Article Managing Your Firm’s Content Strategy by Mark O’Brien on June 26, 2012 Once you have a more complex content strategy, you will probably begin to involve multiple authors throughout the firm across multiple platforms. At that point, it is a good idea to appoint someone on staff as your internal editor. This should be someone who has a solid understanding of the firm Read Now About
Article Why Write? by Mark O’Brien on June 21, 2012 The act of writing on a regular basis is the only thing standing between your site being what it is today and being the sole source of twenty percent of your closed new business. At Newfangled, we keep close track of how much time we spend on our content strategy and where our business comes from. We did not pull this twenty percent number out of thin air. It is a real number based on our experience. This is not due to our locations, the sort of work we do, or the types of clients we have. Instead, it has to do with the fact that we are sharply positioned and disciplined with our content strategy. 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 The Definition of Content Strategy by Mark O’Brien on June 19, 2012 The definition of a content strategy is Read Now About
Article The Modern Marketing Website by Mark O’Brien on June 14, 2012 What if you could speak with every prospect who was considering hiring your firm? And what if they did not just have thirty minutes or so to speak with you, but instead they had all the time in the world 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
Article Prospect Experience Design The Basic Principles of Effective Web Design by Mark O’Brien on June 7, 2012 Because Newfangled has done so much work with agencies over the past fifteen years, I have learned a lot about the print to web transition. While I have written about this topic and given many lectures on it around the country, I do not intend to rehash all of the print to web design rules here. There are a few basic points I will cover in the context of this book, however. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Evolution of the Newfangled Logo by Justin Kerr on June 6, 2012 When I arrived at Newfangled in 2000, the company was known as Newfangled Graphics Co. and the hand-painted wooden sign by the door featured a 19th century Industrial Revolution-style logo. In this post, I take a look back at how Newfangled's logo and brand has evolved over the years. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design How to Prototype a Website by Mark O’Brien on June 5, 2012 After building a site that did not meet client expectations one too many times from 1995-2000, we had an important but seemingly futile epiphany. We realized that we could solve most of our communication problems if only we could build the site twice. We could build the site the first time, let the client interact with it, gather all their feedback, and then build it a second time to their exact specifications. Surely that would be a foolproof process! The only hangup was that no client would be willing to pay twice as much and wait twice as long for their site. Read Now About
