Thoughts & Deeds

The other night during a New Communicators event idea discussion group,  I had a conversation with Jerry Ketel and Tyesha Snow about the power of inspiration and the idea that all creative companies should subsidize – in some way — inspirational experiences for employees. Wouldn’t it be great if your employer gave you two paid weeks off specifically to seek out inspiration that you can bring back to your work and career? … more

It’s become a dirty world in the creative community. “Crowdsourcing” often means a business has chosen to ask all-comers to submit responses to the businesses request – be it a logo, web site design, or engineering design for NASA’s next space shuttle – with no guarantee of pay or selection of their submitted work. On one hand, it’s a great way to get the community involved in solving a problem rapidly. … more

I don’t know about you, but I often find responding to Request for Proposals unsatisfying. Either you’ve received it as a preferred vendor on a short-list, it’s a blind RFP, or it’s sent to you and 20 other agencies. The description of the needs and goals are either A) unbelievably vague or B) unbelievably specific, followed by a list of required features, tools, and canned objectives such as “improve search engine ranking” and “increase sales and traffic.” … more

Today’s Portland design community buzz on Twitter is the City of Portland’s decision to make a design contest out of the Portland Online website. Many of us reviewed the RFP released for project last month and found the budget lacking ($10-20k for a 140,000 page site? Right.), which may explain why they’re moving forward with a design contest. No agency worth its salt wanted to reply to such a poorly proposed project with so little funding.* I know we looked at it and decided to pass. … more

Tax day is a tough one for small business owners. It’s the day we’re reminded of all the tax breaks large corporations get, of the self-employment tax some of us pay for the privilege of entrepreneurship, and of the high cost of individual health insurance. … more

It’s not easy to describe how it felt when California passed Proposition 8 – banning same-sex marriages – last week. The same happened in Oregon four years ago. We search for words to express how it feels to know that secretly (and openly) 52% of people hate us. We rage and we cry and we feel empty. We try to forgive, to keep hope alive, to move forward despite this setback. … more

Over the years, I’ve heard plenty of coworkers and colleagues complain that the design projects they’re working on aren’t very creative. They want inspiration, they want to cut loose from the corporate brand guidelines and do something wacky, they want to do the kind of work we all see in award shows. Sure, those kinds of projects are really cool, but they aren’t the bread and butter of most agencies. We’re so heavily socialized to want to be rockstar designers who redefine visual communication that we lose track of what it is we are paid to do every day. … more

I’m a firm believer in design process, in taking the right steps to create an interactive experience that is audience and brand appropriate. It’s tough to get clients on the process boat, since they usually want the work done yesterday/cheaper/ASAP. To a lot of clients, or even internal teams, process = s l o w + $$$. Even if you swear that process improvements (more research time, better planning) will speed up the project, reduce errors, and ultimately spare the budget, you’ll probably be greeted with “I think she’s a witch, shall we burn her?” looks. … more

After going to the annual Web Visions conference here in Portland, I started thinking about the future of interactive design as a discipline. Who are we and what are we doing?

Things have changed so much since I created my first web page in 1996 back when I hand-coded everything using emacs. Now there’s real design on the web. Sure, there’s a lot of “bad” design out there, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the smorgasbord of animated GIFs, blinking text, and ugly background textures that made up the entirety of your web experience a decade ago. … more

Paul Arden is totally right. I picked this book up at SFMOMA last month because it was entertaining and on sale, but it turned out to be an inspiring read. I brought it to work for my art director to read, and over the weekend both he and his wife finished the book. And then another coworker bought himself a copy. … more