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.

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If you’ve worked with us before hopefully you’ve had the pleasure of working with Kirk Berryman and Patrick Mouser. If not, here are just a few of the reasons why both were recently promoted and why we’re very excited about it.

Patrick Mouser – Art Director

Patrick Mouser

In his new role as Art Director, Patrick will extend his creative leadership beyond web design to include visual supervision of all Manning work including film and video. Many of our projects are multifaceted, so this will allow us to provide greater creative and visual continuity across media types and platforms.

This is a natural extension of the strategic design role Patrick has played on a numerous client projects including the American Bar Association, Stryker, First Student and others. This will also allow Patrick to use more of the branding, print and television design skills he developed as an award-winning ad agency designer before joining Manning.

Kirk Berryman – Senior Producer

Kirk Berryman

Kirk joined Manning more than two years ago and quickly proved himself invaluable. Kirk’s knowledge of web development, search engine marketing and video production combined with his own entrepreneurial background has made him a tremendous asset from both a creative and business perspective.

As Senior Producer, Kirk will continue to provide the strong leadership he has shown on projects for the American Bar Association, COUNTRY Financial, the Metavante Corporation, and others. In addition to taking on more web and video assignments, Kirk will also be putting his entrepreneurial skills to work helping coordinate Manning’s creative growth and business development.

We hope that you’ll join us in congratulating Patrick and Kirk on their promotions and wish them well in their new roles.

The New York Times’ politics blog “The Caucus” took a short break from the presidential race to plug the ABA’s Constitution Day game “Uncle Sam’s Attic” that we created (see previous “Happy Constitution Day” listing).

September 17th is Constitution Day. It’s a day that we the people get to appreciate this important document. And no you don’t get the day off of work to celebrate.

For the past few years, we’ve had the honor of working with the American Bar Association’s Division for Public Eduction on interactive projects to educate students about the relevance of the U.S. Constitution in their lives.

In light of the presidential race, this year’s project deals with constitutional amendments that relate to the right to vote. It’s a scrapbook game, so check it out and see how well you know your rights!

You can also sign the Constitution on this same site if you’re so inclined.  We got an Adobe Site of the Day award for our work on this one.