Erickson’s report and interview discussions provide insight for digital designers and developers like Manning, but also important ideas for those in online marketing and communications.  He likens digital designers to architects and urban planners who are creating public spaces to encourage people to interact, communicate, and live together.  He suggests that we look at online spaces in terms of the interaction they support and promote.

It’s a compelling analysis well worth the investment of time.

Researchers know this ideal approach is pretty rare. Here’s a more realistic scenario: The parent downloads an app and swipes through. If it looks kosher, they’ll “pass back” the smartphone or tablet to their child and return to their grown-up tasks. If you can’t depend on Mom and Dad’s web-savvy guidance, how do you make an app kid-friendly?

Make it easy to navigate.

Very few people read instruction manuals. Very few kindergartners read, period. Combine that with a tendency to get distracted… I’m sorry, what were we talking about?

Kids have limited time with these devices, and every second counts. If the child cannot intuitively find what they want, the fun shuts down. Best case scenario, they rapidly tap everything in sight before interrupting their parents. Worst case scenario, you’ve triggered a temper tantrum and instant deletion. Yikes.

Visually separate grown-up content.

Part of navigation, but important enough to highlight on its own. When we were discussing the UI for Chimps Should Be Chimps, we organized the app’s features by intended audience. Children’s buttons (Start! Next!) are large, colorful and tactile. Adult buttons (about the app, credits, feedback) are small, semi-transparent and flat.  Geography has helped too – since kids tend to rest their hands at the bottom of the iPad, their controls are near the bottom of the screen. The parent menu is tucked away in the top left corner.

Enable multitouch.

Kids treat the iPad like any other surface, often resting a hand on the screen while they explore. Trouble is, apps that disable multitouch gestures only pay attention to a single input at a time. Any other tap or click is ignored – and the app looks frozen.

Keep load times to a minimum

Children hate waiting even more than their parents. Adults that have spent more than 10 minutes with an iPad know feature-rich apps take awhile to load.  Children think their toy is broken.

Respect the audience.

Some people think children magically absorb anything placed in front of them. Those same people complain after they spend $4.99 on a hastily-produced app, only to have their child ignore it. Our app may be free, but we’ve invested a lot of time and imagination. After all, we know who we have to answer to.

Post-graduation.

Our professors and advisors warned us to think ahead and be prepared for it, but there was no time to. There were too many thumbnails to sketch, too many emails to read, too many content dummies to print out and bind, too much sleep to catch up on. It almost didn’t matter to us, sleep-deprived and over-caffeinated 3^rd year art students, what was going to be going on in our lives two years from now in the thing called the “real world.” Some of us knew what we would like to be doing after college, but most of us had yet to figure out what we liked to draw best. Besides, two years away was still too far away. If college so far taught us anything, it was that about 43 minutes is enough for everything to change anyway.

But now it’s happened. Suddenly, my student ID doesn’t let me into my home the studio building anymore, I must pay the full price for student-discount art supplies, and the only new email in my inbox is the automated ad from GradPhotos hassling me to purchase the overexposed photo of me holding my BFA degree.

That’s it, then. I’ve been pushed out of the nest! No more advisors, dorms, studio-mates always willing to give my drawing a good critique, no more free printing, or free access to centuries-old typographic specimens, no more anything. (Starting to think that maybe that’s why it cost $45K a year…)

So. We’ve been trained in design, typography, drawing, various analog and digital tools, and yet…

…what do we really do now?

I’ve been fortunate. I went almost immediately from graduation gown to first day here at Manning, and thus I had (thankfully) little time to wallow before I got things to draw, printers to use, and the company of creative people restored into my life again. Many of my peers have just as quickly begun internships and joined up with other creative agencies, or are working smaller interim jobs until they find their next step.

But what Manning and just about every other creative organization has in common is that none ask their artists and designers to be assembly line workers. They hire the artist for their skills, indisputably, but very important down the road is the artist’s “touch” that they have cultivated themselves. (A “style” is not quite the right word — illustrators can utilize different styles, but their “touch” — something inherent and underlying to the way they make images — is only their own). More than it’s human, it is also something unique to every artist — and for illustrators, a crucial part of their voice. Inherent and unique though it may be, it’s not quite DNA-inherent. Rather, it is a result of the combination of existing work we have been exposed to, our interests, idiosyncrasies, drawing habits, all that good irreplicable stuff.

I think the single most important thing that a young illustrator can do for themselves right now is keep drawing, thinking, and making, whether for a job or not. Unlike many fields, for artists, resting on laurels is not allowed (not too much, at least). Once we stop being inventive with our tools and curious with our minds and stop pushing our own boundaries, the work we produce stagnates, and becomes not only uninteresting and uninspired to view, but also unfulfilling to create. (During my senior year one of my professors, out of determination to simply unhook me from working digitally, made me spend half-a-semester drawing exclusively with a scraggly 2-foot stick he picked up outside, dipped in ink. And I had to do it in front of people.)

Needless to say, we didn’t pick the easiest major. And now we’ve been orphaned from all the professors, scraggly sticks, and helping hands that have guided the way so far. How do we continue that growth that began when we first decided we wanted to study illustration?

A lot of that will come from the work we do, right on the job.

Here at Manning, I am working with Patrick and Namkyu on everything from storyboards to websites to iPad children’s books. Not everything I will get to make will be something I’ve done before, or something I even thought I liked making (kind of like in school, actually!). Much of it is even more concerned with design, than image-making. But that aspect of illustration as a professional practice — the rigor of working on deadline to specifications outside your own — not only shapes the illustrator’s growth, but serves to define the nature of this kind of image-making itself.

For example, say I liked only ponies and watercolors, and I was left to my own devices to make some pictures. Naturally, I might take weeks happily indulging in watercolor paintings of ponies. But, if the client needs a Norse warrior riding a giant hot dog into space and it has to be done by the end of the week — and let’s say I had to do something like that every week — I would start to work differently. I would find different solutions to drawing people, environments, and objects, mark-making and inventiveness that I didn’t consider when I had infinite time and ponies; and the unfamiliar subject matter would demand efficiency in research and execution that the ponies did not.

Brb, taking a break from writing this to draw a Norse warrior on a hot dog now.

But, it will also mean a lot of self-direction.

I’ve kept a number of “pet” illustration projects around for years now, mostly comics and fiction-illustration — anything to keep me drawing and developing my own interests even while school was going on, and I can’t overstress its value. In the larger picture, while “working on deadline” is an influential experience, it may be a while before a young illustrator is in that kind of environment. Or, perhaps, even once they are, the illustrator may find there is not enough opportunity to experiment freely or explore their interests for personal enrichment.

Personal projects allow for exactly that, and they don’t have to be much different from what we’re so used to from school. A visiting alumnus of our art program, for instance, told us how he simply began to draw based on a simple premise: animals in suits, one a day for 100 days or so. Apparently the result was a hit. (Not that I would have expected otherwise!)

A few years in art school gave us all a hint as to what kinds of things we are interested in drawing. One of my classmates has a penchant for the grotesque, silly, and odd; I have a special attachment to war stories and sequential storytelling; another loves everything fantasy; yet another discovered he has his best hand with on-location drawing. So on and so forth. Now it’s time to grab that and roll with it!

(Before it completely changes in a few years.)

It will mean being extremely proactive.

While the design student’s curriculum revolved around preparing the student to enter a creative agency environment, the illustration student, it seems, was being prepared for something entirely different: indefinite wambling around. “There’s no shame in knowing how to pour a good mocha,” one of my illustration professors told us with a smile.

So, that is, to start actually getting gigs, it means pretty much the freelancer drill. Prior to joining up with Manning, I come from humble freelancing roots, both in web design and illustration — but never did I hear “pound the pavement” repeated so many times in the professors’ instructions to us from here on out. Nobody was going to be standing around to help.

Call art directors to introduce yourself.

Enter every illustration contest you can.

What’s that, you lost the contest and all that money? Enter the next one.

Print up 600 self-advertising postcards every month and spam newspapers with them.

Your website won’t save you; make physical portfolios.

And fly them to New York.

Basically, everything that would give a shy person a heart attack.

But, more simply, this just means making some new friends, which might not be as hard as it seems. Nearly every city, wherever we all are scattered to, has some kind of art society, graphic novelists’ club, guild of people that like drawing dogs, and the like. Chicago, where I am, even has an alumni society for graduates of my college — plenty of places to make connections. (And Manning is the first of them, in fact.)

And it will mean looking to our heroes.

Some months before graduation, one of our professors assigned us this: figure out who your heroes are. Not like, “John Kennedy” or “my mom,” but people (dead or alive) whose work and voices we can look to for creative nourishment. Our professor called this our “tribe” — people who think, work, or aspire to the same goals as we in our careers, to whom we can look for inspiration and “guidance.” We are, presumably, on a similar path as them, which they have trodden, and we have not.

Finding them has been a slow process, at least for me. My former classmates and I have inklings of what our voice and work in the illustration world will be, but hardly a concrete idea. And how are we to search for heroes when we do not know the “search criteria,” if you will?

Certainly, I found a few completely randomly — stumbling upon the work of fellow artists from a Slavic background whose politics-heavy roots inspire their thinking, following links online to discover an artist who has explored a subject that interests me, revisiting graphic novels, so on and so forth. As we meet more people and discover we not only like drawing ponies, we also really like drawing submarines, that list will change and expand more.

Hmmm.

The web devvy half of me really itches to start working on a website that is kind of like Pandora or last.fm, but for illustrators — it helps you find your tribe. You could join, log in, list a few people whose work you already admire, characteristics of your own work, media you want to experiment with, or your larger goals. The website, in turn, would match you up with other people who also are obsessed with drawing Little Red Riding Hood steampunk remixes, help you reach out to them, and direct you to galleries of artists who were alive 70 years ago who pioneered the genre. It would be great!

I wanted to write this post to share my two cents on the road ahead of me and my fellow creative industry debutants, but also to encourage those who are a few steps ahead of us (whoever might be reading) to know you can reach out to us, too. Even those of us that are happily employed are still facing some of the same questions about their ultimate artistic self-actualization. And, truly, there is nothing more encouraging than a story of your own out-of-college life, the name of a particularly friendly newspaper art director, the address of a good graphics library, or just an email to say hello.

That said, I should probably get back to work. These ponies aren’t going to draw themselves.

My beautiful infographic

From the day I stepped into the marketing world, one of my first lessons was in the great debate of usability versus design. The way of thinking was, and still is for many people, that you simply cannot have 100% of both.  Meaning, you MUST sacrifice one or the other; should your website be visually spectacular and lack common navigation and web standards or should it function well and just be… kinda good looking?

For a while, I had been trying to decide which side of the fence I stood. As a digital marketer and all around #websavvy gal, I started to subconsciously analyze the websites I came across with regards to the design and user friendlessness.  What I found is that many of the websites that balanced usability and design would fall into this cookie cutter mold – logo upper left hand corner, navigation near the top, big rotating banner messages, and if the user experience was really good (these are gems) a few calls to action sprinkled in.

This led me to only one conclusion:  don’t sacrifice either!  While websites should function well, why can’t this be accomplished without the off-the-shelf templates? Designers need to abandon the quick and easy layouts and strive to create a design that addresses the needs of the client and their client’s customers.  If this happens, usability and design will go hand in hand, complimenting each other.  Set aside the preconceived notions about “scrolling is bad” and “getting content above the fold” and really consider your audience and how they would react best. Sometimes, it may be more traditional and that is OK too… just make sure that you are meeting your companies goals and that of the users.

Gone are the days where you had an online presence for the sake of it. Throwing up an attractive webpage with a plethora of content won’t do much for you, your business, or your customers. Users are expecting a dynamite experience when they come to your site, and it you should work to give them one.   We’re fortunate to be in a creative  interactive marketing community in Chicago where we’ve learned you have your  cake and eat it too.

The Symptom

Text on the site is rendering with very jagged edges and incorrect letter spacing. (The technical term for this is ‘aliasing’.) This makes certain text more difficult to read and/or affects alignment. You’ve observed this problem on multiple computers running Windows 7 and using the IE 8 browser.


The Cause

OS

Internet Explorer may not be the cause of this issue. The root of the problem is likely caused by the Windows 7 operating system and the way that it handles the rendering of screen fonts.

All computer operating systems handle screen fonts slightly differently, but ultimately face the same challenge, which is rendering text in a manner comparable to what we are used to seeing on a printed page. Because anything displayed on a screen must be made up of pixels of a fixed size, small objects like text can be difficult to rasterize accurately. So operating systems have built-in methods of anti-aliasing type to better approximate printed text.

In Windows 7, the proprietary method of font rasterization is called ClearType. It does a fairly good job of anti-aliasing and displaying screen type. However, it is possible in Windows 7 to have this font rendering turned off.

Based on the screen shots I’ve seen, it appears as if ClearType is disabled on all the computers you used to test the site. This hypothesis was further supported by the fact that I was not experiencing this problem on my computer despite using the same browser and OS. As a test, I disabled ClearType and was able to replicate the display performance you are experiencing.

Font

The other contributing factor in poor screen type display performance can be the chosen font. Because of the unique rendering requirements of the screen, certain fonts have been developed with this specific use in mind. These are the ‘web-safe’ fonts that everyone is familiar with: Arial, Georgia, Verdana, etc.

Over the last few years, the number and availability of these fonts has increased. In order to use more distinctive fonts, we have implemented a service called TypeKit which is the industry leader in web typography. This service allows us to move beyond the old web fonts to create more customized web page designs. (We have used this product for more than a year with multiple clients in different markets and have not experienced any problems before this.)

If a print font is used on the web, for example, it can lead to poor results. However, the font we have chosen for the micro-site is a font developed by Google specifically for the screen. This means that in any given screen-based usage case, this font should perform similarly to the traditional web fonts like Arial and Georgia. So factors like a user’s OS, browser and monitor settings being equal, performance between a font like Arial and our font, Droid, should be comparable.

Possible Solutions

The first thing I would encourage you to do is to turn on and calibrate ClearType on your computer. This will at least determine whether ClearType is contributing to the problem as I suspect. Directions can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartypefaq.mspx

Assuming that ClearType is the primary source of our problems, there are a few possible solutions:

1. Leave the font as-is. One of the ‘joys’ of designing for the web is accepting that nearly every single user has unique display settings. OS, browser, screen resolution, monitor type, color settings, etc all contribute to the way a web page is rendered. And we have to assume that each user has adjusted settings to their own preferences.

We spend a great deal of time on the settings of our web designs in an attempt to ensure maximum compatibility and to normalize the user experience. For example, we design all of our sites with a width of 960 pixels, because it displays nicely on monitors with the most commonly used specifications. However, if a user chooses to set their screen resolution below this spec, we simply have to accept they have deliberately chosen settings that provide a less than ideal experience. Because the number of users with these settings is a very small percentage, we are willing to to accept compromised browsing experience.

In the case of your microsite, it is possible that your computers may fall into one of these small percentage use cases. If these computers were all purchased and set up at the same time by an IT professional, it is understandable how a commonly used setting may have been disabled on a large number of computers. Because everyone on your team falls into this group, it is understandable that the problem would seem to affect a larger percentage of users than is truly the case.

So one solution may be to accept that this problem affects a small percentage of users and be willing to move forward despite this fact. The users affected would primarily be Windows 7 users who have chosen to disable ClearType. Mac users would not be affected.

2. Convert the text to another web font. Because nearly all the text on this site is created using HTML and CSS, the font can be changed site-wide in a matter of minutes. Someone on your development team would simply have to modify the CSS to replace all instances of the font Droid with another sans serif font like Arial.

Switching Arial may lead to a slightly increased type display performance on Windows 7 with ClearType disabled (although I cannot confirm this). However, the entire look of the site will change slightly with the implementation of a different font. This is an option that can be tested with the success of the results being assessed in a very short time frame.

If the decision is made to use a different font, there would be a small amount of time required to fix any errors in spacing caused by the different fonts. This would simply require a few small modifications of the CSS.

I do apologize for the performance of the type display on your computer. This issue was not something that we encountered in any of our testing across multiple browsers, monitors and operating systems. For this reason, we suspect that the error is probably found in a relatively small percentage of users.

One of the main issues affecting area interactive creative directors is finding and hiring new talent. Because of the fast-paced, ever-changing nature of our industry, universities have not been able to adapt their programs in order to properly equip students for the real world. Currently AIGA Chicago boasts a mentor program that brings together designers from all levels of experience to share ideas, and offer advice. One suggestion that was thrown out was to expand and focus the mentorship program, as a way to guide young designers who have a passion for interactive design, but who haven’t necessarily been given the proper tools in order to be employable. Another suggestion put on the table was to create an ideal model for an interactive university curriculum, as a way to demonstrate to schools how to structure their programs in order to better prepare their students for the real world.

In addition to finding and hiring new talent, interactive creative directors are also looking to AIGA to facilitate the exchange of ideas. Keeping up to date with technological trends and innovations, popular websites and applications, business and communication news, people and happenings in the industry are always top of mind. Whether this takes the form of lectures, small talks, or studio visits is really up to AIGA, but the key point is to provide a dialogue among area interactive designers.

Other topics discussed include the improvement of content, design and functionality of the AIGA Chicago chapter website, the strengths and weaknesses of the organization, and a way to quantify and communicate the value of AIGA to both prospective members as well as business owners. Shortly after the round table one of the participants sent out this example of an interesting interactive treatment done by the AIGA MN chapter: How Dues Are Spent.

Overall participating in the roundtable was an eye opening, exciting experience for me, and I’m interested in viewing the initiatives that AIGA Chicago will soon be implementing. I’m also excited to announce that Manning will be hosting AIGA Chicago’s first small talk of 2011 on February 1. We will be presenting our philosophy, process, and portfolio to a sold-out audience, giving us the chance to challenge and inspire other area designers.

We’ve just launched the site and so far we’ve been very pleased with the results of our little social media experiment. We’ve used tweeSP to find gifts ideas for friends and family, or just had fun seeing what presents are recommended for celebrity tweeters.

Many people question the value of Twitter, but here’s one example of how tweets can be used in an incredibly interesting and useful way. So take tweeSP for a spin and see if you get some interesting gift ideas for the last few people on your holiday shopping list.

PS – for those of you scratching your head over our name for this cool new toy, it’s a play on Twitter and ESP. Now aren’t we punny!

]]> http://www.manningproductions.com/blog/2010/12/big-things-come-in-little-tweets-manning%e2%80%99s-twitter-gift-idea-app-launches/feed/ 0 http://www.manningproductions.com/blog/2010/11/forging-new-customer-relationships-denisesiegelbronze-com/ http://www.manningproductions.com/blog/2010/11/forging-new-customer-relationships-denisesiegelbronze-com/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:09:13 +0000 Doug http://www.manningproductions.com/blog/?p=2809 The challenge for any business is reaching people interested in your services and engaging them in a meaningful way. For the owners of a new niche brand that meant finding the right platform to showcase their work so customers understand what they do.

New Bronze Age Tile owners Denise Siegel and Dave Jaffe sought to expand their customer base by launching a hand-crafted bronze work business called deniseSiegelbronze. They needed an online presence to reach customers looking for the unique, beautifully crafted products the company offers, to establish Denise as a leader in her industry, and engender conversation with her clients and beyond. They also wanted something that was easy to update themselves and to showcase bronze pieces as Denise created them.

We started off with design that incorporates a variety of textured and pencil-sketched elements to give the site a tactile feel that mirrors the hand-crafted, tactile nature of Denise’s work. The design also mimic the stages that she goes through with a new client to help bring their pieces to life – hence the pencil and paper motifs that make you feel like you’re peeking into her sketchbook.

Once we had the design finalized, we addressed the bread and butter of their site: the Product Gallery. We wanted to make sure it was easy for visitors to use and for the owners to maintain. This was a major undertaking due to the breadth of products offered. It’s basically a “you want it, we’ll make it” operation, so the gallery needed to be flexible, with the ability to cross-list content and expand content categories easily. We actually reworked the organization of this section several times before settling on a category/post model that makes it simpler to find the products AND easier to keep the section up-to-date and scalable. As we often realize on projects, “simple” is often the hardest thing to get right!

Finally, we added a blog that gives Denise an online soapbox from which she can discuss her design work on recent projects, industry goings-on and engage the audience on another level. Plus the fresh content helps keep their site up in the rankings and users coming back for more.

The new denisesiegelbronze.com site officially launched October 21st, complete with an event that Doug was lucky enough to be able to attend. Check out their new site and Denise’s amazing work!

Textured elements for a tactile site!

Recently, our good friends Dave and Denise came to us with a request to help them build a website for their new company. Denise was set to launch deniseSiegelbronze – a new spin of her existing company New Bronze Age Tile. Her new brand places a heavier emphasis on Denise’s custom, hand-crafted bronze work and they wanted to make sure that this came across in their new site. They also wanted the site to be a platform to help establish Denise as a leader in her industry and engender conversation with her clients and beyond. And finally, they wanted something that was easy to update themselves and would allow them to showcase bronze pieces as Denise created them.

Not being ones to shy away from tall orders, or abandon friends in need, we jumped at the chance.

We started off refining their interactive marketing strategy, then creating a design that incorporates a variety of textured and pencil-sketched elements to give the site a tactile feel that mirrors the hand-crafted, tactile nature of Denise’s work. The design also mimic the stages that Denise goes through with a new client to help bring their pieces to life – hence the pencil and paper motifs that make you feel like you’re peeking into Denise’s sketchbook.

Once we had the design finalized, we attacked their Product Gallery. Knowing that this was the bread and butter of their site, we wanted to make sure it was easy to use for both visitors to the site and Dave and Denise, who would need to maintain it. However, it was challenging because of the breadth of products that Denise offers – it’s basically a “you want it, we’ll make it” operation, so the section need to be flexible, with the ability to cross-list content and expand content categories easily. We actually reworked the organization of this section several times before settling on a simple category/post model that makes it simpler  to find the products AND easier for Dave and Denise to keep the section up-to-date and grow with their company’s offerings. As we often realize on projects, “simple” is often the hardest thing to get right!

Finally, we added a blog that gives Dave and Denise a online soapbox from which they can discuss their most recent projects, industry goings-on and engage their audience on another level. Plus the fresh content helps keep their site up in the rankings and users coming back for more.

The new denisesiegelbronze.com site officially launched October 21st, complete with a snazzy event that Doug was lucky enough to be able to attend.  Check out their new online digs and Denise’s amazing work!

As part of the celebration, we were treated to the presentation of the flags by a full Color Guard and a spontaneous singing of the Marine Corps Hymn (Did you ever hear the last verse? Hilarious!). We were also joined by representatives from the Semper Fi Fund, the Wounded Warrior Regiment and Andrew Tibby, a local Iraqi vet who had received grants from the Semper Fi Fund.

Aligned with the The Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund, the group’s goal is to raise $1 million in gifts for injured soldiers around the nation. The Glenview Marines asked us to help them design a website that could be used as a fundraising tool – something that provided some background about their group and their cause; showcased the good works of The Semper Fi Fund and streamlined the gifting process.

From left to right: Jess Hara, Jim Baisley (Glenview Marines), Sara Ammuler (Semper Fi Fund), Andrew Tibby (Marine vet), Srgt. Ray Gozen (Wounded Warrior Regiment), Doug Manning

The result was GlenviewMarines.com, a slick website that emphasizes the Glenview Marines’ commitment to the Marine motto “Semper Fidelis,” or Always Faithful. Doug summed up our feelings by saying, “It’s an honor to be able to contribute to the treatment, aid and support of injured servicemen and women.”

To date, the Glenview Marines have raise just under a quarter of a million dollars and are as gung-ho as ever to hit their million-dollar mark. As one WWII vet told me with a wink, “It’s a heck of a mountain to climb, but at least no one’s shooting at us this time!”

We’ll keep you updated about progress of the Glenview Marines campaign, and invite our friends, clients and colleagues to visit the site and help support our injured troops.