Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
Your Friday Quote
//1 Comments //Link
My creative process is a rollercoaster of determination, self-doubt, sweat and procrastination.
Your Friday Quote
//1 Comments //Link
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page… When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.
Your Friday Quote
//2 Comments //Link
I find going to bed and pulling my imagination over my head often means waking up with a solution to a design problem. That state of limbo, the time between sleeping and waking, seems to allow ideas to somehow outflank the sentinels of common sense.
Your Friday Quote
//2 Comments //Link
We often don’t realize that the people we admire as designers have yet to “arrive.” Their ongoing quests are part of the reason we admire them so much.
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
There is nothing glamorous about what I do. I am a working man.
Drop Down Menus: An Information Architecture Conundrum
//0 Comments //Link
We’ve been working on the web redesign of a local community college for the past several months and as with any large, complex organization, the information architecture has been a bit more challenging than your average display site. Any time you try to formulate a simple, useable navigation schema while respecting the hierarchical structure of an academic organization and the sundry needs of students and faculty alike, you’re going to end up with a very deep site. Deep sites are problematic for various reasons: important pages can get lost in the bowels of the structure, navigation elements can become unwieldy as we try to design for six or seven levels of hierarchy, and the overall usability suffers and people get frustrated.
There are solutions to the deep site problem. A couple we’ve tried in the past include highlighting popular or important links in special “Quick Link” areas. Another was to create special persona-based “portals” that work alongside the deep hierarchy to promote important links to the top based on user profiles. The one solution we have always tried to avoid is the dreaded drop-down menu. In the 6 years I’ve worked here at PBDH I can’t remember a single project where we have recommended using drop-down menus. There’s been a couple projects where we were coerced into using them, but never without a good deal of “informed pushback” from us. Drop-down menus present all sorts of problems, from allowing users to skip over important pages, to removing any frame of reference, and mostly frustration at having to keep your mouse in the elusive “sweet spot” as you scan the link offering quickly before the menu disappears again.
So a few weeks ago our community college client came by the office with the results of a pretty extensive card-sorting exercise. We all headed down to the ideation lab and began pouring over the data. As expected, we were faced with the potential for more than 6 or 7 levels of hierarchy and all sorts of varied user needs. Eventually, as we sat there pondering the white board scribbles, the D-word came up. What about drop-downs? Could they actually work here? This time around they didn’t seem all that bad. Especially when we started calling them “flyouts”. Flyout menus sound sleek and purposeful. And there is a real-world distinction: we were envisioning large, multi-column menus that required little in the way of mouse dexterity to operate.
Flyouts make sense in this situation, especially since all of our top-level section index pages were essentially devoid of any real content—they would be reduced to, well, indexes. But, if we could create a section flyout for the first 3 levels and skip the index, we could save the user a lot of time clicking through to the meaty links and offer a nice section overview at a glance. (This is not a site concerned with a sequential narrative, so “stepping” the user through the content is not a requirement.) The file structure would remain hierarchical, with a browse-based interface built on top if it, and anything beyond the third level would become side navigation.
This sounded good. But what about all the anti-drop down usability studies out there? Usability experts are always coming out against the use of drop-down menus—and heck, we were too. Was this really a good idea? So we did some research and it turns out the king of all usability gurus, Jakob Nielsen, has recently published a pretty extensive study called Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well. (This is sort of like the Pope recommending that married couples start “seeing other people” to spice things up.) It’s a great read and there’s some good information on what to avoid when traveling down the path of the now renamed: Mega Drop-Down Menu.
From the article:
Given that regular drop-down menus are rife with usability problems, it takes a lot for me to recommend a new form of drop-down. But, as our testing videos show, mega drop-downs overcome the downsides of regular drop-downs. Thus, I can recommend one while warning against the other.
I’ll keep everyone posted on the progress and we’ll see if our assumptions about Mega Drop-Down Menus are correct.
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that makes it good or bad.
Our Own Bryan Zug: Geek of the Week
//0 Comments //Link
PBDH’s Interactive Manager, Bryan Zug, nabs the highly coveted Geek of the Week title over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Bryan discusses streaming-video tea parties, pinewood derby, and the question that defines all geeks: Star Wars or Star Trek? Get the answers and the state of Seattle geekdom on the PI’s Web site.
Predicting Color Trends for 2009
//4 Comments //Link
Every year around this time I consult various chromatic prognosticators, gather my divining beams, and plot the celestial activity of our benign spectral overlords. At some point, usually after much wine, I determine which colors will take center stage for the upcoming year and in turn, guarantee ultimate success in all of your design and decorating projects. These colors are for you. Take them. Be fruitful. And we’ll meet back here again next year.
Here they are, your 2009 Colors for Success:
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
Design should never say, “Look at me.” It should say, “Look at this.”
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
The best design tool is a long eraser with a pencil at one end.
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
To be truly useful, any technology has to be unconscious. We don’t pick up a hammer to have a “hammer-and-nail experience.”
The Morning Commute
//1 Comments //Link
Our own Dave Cole makes the snow commute look easy. Also featured in the Seattle Post Intelligencer and Seattle Times
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire, and persistence. Talent without these things vanishes and even modest talent with those characteristics grows.
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
Competition is the by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.
Remaindered Links Vol. 2
//0 Comments //Link
Peguin Design Award winners and short list.
Wired puts going green into perspective.
Dubai continues to challenge conventional architecture.
Charles and Ray Eames Stamps!
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
If it matches the sofa it’s art. If it demands attention it’s culture.
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash.
Be water, my friend.
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
The most meaningful developments in my work are those that occurred involuntarily and blindly, without my knowing what I was going to do, when I had enough faith in my own creative process to be willing to wait for it to happen without my will demanding it.
Thirty Tables of Contents
//0 Comments //Link
Design Observer links to a slideshow featuring 30 different varieties of well designed table of contents pages from various publications. Cool stuff. Michael Beirut on the collection: “Some readers will appreciate their typographic form, while others will see further strategies at work — informational, strategic, philosophical, literary.”
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
It is a lot easier to be new than it is to be good. The criteria for being new is only based on the past few years, but the criteria for being good is based on everything we have learned since the beginning of time.
Remaindered Links Vol. 1
//0 Comments //Link
Fortune magazine presents Brand Smackdown.
Hotels in the afterlife.
Seattle vs. Dubai
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
Don’t covet your ideas. Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you.
Magazine Watch: Monocle
//1 Comments //Link
I am somewhat of a magazine hound and I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting publications. A recent find is Monocle from Tyler Brûlé, the man behind Wallpaper* back in the nineties. Monocle has a lot in common with its predecessor and the attention to detail is what you would expect: great typography, tight layouts, stunning photography—even the various paper stocks are worth noting. What makes it better than Wallpaper* is that the articles themselves feel a bit more substantive. In a recent review of the magazine Business Week asks: Can rarefied information be sold like a luxury product? That appears to be exactly what Monocle is trying to do.
But I think what most attracts me to Monocle is a seamless (and beautiful) transition from print to Web. So few magazine Web sites live up to their print counterparts and magazine brands are quite often diluted and dumbed-down online. Not so with Monocle. That same attention to detail found inside the pages of the magazine are right there on the pages of the Web site. And it’s not just a copy and paste effort. Stories are extended with broadcast-quality video, slideshows offer rich, high resolution photography, and there’s even a companion podcast available. It’s obvious that the whole effort was intended to be multi-platform from the beginning.
For an excellent in-depth look a the entire process of designing and developing Monocle’s Web site check out the designer Dan Hill’s blog post. He covers it all in great detail. One of my favorite quotes form the article:
“We wanted to really give a sense that the website would have the same quality threshold as the print magazine in terms of production. Building a 2.0-style service, or a ‘platform for journalism’, was not at all relevant at this point.”
That’s a refreshing approach. www.monocle.com
Your Friday Quote
//0 Comments //Link
It was never my design objective that the furniture be different or novel; only that it be good to sit in, good to use, good to look at, and easy for everyone to buy.
Geoff’s 4th Annual Clairvoyant Color Cavalcade and Trend Watch
//0 Comments //Link
Sorry I’m late with this year’s picks for trendiest must-have colors. I got mixed up in some Web site redesign project and I haven’t really seen the light of day in several weeks. But, like the groundhog who ponders his own shadow, I’ve crawled out of my design cave just long enough to see the future of color for 2008: It’s five more months of rainbow! (I have no idea what that means.)
Anyway, here are the colors that all the cool kids will be forced to use from here to December. Get used to them, you’re going to be seeing a lot of these. (CMYK and RGB values available upon request.)
Remember: if it’s not trendy, it’s original.
Web Redesign Part 1: Why We Did It
//0 Comments //Link
About two years ago we decided we were long overdue for a new Web site. The old pbdh.com site, while still mostly functional, wasn’t quite the spring chicken it was when we launched it back in 2003. So we got together and started to figure out how we could improve the site as a whole. The look, the functionality, the usability and even the overall purpose of our site were considered. When all was said and done we came up with one major goal: simplify. In the words of Albert Einstein we decided that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
We started by looking at the many different sections and pages we had produced over the years. Some of them were from the original site-map, others were add-ons cobbled together over various marketing initiatives, and one or two pages just showed up one day out of the blue. As is the case with most aging Web sites it was becoming cluttered and difficult to navigate. It needed a major overhaul.
News
We started with our news content. We had eight different pages devoted to news-worthy information: News, Events, In The News, Newsletter, News Archives, Press Releases, and a blog called Open House. There were just too many places to start. So we simplified. Instead of eight different pages devoted to eight different types of news we decided to route all the news content through our blog. After all a (good) blog is, by definition, a reverse chronology of written information that can be timely, interesting, though-provoking, insightful, and informative. We decided that if our news isn’t any of those things it doesn’t need to be on our Web site in the first place. So now Open House is one page of news instead of eight pages of news. It’s simpler. It’s better.
Portfolio
Early portfolio information architecture sketch.
Next, we tackled our portfolio. As much as we design firms like to champion our processes, a portfolio is still probably the most important part of a Web site. We had a very comprehensive portfolio with plenty of examples of our work and it told a good story of what we were capable of as a firm. But, it had one major flaw: it was designed for us, not our users. The portfolio was was organized by our clients’ names, and as long as people wanted to simply browse the portfolio and see the work we had done for each client they were in good shape. This organization worked great for us too because we know our clients intimately and we could easily navigate to any one portfolio example without much trouble. But then we put ourselves in the shoes of a first-time visitor and started to imagine how they would want to navigate our work.
Let’s say there’s a guy named John Doe and he’s looking for a design firm that does fantastic annual reports. His boss wants him to round up some samples of annual report work from Seattle design firms by noon so he can start putting together a short list of people to call. With the old portfolio structure John would have to click through each client individually to see whether or not any annual reports had even been produced before he could start selecting the ones he liked. We figured John probably wouldn’t take the time do this extra work in the end. So we began architecting our portfolio around John’s goals and the goals of people like John. This was easy to do because the development of personas have long been a key step in our own experience design process—we just never had a chance to try personas out on ourselves! (And like we’ve been telling our clients all along: personas work.) In the end we came up with a portfolio that assembles itself on the fly depending on what the user is interested in. User interest can be as broad as work for print or as granular as annual reports and the portfolio will accommodate. And for those want to see it all at once there’s still a comprehensive client list option.
Change of Plans
Things were moving along nicely at this point. We came up with a pretty fun concept for our always popular people page and after a final tally of 3778 photographs, staff camera-shyness was at an all-time low. We were a week or so away from going live when the conversation turned to rebranding the entire firm. (I won’t go into the rebrand process as Devin did a good job explaining it in the previous post.) Since we built the entire site with extensibility in mind from the beginning, it was a fairly painless process to scrap the entire look and feel and redesign the site form the ground up in under three weeks. (When used properly CSS is a wonderful thing—more on that in a future post.)
Transparency
The final touch was to introduce our focus on transparency into the site visually, and the final solution might be my favorite part of the site. We are using photography, illustration and even strategy diagrams somewhat abstractly throughout the site. While each image is visually interesting as presented, it can also be extended to reveal a bit more information or even link to a relevant project. Moving forward we want to introduce a lot more of this “behind the scenes” imagery. We are also having some fun with it on the Open House page by giving visitors a peek into our work areas. Ultimately it’s a pretty subtle feature, but it offers a little something extra for people who are curious.
Both the rebrand of PBDH and the redesign of pbdh.com were very successful endeavors and we’re all pretty proud of the results. Next week in Part 2: How It All Works I’ll give you some insight into how the site works and how we manage content. And feel free to leave any comments or suggestions as we’d love to hear your feedback.