lines that measure out the page into columns, rows, and cells that expedite answering questions of element placement, spacing, and size. In web design, an art performed across diverse mediums of sketches, graphics software, and code editors, an underlying grid system must still somehow exist, despite unpredictable variables such as the end user’s screen resolution. Enter the 960 grid system: limit your design’s width to 960 pixels, and utilize the magic number’s accommodating flexibility of column numbers and widths, while reining in your design within the limitations of a modern web user’s screen.

The homepage for the grid system, http://960.gs, offers explanations, implementations, and samples of the grid’s versatility and application. Last but not least, yours to take home is a nicely-giftwrapped ZIP with a template for your software of choice to get you started on using it.

LessCSS
CSS is an invaluable step-up from markup-restricted <font> and <center> tags. But compared to the dynamic nature of programming languages that constitute the other building blocks of front-end development, it falls short in robustness and flexibility. Especially with a cohesive design, how often is there a color hex that you wish you could simply save to a variable and plug into background-color, color, and border-color properties throughout the CSS file? Or not have to retype the same border radius value for -webkit, -moz, and -o every time there’s a different radius needed? After all, 90% of that code is not going to change, and it makes sense to wish you could do 90% less the typing.

LessCSS (http://lesscss.org) does all that and quite a bit more. Store your #686868 to a @maingray variable, and simply insert it in wherever you want with color: @maingray; Want to reuse all that border-radius code, but with varying radius values? No problem. Make yourself a .rounded-corners(@radius) parametric mixin, then simply type use in any declaration: div { .rounded-corners(5); }. Want add some #dddddd to your #ff0390, and use the result? Got you covered there too.

But before you switch over all your CSS to LessCSS, note that you may have some IE8-using visitors to provide for. As of this writing, LessCSS cannot be parsed in Internet Explorer 8 and earlier because of LessCSS’ use of inline stylesheets which LessCSS needs to write to. But don’t let this be the reason not to give it a shot. As an IE-safe alternative, leverage LessCSS’s superior code-composing capabilities for design efficiency, but store the compiled raw-CSS output as a regular CSS stylesheet for bulletproof cross-browser compliance.

And as a bonus, LessCSS’s support for parametric mixins plays in beautifully when you feel like showing an underlying grid some love. A favorite of mine is .grid(@columns), a mixin I write that allows me to calculate the width of a div given a desired number of columns it should span. For example, assuming a column width of 40 pixels with a 10 pixel margin, .grid(2) would compute for me width: 100px. With functions and various mathematical operations available as well, the horizon is broad — and involves Less math, less time, and less CSS all around.

Once you’re through design and development, the finish line for your site, app or video can be tantalizingly close. But before the project goes live, it’s time to look at it one time – very thoroughly.

It’s vital to go through and test your project with a fine-toothed comb. For most people, this part of the process is less fun than looking at designs. It’s the steamed vegetables you have to eat before you get dessert. The length of the testing stage varies depending on the scope of the project. But like every other point of feedback we’ve discussed in this blog series, proper communication can keep things moving forward. I find the best way to pick apart and address issues is to compile them into a clear, easy-to-read list.

1. Everything has bugs at some point. Our goal now is to find those bugs before we make anything live. We’d much rather find errors during this phase than during launch.
2. Ask your development team how they would like bugs delivered. We’ve created a template for clients so they can compile bugs in one location and in an organized way. It saves them time writing and saves us time putting those fixes into action. Plus, the template reduces the amount of follow-up questions we have to ask afterwards (What browser were you using? Can you reproduce it? etc.)
3. Test your site thoroughly: every page, every link, every interaction that someone may potentially have. We’re doing it too! We’re all trying to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Keep in mind that there are a host of things that we could never spot without help from you – a mixed up headshot, for example, or an out-of-date address.
4. A feature is not a bug. If you think of something new that you want on the site, talk to the project manager to see if it’s in scope or if it’s something that will require additional resources. However, if you see something that contradicts a comp or has a different functionality than was previously discussed, that should be fixed during this phase.
5. Send organized lists, the fewer the better. If we’re working off a single list it’s easier to get everything done quickly and to ensure we don’t miss one critical thing that got lost in 30 different emails.
6. We want the site to be the highest quality work we can possibly put out. However, if there are requests that are out of scope, infeasible or impossible to replicate, they may be held for a later update while we make sure we have everything else working at its full capacity. This is especially true if a project has a tight deadline.

Final testing and feedback is a tricky step, but it’s also, happily, the last one. Once you’re through, your project can be finalized and put forth for all the world to appreciate. And if a project has a strong foundation of communication, it’s sure to be a success for everyone involved.

I recently read a great quote in ESPN The Company: The Story and Lessons Behind the Most Fanatical Brand in Sports:

“Analysts talk in theory about cross-platform opportunities today, just as they used to talk about the ideal of synergy ten years ago. But ESPN is an unheralded case study that illustrates how such a strategy evolves organically while actually meeting customer needs and turning a profit.”

Turning a profit certainly isn’t hard when over six million people fill out a March Madness bracket on ESPN.com. That’s a solid base audience to start, but it’s even stronger when you realize each one of those fans is checking in daily via web or mobile app, and sharing their progress on social networks. Sports have become a necessity in our society, just as much important as eating and sleeping for fans. It’s water-cooler conversation – and ESPN’s cross-platform approach has made the company a big part of those discussions.

Every company wants to reach the biggest audience possible, and a lot are trying to reach them through multiple avenues. Unfortunately, the effort can’t stop after registering an account for Facebook. What makes ESPN so successful is that they use a ton of platforms and use each one very, very well. Whether it’s broadcast, website, or mobile, if you want the best sports coverage, you’re going to use an ESPN product – especially this month.

The benefit of having a strong presence on multiple platforms is that it’s difficult for people to stop tuning in at any given time. On a lunch break they can check updates on their phone; if they go on a computer they can watch videos there. Instead of accessing your content once a day through one platform, they can check in 15 times a day through multiple platforms. The key is providing the consumer with that access whenever and wherever they want it.

This is definitely the month of the year that everyone in the U.S. wants a piece of ESPN’s data. If you’re a fan of March Madness, every year lives up to the hype (especially being a UConn fan after last year). Last year, March Madness was the second most profitable event of the year after the Superbowl. Normally I use the ESPN Scorecenter App for updates on my favorite teams, but during March Madness I kind of care about every team in the tournament (or at least every team I picked to win.) I need coverage on every single college basketball game. And with sixteen different games in one day, I need a way to keep up with the madness.

Even though ESPN isn’t broadcasting the majority of these games, they offer the best March Madness app: ESPN Bracket Bound. I can see every score, the full schedule, big news updates, even my customized bracket. Now, that’s exactly what the consumer is looking for  – and a killer way for the company to keep fans engaged with their brand.

After conquering sports on TV and providing useful apps, ESPN recently made their API database public. This is a great move for the company because it lets developers create applications and software to promote ESPN, and opens a whole host of new opportunities. EPSN doesn’t have to spend a dime on new device research; developers will take their API to places they never dreamed. Like Facebook apps, each time a new company uses the API, they’re advertising for ESPN. And like Farmville did for Facebook, another company’s work drives a whole batch of users back to the channel.

Despite all the information and analysis one can gain from the easy access to ESPN’s data, it’s still difficult to predict the fate of college basketball teams and find the perfect March Madness bracket. Mine turned out to be too poor to even post a picture of it.

The bottom line though is that companies must have a well thought out strategy for each platform – how are you going to connect and continue to connect with your audience? Cross-platform success often comes from utilizing the same data for slightly different output, whether it’s an app, website, or social media outlet. It’s finding out what’s right (and what’s most addictive) for each platform.