get creative with web design

March 28, 2011 under Design, Social Media, Web

I seem to have started the thinking of this blog piece on a more tranquil note. The sun is out yet again now its spring (not sure if this is official yet) and the clocks have gone against me, loosing me time in bed. On this fine Monday I have been asked a question on twitter by @mazrred. What’s the best way to ‘get creative’ with website design? (www.soseriouslysocial.com Getting ready for the LAUNCH 01.04.11)

The overall format and structure is the same so that people understand what they are getting and how to get to the right information for them. Website are not about design any more, sure they have to look good to a degree, but understanding what you are offering and knowing how to lay this out is important. For example, your entrance and your shop window may need to be visual to catch everyone, or simple and detailed for the people who know what they want. The experience on your site must seem fairly straight forward and that the content you provide is interesting and relevant to the site. Usability is still hugely ignored as being part of the creative process.

Once everything seems to be in order, you can guarantee, its not. I am aware that so far I may have dodged the question about creative web design slightly. The reality is that you have now done all the hard work by getting an understanding of your values in written form. If you had to visualise the content of your site and symbolise the vibe or experience of the site, you have your design, or visual identity.

When people talk about brands and wanting the express themselves in the right way, they seem to always ask me about it because they struggle. When I sit down and talk to them about what they are doing and why, whilst poking them for the right info, I then repeat what they have said. Somehow, this magically changes everything and they can visualise their website and their brand. Making a visually creative website can be easy if you listen to what you want. If you are wanting a website and know what you may want then you have ll the answers. The reason for this is because you have built up an ideology of your brand already and by dismantling it into many pieces you can now use some of these bits and put together a new and slightly different vision that could be the creative version of your website you are looking for.

I promise this will be the final bit now. When Biz Stone and his mates founded Twitter they knew that they wanted something light and airy (blue sky) and that it had to be simple and almost natural (nature element) for people to use. The community online would hopefully become organic and flourish (yet more nature words) and some how people should be able to harp on about things that interest them. So why sis they avoid the name harp? Other than the fact that to twitter on at some one was an old fashioned term, why did they feel it was right. It was because they knew what they were doing and they knew what it had to do. It had to be natural, so the name and brand had to be sky blue, on cloud nine, bubble font and have a natural symbolic element.

Even if this was an oil company, the plan of what they were doing was already on a path that was in some ways pre-determined by their actions and thoughts, just like you when you are building your website.

New addition – audioboo on how it the twitter name was decided.

Listen!

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Real or Virtual knowledge?

February 23, 2011 under Design, Web

During making my audioboo’s I often find that they are quick, of the mark and always a good starting point. In this boo I have reached out to open pandora’s box around the real verses the digital world.

After looking at choreographer Luca Silvertrini talk about his open attitude to the online world, it made me think about the experiences we face online and how these may differ to a real world situation. It seems that many of us on-line forget that there is a clock ticking. The instant gratification and feel good factor for simply spending two minutes time online is enough to grab you for a week. Surely this is an unfair exchange rate.

If we compare this to the real world, where we can touch and see people move, well this is very different. If you pass someone on a rss feed nobody cares. If you pass someone on the street, I may be put off by their look, smell or simply because I may dislike something about them. Its an instant reaction based on your personality you can not hide.

So when we decide to hide things online and seclude our emotions, as opposed to revealing them to everyone suggestively, in the real world, does this then lead to a further deterioration in confidence and ability to achieve. In order to achieve and gain any level of success one must over come some barriers.

The on-line world allows us to remove these barriers, which is great, but its also not that good because its now stopping us from developing. This marvellous piece of art mentioned in the metro paper seems to be developed in a very fitting style that explores real work experiences. The only problem is that you have to go out and experience it for yourself to be able to view this little masterpiece called “lol (lots of love)”.

LOL (lots of love) Trailer

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Text vs Flash

February 23, 2011 under Design, Web

I remember a time where everybody was developing flash sites. Even now there are markets that need to use flash as they are the industry standard. Since moving cities I have learnt that there was a new kid in town.

Before what I consider to be the Internet Mobile user boom, there was another boom in the web world. New class styles and more geek code work changed the face of the boring html and css became more and more popular. Not only that but the css code was actually beautiful and some people made some great looking sites.

So what happened to flash! Well its fairly simple,from my view point, the Macromedia Bunch sold out to adobe. Its here that problems began. Flash in particular did not really get pushed or developed at all. There was some work involved in implementing and weaving php, mysql and css into the flash file, however with some of these the question was, why use flash and still insert css?! So all in all there is no real point to it. As this goes on the w3c standards exploded and primed up more relevant new standards that meant css was a lot more robust and up to date.

If the story was not juicy enough, then Apple came on the scene. There was a visual use for flash however it was seen as not suitable for seo and was slightly too unstable to run. With these reasons in mind Apple banned it from the new itouch and iphone. But this left people wanting slight animations and flash looking sites. The current trend, with the help of sites like mootools and jquery, is to use javascript as it remains seo friends and makes swooshy sites.

On a slightly different note, many of us forget about disabled accessibility until the day where we heard it could become a legal requirement to cater for this. The reality is that websites were on a path to change so that they could be easily accessible to all people.

In a long story short, websites are built using css because flash is now seen as obsolete because Apple have helped kick it out. The fact that IE was no longer a viable secure and decent browser did not help much either.

The real way forward in today’s world seems to be to use systems that are user friendly, engaging and can communicate at different levels. The Internet has gone back to basics and has seems to be looking at the content and how its placed before the overall look. Well, on that high note, it seems that this is one good reason for designers to get back to designing and not worrying too much about the visual capabilities. Its the content that matters … sometimes!

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