Unlike a lot of project manager tools, these resources won’t help you manage your workload, multi-task, or prioritize your workflow. Instead, they fulfill our number one task: effective communication.
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Typography for Lawyers: Essential Tools for Polished & Persuasive Documents
by Matthew Butterick

I may not be a designer, but I represent a design company. Each document that leaves my office needs to look deliberate, thoughtful, and legible. And no matter what your resume claims, you’re not proficient in Word until you can nicely format your work.

Enter Matthew Butterick, an attorney/digital type designer. His book, Typography for Lawyers, codified my gut reactions to basic design mistakes and armed me with the tools to fix them. Don’t let the title deceive you. This book applies to anybody who writes on a regular basis. Butterick’s work mixes philosophy with practical how-tos; he focuses on the functional, not the needlessly fancy. For example, rules come with explanations:

I know that many peo­ple were taught to put two spaces between sen­tences. I was too. But these days, using two spaces is an obso­lete habit. The prac­tice was passed down from the typewriter era. Type­writer fonts had unusual pro­por­tions. Using two spaces helped set off sentences a bit bet­ter. We don’t use type­writ­ers any­more. So it’s not stan­dard. It’s not part of typo­graphic prac­tice. Once in a while, you can use two spaces after sen­tences. When? If you’re forced to use a typewriter-style font. These are also known as monospaced fonts.

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I recently read an article from UX Magazine about some of the most common mistakes made on the web, and one jumped out at me in particular: usability. The mistake wasn’t ignoring usability—although there are plenty of sites on the web that have poor usability—but rather the pitfalls of focusing on being  usable without first figuring out how to be useful. In other words, the best user interface in the world can’t save a site with a poorly defined purpose.

I’d never seen this particular point articulated so bluntly, but it reinforced a philosophy that we’ve always worked hard to embody in our client work. We partner closely with our clients to help them understand that the “why” of a project is just as (if not more) important than the “how.” To that end, our approach includes a few steps that, while not necessarily difficult to execute, are often overlooked and can lead to underwhelming results.

In order to better understand the distinction between usefulness and usability, let’s explore a hypothetical website project for Lassie’s Dog Walking Company. Continue Reading →

A new iPad App conceived and developed by Manning is part of a campaign that goes on the offensive against a CareerBuilder Superbowl ad that uses chimpanzees.

Our app, Chimps Should Be Chimps, is being used as part of the The Lincoln Park Zoo’s protest against CareerBuilder’s upcoming ad.  The story was picked up by NBC Chicago, the Chicagoist and the Chicago Sun-Times.

This CareerBuilder ad reminds us that the message of Chimps Should Be Chimps remains timely. The app allows us to reach a widespread, targeted audience and easily update and distribute the content. For fans this Sunday: if the big game is a blowout, and the commercials seem stale, there’s a another option to turn to.

We’d like you to meet our new Producer/Video Editor, Erik Duda.

Erik worked as a multimedia specialist at the University of Connecticut where he produced, shot and edited video and multimedia projects for University Communications. His work included creating recruitment programs, marketing and news pieces.

He has extensive experience with non-linear editing, 2D and 3D graphic creation, shooting with a variety of HD camera formats, and video compression. And he sometimes even stars in his own work.

At Manning he’ll be responsible for video projects and integrating video into our digital interactive work. In his spare time Erik has a passion for stand-up comedy, guitar and playing ice hockey. Although he’s originally from Connecticut, he is not a Boston Bruins fan (so getting him to support the Blackhawks won’t be hard.)

Last night I slept for 6 hours 51 minutes, 7 minutes under my monthly average. Decent quality for most of it, looking at the graph. Tap another app: today I’ve consumed 16 oz of coffee (4 calories, since I drink my coffee black.) Better log another cup – those seven minutes are taking a toll.

If I felt like it, I could post graphs of these patterns to Facebook, to bore my Friends with the minutia of my statistical existence.

Or I could think about why I monitor these things in the first place.

There’s a terrific New York Times article from about a year ago called “The Data-Driven Life” on this self-measurement phenomenon. At the time, I thought the tracker lifestyle was pretty bizarre. A few apps later and a quote from the story rings true:

I got nothing from my tracking system until I used it as a source of critical perspective, not on my performance but on my assumptions about what was important to track.

I’m not a true believer yet – and I doubt I’ll ever be a person who creates a statistical analysis of how daily butter intake changes my arithmetic speed. But I started tracking to wean myself off of caffeine, and it’s worked. Unchecked, I consume it like a fiend. Logging every diet soda keeps me from overindulging. Then I wanted to see if my sleep improved on days I drank less caffeine (it does!). The daily graphs have taught me how I sleep and how often I sleep — and how to improve them.

Now if I can only remember to track my hours at work…

As the launch date for Chimps Should Be Chimps approaches, we’re taking a look back at our development process. In this interview, our art director explains how Manning’s company philosophy informed decisions behind the app’s design.

What made the iPad a good fit for Project ChimpCARE?

Patrick Mouser: The iPad and other emerging platforms are really changing the way in which companies, organizations, etc can reach their audience. Traditional media such as print, TV and even the (capital I) Internet can’t rival the level of engagement possible with the iPad. The device is highly mobile – people use it everywhere, it’s intuitive – used by toddlers and grandparents alike, it’s tactile – you literally hold and touch it to interact. Additionally, most users think of their iPad as technology that enriches their experience: they download apps to make things easier, do things faster, to entertain, to learn, to connect. They trust it and welcome it into their lives. And so the relationship they have with the device creates an environment that is fundamentally more conducive to engaging people than the bully pulpit provided by traditional media. And so it’s interesting to explore the idea of how to communicate with users within this entirely new dynamic.
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NBC’s Chicago business blog, Inc. Well, did a story on us and our upcoming iPad app, Chimps Should Be Chimps. Check out the story, leave a comment, and make sure to download the app December 1st!

With iOS, Android, and other platforms, we see some sites creating a native applications. What’s interesting to me is that this idea of optimizing the end-user’s experience could have been done ages ago by creating applications that interact with the web on Windows and OSX. My guess is that it just wasn’t practical at the time.

However, I slowly see sites developing native apps (although having mobile versions of their sites coexist). For me, personally, if there is a site I go to often, I prefer to have the native app (presuming that it works well). In my imagination I see the web evolving in this way. HTML, JavaScript, PHP, RoR, among other programming languages are great for what they do. But without the current type of synergy with these tools that makes the web so unique and fresh over time, the environment for web development is pretty dull. Web standards are always being debated and there always seems to be issues with creating a new site that takes advantage of new web technologies.

If you take a look at the SDKs of other platforms, they can provide deep device integration along with tools that expand on possibilities of what you could develop solely on the web. However the web surfing environment on the computer has always felt like a separate space.

It’ll be interesting what type and form of web content will be considered as standard in the years to come.

As the launch date for Chimps Should Be Chimps approaches, we’re taking a look back at our development process. For our first installment, we talked to the story’s illustrator about research, favorite characters, and collaboration.

Can you tell us how you developed the artistic style for the character illustrations?

Natalie Sklobovskaya:   For Lulu and Poe, there were many ways I could have drawn them. They could have been a drawing for National Geographic or it could have been a drawing for some nature textbook, but we were dealing with a digital children’s book. So for that there needs to be a lot more research done both on how children’s book chimps are drawn, and how to draw a chimp, because I have never drawn chimpanzees before in such an intense fashion.

For the character design portion, I took trips to the zoo to learn how to draw chimps. I spent hours sketching and learning how they live, where they hang out and how they move.  I also tried to figure out how to depict them with regards to where on the gradient of animal to human they were going to lie. We wanted the reader to relate to the chimps. So within that it was a lot of push and pull, bringing in little characteristics of humans – you know, whites of the eyes, and maybe less furry or a little bit furrier… finding a good balance until it looks like something that’s friendly and real at the same time.
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Combining creative people with the right clients and challenges results in some pretty unique work – like our soon-to-launch iPad app Chimps Should Be Chimps. Working with Project ChimpCARE taught us about the problems surrounding chimpanzees in entertainment. We learned another big lesson from the app itself: that we can find effective ways to use the iPad and other digital technologies to convey important information in an engaging way.
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