Article Prospect Experience Design Creative Questionnaire: Steven Levesque by Justin Kerr on September 4, 2009 Steven Levesque is an award-winning exhibit and retail designer and fellow RISD alumnus. He graduated in 1990 with a BFA in Industrial Design and is currently the VP of Creative for Bella Group Design Solutions in Coppell, Texas. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Guest Post by Eric Holter: A Critique of Closerlook’s Website by Christopher Butler on August 25, 2009 Now that Eric, our former CEO, is off to new heights in his career, I've invited him to contribute a few guest blog posts. This is the fifth of several that he'll share in the coming months... Chicago agency Closerlook is a relationship marketing firm specializing in healthcare (pharmaceutical, health insurance, and health information technology). They have an excellent agency website that builds upon tight positioning with a significant content strategy. So let’s break it down... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Guest Post by Eric Holter: A Critique of Remedy’s Website by Christopher Butler on August 10, 2009 Now that Eric, our former CEO, is off to new heights in his career, I've invited him to contribute a few guest blog posts. This is the third of several that he'll contribute in the coming months... In the recent HOW magazine article, "Rock Your Website," Chicago-based Remedy was one of the featured website examples. Remedy is a good example of an agency website, but I’m not quite ready to push it into the "great" column. It’s on the edge though, and with a few adjustments I think it could become one of the great examples of an agency website... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Meet the new Village Fertility Pharmacy! published on August 7, 2009 I am pleased to announce one of the newest additions to the Newfangled family, the redesigned Village Fertility Pharmacy!This site, which went live on July 31, was a complete rebuild/redesign. The means that we went back to the drawing board prototyping and reimagined the entire site from the ground up. Justin designed it, Dave built , and the entire VFP team worked tirelessly to populate their new site with expanded and updated content. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Paper Prototyping published on July 30, 2009 Despite all the tremendous benefits using an HTML based, interactive prototype (which we will sing praises for til the end of time), I often find that if we begin with HTML alone, we're more likely to cling to a certain layout simply due to the time (and pride) put into crafting a complex HTML structure. This is why I begin nearly all template layouts with a number of hand drawn sketches or whiteboard layouts before we even begin with HTML. In this post, I'll share an example of how paper prototyping played a critical role in how we approached a redesign for winwithoutpitching.com. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Guest Post by Eric Holter: A Critique of the Currency Marketing’s Website by Christopher Butler on July 28, 2009 Now that Eric, our former CEO, is off to new heights in his career, I've invited him to contribute a few guest blog posts. This is the second of a series that will be published in the coming months... Tim McAlpine founded his agency in 1990. But it wasn’t until 2003 that he took the bold step to re-position The McAlpine Group (their former name) as Currency Marketing, a specialized Credit Union marketing firm. It’s rare that creative firms overcome their initial terror at the idea of such focused positioning. Fears of opportunities lost or being passed over for other kinds of work (not to mention the fear of boredom from doing “just one thing”) often give agencies pause. It’s sometimes easier for agencies to warm up to the idea of positioning the way Tim did at the time, by maintaining two “brands.” In 2004 Tim created Currency Marketing for credit unions and Passport Marketing presumably for everything else. But three years later the fruits of Currency Marketing’s positioning were so profound he dropped Passport and now enjoys a laser focused specialization, which gives him valuable expertise and a leading position in credit union marketing... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Guest Post by Eric Holter: A Critique of the Talstone Group Website by Christopher Butler on July 22, 2009 Now that Eric, our former CEO, is off to new heights in his career, I've invited him to contribute a few guest blog posts. This is the first of a series that will be published in the coming months... The Talstone Group is heading in the right direction with their website. They’ve already done the hard part, choosing a bold and narrow positioning statement (they specialize in healthcare marketing). They also have a site platform that includes a news section and blog so they have the means to employ a solid content strategy. But they seem to stumble in implementation of a content strategy that accords with their clear positioning. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Mood Board Observations by Justin Kerr on July 10, 2009 Steve Grothmann, one of our project managers, recently wrote a good introduction to mood boards and explained how we have folded them into our design process. I'm going to expand a bit on Steve's post since I'm the one responsible for producing the mood boards and, now that I have a dozen or so of them under my belt, I can assess their impact on Newfangled's web development... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Emusic makes Scheduled Downtime a little more Courteous published on July 9, 2009 A number of us Newfanglers are big fans of eMusic. They do a lot of things right, like DRM free music, an amazing selection, great design and social media tools. Despite the flack they've received for their acquisition to Sony, they still consistently deliver one of the best usability/customer experiences I've come across online... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Managing the Design Process by Christopher Butler on July 8, 2009 Yesterday, the Project Management team gathered in our newly renovated conference room at the North Carolina office for a professional development session on managing the design process. We covered a ton of information, ranging from the basic elements and principles of design to strategies for framing design discussions with clients. I think it was a really productive experience for everyone, and I was excited to witness the inner design critics emerge from our PM's as we reviewed some design case studies together. Here are some of the key points we kept returning to... Read Now About
