Article Prospect Experience Design Designing Newfangled’s Home Page Slides by Justin Kerr on October 15, 2012 You've probably seen the rotating slide show that sits atop our home page. The slides promote upcoming events, book releases and new services. I've designed most of the slides, with some art direction and feedback from Chris Butler (who's created a few of the slides as well). Since our website will be undergoing a redesign soon, I thought it would be a good time for a retrospective of previous slides as well as a peek at how they're designed... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Evolution of the Mood Board by Justin Kerr on September 21, 2012 Mood boards are a key element in the design phase of our web development process and the format for these boards has evolved over the last three years. In this post, I outline some of the key changes and the thinking behind them. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Web 3.0? Made with Metadata. published on September 21, 2012 Metadata is useful for more than just SEO, it's also an integral part of where the web is quickly going. The Semantic Web is about linking knowledge, rather than just linking web pages, and using some simple metadata, it's fairly simple to plug into these emerging technologies... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Don’t Be So Linear… Learn how to wrangle! by Christopher Butler on September 18, 2012 In Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling's manifesto for design in a post-gizmo society, the author points out that technologies "do not abolish one another in clean or comprehensive ways." If they did, the designer's job would be far easier. Instead, we must design for the spaces between the old and the new—a challenge that Sterling calls "wrangling"... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design The History of Web-Safe Fonts by Justin Kerr on August 6, 2012 I recently wrote an article for HOW's Interactive Design site about the history of computer-based fonts and how "web-safe" fonts, such as Arial, Verdana and Georgia are no longer the only game in town when it comes to web typography. Read the full article on HOW's site. Read Now About
Article Content Strategy Website Design Style Guide by Justin Kerr on July 26, 2012 Last year, I produced a short tutorial video on how to prepare Photoshop (PSD) files for web production. It's a quick overview of the process I use to properly set up and organize template files so that Newfangled's developers can use them to apply the visual design to the site architecture. One of the template types mentioned in the video is a style guide; a very useful "cheat sheet" containing text styles, colors, notations and key design elements that comprise the majority of a site's design. Since posting the video, I've recevied requests to provide an example file that our agency partners (or anyone) could download and use as a reference for creating their own style guide. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Stuck in Idle by Christopher Butler on July 16, 2012 The August issue of PRINT Magazine is out, and with it, my latest column. The illustration is by Justin Gabbard, which I really like (in addition to the rest of his work, by the way). It's a different type of thing than I've become accustomed to for these articles, but it's what makes the arrival of the magazine exciting for me. I used to wish I could get some kind of preview of the art direction for my column, but I've grown to really love the surprise. Anyway, this one is about information overload and what cost it might have to creativity... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design The Boy in the Bubble by Christopher Butler on June 21, 2012 My column from the February issue of PRINT Magazine, about what I described as a "post-screen future," has been reprinted by the UTNE Reader and is in the July-August issue. They titled it, The Boy in the Bubble. For now, you can find it listed among the rest of the contents of the current issue, pick it up at your local lefty reading post, or read it in it's original form, Future Daydream... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Making Sense of the Data by Christopher Butler on June 19, 2012 We designers need to be proactively involved in measurement. Knowing how to gather and interpret interactive data will better position us strategically, not to mention prevent inheriting unhelpfully data-glutted reports and being held accountable to someone else's vague interpretation of them. But, it's more important that the data ground our vision in reality than be used to build credibility with clients. We want our clients to trust our judgement, but our measurement process should lead them to the same conclusions we've made if they were to do it themselves... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design The Use of Mood Boards in the Web Design Process by Mark O’Brien on June 12, 2012 A useful strategy for communicating website plans with your in-house team or client is to separate the discussions about information design from those about visual design. This is helpful for both seasoned professionals and web neophytes. Read Now About
