Design

Es gibt 88 Beiträge in Design.

The Walled Garden Awards

lion.gifDear Cannes Cyber Lions,

I’m writing just to say hi. I’ve looked at, and occasionally up to you for the seven years I’ve been working in an agency, but I’m leaving the agency microcosm soon and wanted to give you some advice before I go. It’s, um, kind of difficult to say, but, well, we’ve known each other for a while, and good friends tell each other the truth, right? So. Here goes.

I believe you’ve misunderstood the internet.

There, I said it. I know this has got to be embarrassing for you, being an internet awards thingie and all. I guess you didn’t get the memo. Although the truth hurts, I’m sure you’ll come out the other side a happier, shinier Cyber Lion.

Cannes Registration Ticks Me Off

Why do you force me to register to see the winners? It can’t be purely so that „the IAF, our official awards partners and relevant Emap Communications brands“ can throw a few more nuggets on top of my already overflowing spam folder, can it? That’s not what that extremely creatively worded bit on the rego form meant, is it? And, um, describe my job role? Give you my address? My phone number? Twenty-one mandatory fields? You’ve built a walled garden with high, thick walls, and want a DNA sample before you let me inside? For what exactly? You’re throwing press releases over the wall anyway, so what’s in it for me?

I’m afraid your site’s also doing your clients a disservice, and if they aren’t pissed yet, they sure as hell should be. What? You don’t have clients? Well, who are the agencies who send you submissions (and money) every year? And what if they realised that you’re using the medium for which they win awards (that’s the internet) in such a way that it reduces the chance of people hearing about their good work? If I was them, I’d be pretty pissed.

But, considering the way so many of your clients still use the internet–beautifully designed and animated, closed, unmashable ads that equal little more than click-a-minute-television–I’m honestly not surprised that you’re doing little better. My recommendation, and hope, is that you’ll one day see your role as a leading internet marketing awards thingie as a possibility to espouse and spread the spirit of the web and the methods that actually work. Openness. Transparency. Sharing. Participation.

You see, and it embarrasses me to have to explain this to you, but the internet is all about linking. Copy & paste is today’s marketing. Letting your fans mash your stuff up leads to success. Connecting little bits all over the place is what we do here outside the wall, and how people hear about new stuff. If your stuff’s good, some guy will carry it over the wall anyway, even if he does have to fill your form with bullshit to do it (yes, I’m sorry, but we do lie to marketers). And there’s a nasty chance that guy will own your Google juice, too. Making it easier by not building a wall in the first place just improves your chances of being loved. Have you heard that there’s a 14 year old on YouTube with 45 million views? He certainly didn’t do that with a registration form. How many registered users have you got? And how many registered as „Dr. Mickey Mouse“ like I did?

That’s it for now. I hope you take some time to think about this, and it makes you a bigger, better lion.

Yours sincerely,

Matt Balara

P.S.: I didn’t want to say it, but what the hell’s up with your logo? Dude, are you sure you want to wear that in public?

So congratulations to all the well-hidden winners of the Cannes Cyber Lions 2008! For those you you outside the wall who couldn’t be bothered registering, Dr. Mickey Mouse has sacrificed his 100% fake DNA for you. Here are all the winners in a PDF (unfortunately completely devoid of URLs), and here are the links:

Grand Prix

Gold

Silver

There are a hell of a lot of bronze winners, and my copy & paste finger’s getting tired, so if you’re interested in the Cannes Cyber Lions bronze winners, check out the PDF and you know what to do.

Originally published at mattbalara.com.

compact. fundiert. ausgezeichnet.

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Der BCP Best of Corporate Publishing verlieh in diesem Jahr zum zweiten Mal einen Preis in der Kategorie Electronic Publishing Newsletter. compact, der Newsletter der comdirect, kann erneut in dieser Kategorie glänzen und gewinnt Gold. Eine ausgezeichnete Steigerung im Vergleich zum Vorjahr.

SinnerSchrader ist für das Design von compact verantwortlich. Der Newsletter wird redaktionell von G+J Corporate Media betreut. comdirect ist ein Kunde von SinnerSchrader, und wir freuen uns über die erneute Anerkennung.

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Top-Down Boxes or Bottom-Up Piles?

Photo by A30_Tsitika - click to view

A chat with Ryan Singer after the next08 has been bouncing around in my head for a few days. We got onto some basic info architecture assumptions which define almost all sites my company makes, and most sites in the web. The more we explored the idea, the more both of us were surprised at how these assumptions often keep users from doing what they’re used to doing in the web — finding things fast.

Top-Down Boxes in Boxes

A new site structure usually starts with a number of assumptions. Big Fat Assumption Number One is that the content chunks will be stuffed into a hierarchy of boxes. The first group of boxes form the 1st level navigation, and each of those boxes usually has more boxes inside it. Often the 2nd level boxes have more boxes inside them, and I’ve seen this boxes in boxes structure repeated down to the 5th level.

A user can only try to guess which box what he’s looking for might be in. And instead of getting the content chunk he’s looking for when he selects a box, he gets a new set of boxes and starts guessing again. When he finally reaches real content (after guessing, guessing, guessing, etc.) the chances are relatively good that he’s not found what he wants, and the guessing game can start from the top again.

If individual chunks of content (or user goals) are the bottom of our structure, we’ve just built an info architecture from the top down.

Hierarchical boxes are also made of „conceptual steel“ and separate chunks from each other. This works for a book: the boxes are chapters, which have boxes in them called paragraphs, which are full of chunks called sentences. But once a book’s printed it doesn’t change. Web sites change constantly, and boxes are change-resistant.

Bottom Up Piles & Lenses

Instead of imposing a structure on content chunks from the top down, why not look at the chunks themselves first; i.e. bottom up? If we find common attributes for the chunks, e.g. colour, and label each chunk either blue, green, yellow or red, then we have a labeled pile of chunks.

To find something in a colour labeled pile, users could use „lenses“. A red lens would make all blue, green and yellow chunks disappear, leaving only the red chunks visible. If our chunks also had an attribute size–with labels big, medium and small–they could then combine size and colour lenses to quickly find large/red chunks, or small/green ones.

Old Hat?

Sure, none of this is particularly revolutionary–it’s the way a great deal of those sites we insist on calling „web 2.0“ work. Flickr is a gigantic pile of images whose labels are tags, but also technical details such as which camera made the image, Creative Commons license, interestingness, etc. Most of Flickr’s navigation doesn’t throw the user into a box, it provides them with a lens through which they can look at the chunks they’re interested in, and ignore the rest of the pile.

Where The Hell am I? Who cares?

The assumption that drives us to make top-down box architectures is that without a structured, categorised series of boxes in boxes, the poor user will lose his orientation. I think this is seriously outdated thinking, which comes out of the interface thoughts of the pre-internet software design era. It might make sense in the focused, daily-use context of an application, but a user who can find any page in your site from google, and jump directly to it, doesn’t give a crap where he is as long as he finds what he wants. When I’ve asked a number of daily-use but less than cutting-edge users „where“ in the web they are right now, the answer surprised me: „What do you mean? I’m in Google.“ So much for that carefully thought out color-coded box hierarchy.

Hunters & Gatherers

Am I recommending that all of my corporate clients throw their hierarchies out the window? Hell no. But I would like to see them experiment a little more with piles & lenses to supplement their box hierarchies. Traditional boxes-in-boxes navigation is fine for gatherers, but google is teaching users hunter strategies: select a goal, focus on it, jump on it as quickly as possible. The next time you start a concept with Big Fat Assumption Number One, and begin stuffing content into boxes-in-boxes, take a step back, look at the chunks at the bottom, and see if you can offer the hunters piles and lenses to speed their hunt.

Originally published at mattbalara.com

Shameless

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While standing outside having a smoke this morning, colleague Gregory Jacob brought me back to the subject of web design “theft”, which I wrote a couple articles about in 2006. Back then, the discussion showed that there are many varying opinions of where inspiration stops and theft starts. Greg’s example, which absolutely takes the cake in my experience, is without question way over the border.

Greg’s a Flash guy, with a pleasingly minimal personal site. He received a mail from a friend this morning, with a link to a stunningly similar site. Have a look:

After a little research it was clear that Foued, due to laziness, deficient creativity or most likely a combination of both, had simply downloaded Greg’s SWF and the XML which defines the site’s content, and after a little text editing, uploaded both on his site.

It Gets Better

Not only did he shamelessly rip off Greg’s work, but he then submitted his rip-off to numerous awards sites, and won on four of them.

It Gets Even Better

Not only did Foued win awards with stolen goods, but one of them, Dope, had already awarded Greg for the exact same site.

I’d like to take the opportunity to congratulate Greg. Not only a 1:1 rip-off (as we all know, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”), but four awards, and one of them twice. Well done Greg!

Too Easy to Do, But Also to Find

Things like this just leave me extremely confused. Let’s assume that Foued Azzone is not remarkably naïve, and knew full well how wrong this is. So he uses a stolen design, right down to the file itself, to promote himself and his talents. And in a medium which is so fast, and so everywhere, that the chances of this theft remaining undiscovered are zero. And in a medium where stuff like this gets publicised like wild-fire, irrevocably poisoning is own Google-juice. What could he possibly think this would do for his career? How could he ever dream of this being good for him?

Originally published at mattbalara.com. Matt Balara works as Senior Art Director at SinnerSchrader, Gregory Jacob is Head of Flash.