Category: Strategy

Pretty or effective?

Posted in Strategy on November 1, 2010 by David Cecil

We posted an article a few weeks ago that was called, “Effective or pretty?” The point of it was to question whether designers had become so focused on being fancy strategic experts that we’ve lost sight of the fact that sometimes it works to just make something look pretty. We concluded, of course, that you simply have to be focused on both aspects of great design – if something is pretty but not effective, it will fail. If something is founded in sound strategy, but doesn’t look good, it will fail.

Since the last article reminded us of the value of aesthetics, we thought we’d share a great article that reminds us of why we can’t forget strategy. Read it here.

To conclude, as a designer and when designing certain websites, your goal cannot just be to make a website aesthetically pleasing, but also to make the functions of your website easier to work with, and to integrate them together to appear as a whole system rather than appear as multiple pieces that do not connect.
With that in mind, we are not saying to eliminate the aesthetics point of design, but rather to keep an even balance of thinking about both. As with design, focusing fully on aesthetics can result with poor user interface results and vice versa.

Beginner’s Guide To Graphic Design

Posted in Strategy on October 13, 2010 by James Penman

Jessica Halfand and William Drenttel have put together an excellent little primer about the fundamentals of what Graphic Design is over at Design Observer, what matters it concerns itself with, and what effective Graphic Design means. It’s a broad overview, but they hit most of the essentials. After all, they are veterans of the field. At the end they even kindly offer a list of books they recommend for further reading.

Long ago, to be a graphic designer was to distinguish yourself by defining your territory as fundamentally two-dimensional. Unlike artists, graphic designers had clients. Unlike architects, they delivered printed messages. Today, with the meteroric rise of desktop computing, social networking and mobile technologies, graphic design is the ultimate DIY activity. Or is it? Albert Einstein once said that the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. So don’t ask us to explain how kerning works: just trust us.

Read the rest of it here.

Effective or pretty?

Posted in Strategy on October 1, 2010 by David Cecil

We just passed around a great article by Mark Cook, a professor of graphic design at the University of Notre Dame, which questions what the purpose of a graphic designer should be. Here is an excerpt from the full article, which can be read here:

Historically, graphic designers have been commissioned to communicate messages in an attractive and desirable way using a combination of type and image. While this is still very much a part of what we do, the role of ”graphic designer” has become increasingly strategic, resulting in a conscious move away from anything that could be perceived as simply decorative. We have worked hard to hold a seat at the table, and fear that recognizing the persuasion of aesthetics will relegate our professional contributions to that of a technician adorning someone else’s thinking. But perhaps the pendulum has swung too far the other direction.

Our opinion? Sorry graphic designers – you need to do both. Great design work needs to communicate the right message to the right people in the right way, AND look great while doing it. I think this is the point that Mark is making, and it’s a good one – you can’t discount the value of doing something that looks pretty anymore than you can discount the value of doing something that is based on sound brand strategy.

Respecting convention

Posted in Strategy on July 12, 2010 by James Penman

Derek Sivers recently posted an article titled Quit Quirks When Working With Others, and it made some good points about how virtues like “originality” can fail. He highlights how you’re sometimes doing everyone (yourself included) a disservice with your reinventions of “tired” concepts. By toeing the line of convention and saving your unique ideas for places where they’re welcome, you preserve what’s most important: Playing well with others.

Typography matters, people!

Posted in Strategy on July 9, 2010 by David Cecil

Typography is the “style and appearance of printed matter” and there is a reason that we bore clients to death discussing the brand ramifications of serif and sans serif fonts. It matters!

Cavs owner’s letter mocked for Comic Sans font

Comic Sans Font

Good Designers vs. Great Designers (Part 2 – Communication)

Posted in Strategy on July 1, 2010 by David Cecil

In my last post, I brought up a question that everyone considering hiring a design firm will inevitably ask themselves – what is the difference between a good designer and a great designer? I’d like to explore the first differentiator raised by Cameron Moll in his presentation, “Nine skills that separate good and great designers“:

GOOD DESIGNERS DECORATE, GREAT DESIGNERS COMMUNICATE

Posted in Strategy on June 8, 2010 by James Penman

Web Fonts - TypeKit Homepage Screenshot

A List Apart just published an excellent article looking at the state of fonts on the web. It covers all the reasons to be optimistic as well as a few things to be concerned about. The article links to a funny-because-its-true open letter to commercial font vendors that highlights the backward state of most font foundries by stating quite simply:
READ MORE →

Website Technical Factors (Introduction): Or, How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love The Choices

Posted in Strategy on May 24, 2010 by James Penman

Website Technical Factors - Johnny Lightning Strikes Again

I started this post thinking I would do a quick dump of the technical considerations that go into excellently designed and positioned websites. A lot of people want their website to have specific functionality, be built on specific technology, and be optimised in specific ways; however, a lot of people have no flipping clue what they want, let alone need. The article I imagined I’d be writing would be for the latter group, a sort of primer on the technical decisions that would need to be made. However, I knew I was in trouble when my basic article outline was over a thousand words on various considerations.

Posted in Strategy on May 17, 2010 by David Cecil

I recently came across a presentation by a designer, speaker, and author named Cameron Moll called, “Nine skills that separate good and great designers.” Needless to say, it struck a chord, because it’s a topic that we spend a great deal of time talking and thinking about – both within our agency and with people who are interested in our agency. Since this blog is a place for us to talk not only about us and our work, but also our industry as a whole, I thought I would take some time to go through the points he makes and do my part to help educate people on the differences between good designers and great designers.

Posted in Strategy on April 19, 2010 by David Cecil

Some of you may remember the article we posted last month, entitled “Web site or website?” Well, thanks to an email from a friend of ours at another Kansas City creative agency, we just learned that the AP Style Guide just released this weekend that “website” is now the correct term for a site that exists the World Wide Web.

Since we may be another step closer to putting such a long argument to rest, we thought it was worth a quick addendum to our original post.

Good job AP Style Guide!