Holly Rawson at Inphonic, a client of ours, helps to run and design wirefly.com, one of the bigger online mobile phone resellers. She came to my web design class at Towson and gave a critique on a 1st round of ecommerce designs my students did. Basically, she said she wasn't all that impressed with the formal aesthetic beauty of any of the sites she was shown, she wanted them to be more promotional and "selly", with buttons, badges, arrows and "flair" to catch people's attention.

You know what she means: the little star shaped badge that says "GREAT DEAL! BUY NOW TO SAVE 10%".

Classically, such high-falutin' designers as we scoff at such low-rent tactics, badges seem so horribly direct-mail-from-vegas. But there is a LOT of evidence that show they work. Anecdotally, Holly says that if you want to push a product, make the badge glowier, make it bolder and make it demand attention.

Design Meltdown puts it quite well: "It actually turns out that these little dudes do their job really really well, when used right of course."

Today in the Wall Street Journal, the article “Should Owners of Web Sites Be Anonymous?” raised some interesting questions. Finding out who owns certain web sites makes sense when they need to be shutdown. On the other hand, the Whois information published about web site owners is relatively personal, and can be used for harm.

At the end of day, I am not sure where I am with this one. What I do know is that I get a lot of snail mail spam from internet companies selling this and that. The only way they can possibly know my address is through the Whois service. I also know that I haven’t been asked to shut any of my web sites down. So, as long as we are not doing something illegal or wrong, there is no need for anyone to know who owns anything.

That’s neither here nor there. This is a tough one. We should keep our ears perked on this issue.

Last week Sean Cohen sent around the Adicolor Pink video.
Purely by surfing around I stumbled upon...

Blue
Green
White

Enjoy.

Labels: Design

I don't think there is a competition, but if there were, this rainbow would win. Find other pictures of it here.

Labels: Design

At 10:30 am, apparently those who read are thinking about, in order:

1. love
2. economics of everyday things
3. common dog problems
4. compelling powerpoint (really!)
5. globalism
6. theocracy, religion, oil, deficit spending
7. hunger and omnivores
8. mysterious fictional murders, cults and ancient religions
9. the world's worst dog
10. the founding of America, religion.

I am no sociologist, so I can't pretend to understand the cultural shifts that a list like amazon's most popular books indicate: but I can't help but find it revealing that "dog" books beat business books and that non-fiction how-to's trump fiction. By the time you click on this link and go to the list I hope much of the list has changed, but don't bet on it. We are a vast diverse audience who nonetheless seem to crave the same things steadily, predictably.

Take a look and see what people are buying, it is an education in itself: Amazon's top sellers.

"But in the quest to entice people a few exits down the highway, developers are increasingly availing themselves of a type of research called psychographics, or some variation of it, to inform their decisions on whether to build colonials or craftsmen, dog parks or tot lots, to gate or not to gate, and in general, to decide how they want a community to "feel."

The [psychographics] concept, which assumes that people buy things because of their personality and values more than age or income, goes back to a 1959 academic paper describing the psychological differences between people who buy Fords and those who buy Chevys. It became popular among Madison Avenue types in the 1980s, particularly as computer technology enabled pioneering firms such as Claritas to merge vast amounts of census data with vast amounts of consumer data, creating dozens of personality-oriented market segments -- the "young digerati" or "money and brains" -- to describe the entire U.S. population."

- from the article
------------

This makes me think of my suburban community, and wonder at its nutty collection of peoples. I am pretty sure that my community is odd in the sense that is religious/tribal based: meaning that we have a ton of Jews in my area. At Christmas you won't see a single light anywhere. This is unusual, I think, but all the more so because I think it is pretty impossible to find any two of my neighbors who agree on anything. Really. I have a diehard old Zionist from Poland to my left, an elderly Russian couple to my right, a very liberal couple of professors across the way, an orthodox businessman with his wife and 4 kids 5 houses down. Sprinkled among them is a Latino family who are plumbers and a Chinese family who own a restaurant. None of these people vote the same, think the same, speak the same language, etc.. I think if they had tried to create a psychographic profile of the people who live in my area, it NEVER would have been created.

Does good community arise out of homogeneity? Or is it more likely that the profiling described in this article, a simple questionnaire, is too shallow an indicator - and that 20 years from now these communities will have sorted themselves out along different lines?

washington post's property values

Of course I was too crazy busy to watch the entire segment on the Today Show this morning about the book "Crazy Busy". But there were some key thoughts that did resonate to me personally and I think would to all of us given our interruption-driven days. Many of them we already know, but forget.

Fragmented tasks equal lost time and efficiency.

Schedule your own time to allow yourself to "go deep" instead of skipping like a stone across the surface. Just surface touching on multiple projects creates the illusion of truly being busy, but nothing ever really gets done, or completed for that matter.

Especially with the nature of our work and the need to focus for a period of time and get into a creative groove, it's important to know when to not check email, when to shut the phone off, and when to be offline. Without that, it is too easy to fall into being "busy" to a point of counter-productivity, or even worse... counter-creative.

Note the newly refreshed face of the New York Times site. I think we can all appreciate the work and study that went into a project of this scope and visibility. They've overhauled the navigation and are paying more attention to seamless integration of video and multimedia.

NOTE... the big headlines today (at this moment at least) Apple allowing Windows in, Katie moving to CBS, and snow in April. All signs of the beginning of the end.

Apple just released Boot Camp, a utility that lets you run WindowsXP (well, dual-boot Windows XP) on your Intel Macintosh. I've downloaded it but haven't installed it yet (I'm assuming it's going to be a several hour process), but it looks good. A setup wizard walks you through burning a driver CD and partitioning the hard drive in a typically elegant Apple way and you don't need to reformat the hard drive! Stay tuned for more details as I attempt to not ruin my new Mac!

Here's a wonderful story on Zug.com about how a prankster used a loophole in the way credit card companies hand out cards coupled with the deft application of a few well-known cultural signifiers to stage a fake Michael Jackson appearance in Boston. Not only did they cause a media frenzy but they got beyond-VIP treatment while crashing a posh fundraiser at a Gladys Knight concert. A stark lesson in how chutzpah, media savvy, and the world's desire to see celebrities warp reality.

Not to make too big a deal of it, but making this movie really gave me a glimpse of the future of user-created media. It was hacked together in about 30 minutes on the train between Philadelphia and Baltimore using nothing more than the built-in camera in my MacBook Pro and iMovieHD. DIY media rocks!

We were chatting around the office about the idea of women RENTING shoes, and while we chatted it up Andres mentioned this place:
http://www.bagborroworsteal.com/webclient/getPage.aspx?page=welcome&

It has been around for a year or so, and it is difficult to determine if it has had any success.

Customers pay a monthly fee, pick and order handbags online, and borrow them for as long as they like. Monthy fees range from USD 19.95 per month for the Trendsetter membership level (one bag a month from the 'trendsetter' collection), to USD 99.95 a month for the Diva membership, which allows access to the couture collection. This spring, Bag, Borrow or Steal will also start offering women's jewelry and watches by Tiffany, David Yurman and others.

So it seems at least diamond-bedecked shoes can't be far off. You'll be pleased to note that insurance is offered, and if you have further worries, they have a hotline you can call.

This is part of a broader sea-change of people who prefer to rent over buying. I'd wager that there a whole host of things I'd prefer to rent if I didn't break or lose half the things I own.