(You can’t see it in that image but there is also a sponsorship graphic & link—gasp!—to the right of the editorial promotions.)

Similarly, Food2 promotes a handful of videos alongside a more conventional list of nav links.

And on the Craftsman site, graphic promotions appear below a straight-forward index of links.

At first glace, this goes against everything we’re taught about good user interface design. Navigation should be like the exit signs along the highway, not the advertising billboards. But I must admit that these examples don’t bother me—in fact, they look kind of juicy. Maybe it’s all about the context. In the case of Food2, I’m not very familiar with their programming, so I was happy to see some interesting suggestions crop up unexpectedly.

Of course, three examples does not exactly qualify as a trend per se. But it does seem to reflect some broader changes in search-related behavior that designers are beginning to explore. Cheryl, one of my co-designers here at Tierra, is currently reading Search Patterns, published by O’Reilly, which talks about how the boundaries between searching, browsing and discovering are being blurred. Or so Cheryl says. Rumor has it she will be posting a review of the book here soon, so stay tuned.

I was stoked to hear Michael Beirut talk about Pentagram’s Murals for the Library Initiative. When I came across that project online several months ago it went straight into my ‘Dream Projects’ folder. It was fascinating to learn that the library murals weren’t even part of the project’s original scope of work. Pentgram had originally been contracted to do signage, wayfinding, and branding for a series of public school libraries. Along the way, the client tossed in a request that they do something with the empty space between the bookshelves and the ceiling. They could have easily said nope, sorry, out of scope. But they listened and ended up seeing the potential. For their first solution they started off small and used the resources that they hand on hand (in this case, Beirut’s wife and her photography skills). Over time they were able to engage well-known artists and the murals blossomed into the centerpiece of a long-term project with the public school libraries.

Scott Thomas, design director of the Obama campaign, spoke candidly about what it was like trying to build a strong, cohesive brand in a short amount of time with a small design staff while coordinating with hundreds of small voltunteer organizations. While they manage to project a confident brand on the outside, behind the scenese it was often like ‘fixing the plane mid-flight.’ Until something like the primaries, the Obama campaign website wasn’t even in subversion – they were just making edits to the live site on the fly. Yikes! And he had screenshot of a hilarious mistake to prove it.

Seth Godin focused on the importance of being a person who ships your product. His primary point is that we’re all creative and have more than enough great ideas. But an idea or project isn’t really worth anything unless it ships. So if you’ve really started, make yourself finish. Don’t get caught up by insecurities at the last minute. That has motivated me this week to get off my duff and finish up the last 10% of design for an internal iPhone project we’ve been working on here at Tierra.

I’d summarize all the best points from 99% but luckily someone else has already done it for me!

And here’s a round up of tweets from the conference if, ya know, you’re into that sort of thing.

Todd:
</lunch>

Jamie:
Todd – you forgot to put your open lunch tag…so the chat looks busted to me

Mike:
That explains why all I see are sandwiches

TUESDAY

Gerard:
<lunch>
</lunch>

Jonah:
<lunch time=”20″ hunger=”3″>

Todd:
that could have all been done with css

Mike:
don’t care what they say, lunch is easier using tables. sammiches fall right through a div.

WEDNESDAY

Todd:
<style type=”text/css”>
lunch { font-weight: bold; color: #000; }
</style>

<lunch>Going to eat</lunch>

Mike:
Can’t wait to see how he closes the block when he gets back

Doug:
pranzo

Todd:
<style type=”text/css”>
return {
text-transform: uppercase;
font-size: 2.00em;
font-weight: bold;
color: #000;
}
</style>

<blink><return>I’m full!!</return></blink>

Mike:
[[lunch alloc] initWithFormat:@”leftovers”]
[lunch release];

Todd:
Show off.

Doug:
return DougFromLunch;

Gerard:
your method names are way too short

Mike:
[lunch release];

Gerard:
def lunch

Scott:
goto lunch

Gerard:
end

Scott:
goto work

Just look at those curves – oh la la!

Of course you can render ligatures online by using hexidecimal code. But come on – who wants to go through all that trouble? Typing out six hard to memorize digits to render a single ligature certainly isn’t fast. It takes the fun right out of writing. I want a web-friendly keyboard shortcut or a ligature-friendly css style, or something of that nature. Maybe the gods of CSS3 will hear my plea.

And speaking of ligatures, the other day Kristina and I were chatting about a client project and she mused about what it would be like to have vertical ligatures. Vertical?!? That’s bold, friend. I’m not sure why or how you’d “go vertical” but I’m certainly intrigued.

For the past few years, the AIGA has put on Fresh Dialogue, a series of panel discussions on emerging topics in graphic design. These are recapped in book form—perhaps not quite as ‘Fresh’ as when the event occurred, but still very relevant. I picked up a copy at the excellent Powerhouse Books (Tierra’s downstairs neighbor) and read it on a recent flight.

Designing Audiences focuses on designing for users/viewers who are also co-creators. Panelists were game designer/educator Katie Salen, designer/illustrator Stephan Bucher (who’s work I love) and Erick Rodenbeck from Stamen, of Digg Labs fame. Stephan Bucher’s discussion of his blog, Daily Monster, is particularly good. He describes how it started off as a space to show off his personal project but evolved into a community when his audience decided that they wanted to create too. Even though Bucher is primarily a print designer, he was really smart about reacting to an enthusiastic online audience. When he found that they wanted to write stories, he made it easier for them to post and share, and nurtured contributors with feedback and praise. Gradually, he came up with creative visual projects for those who weren’t interested in writing.

Katie Salen also makes some well put observations about how audiences’ familiarity with media and design is changing:

I think what we’re seeing today is a rising level of what I’ll just call media literacy. People are more literate today in more media than they’ve ever been before. People learn how to write because they blog. They are learning about video editing and illustration and graphic design, so I think that there’s a broader range of literacy across media…I do think that we’re going to get rid of the concept of amateur—the notion of amateur-made content. Instead we may begin to think of it more as user-produced content…

So true Ms. Salen, so true.

As iPhone apps go, Chanel’s has got to be the most beautiful one I’ve seen so far. There’s nothing earth shattering about the functionality — just amazing fashion photography + video that is cropped & edited to fit to perfection inside the equally elegant little iPhone. It looks so good that I’ve actually taken off my iPhone’s ugly rubber protector just to give it the stage it deserves.

A friend who works in mobile design first showed me the app. Even though he’s not a fashion connesouir per se, he frequently cites it as an example of an app that takes a few simple things and does them really, really well. I have to agree. It used to be that my main reason for liking Chanel was the Fug Girls’ hilarious Karl Lagerfeld dialogue. But this app has taken my feelings to a new level.

and sometimes in ways that are um, bold…but embarrassing:

Of course mainstream news sources like the New York Times and CNN aren’t the only ones serving it up. Designoblog has a nice collection of election graphic highlights from sources including Good Magazine and An Orange America. And sites like FiveThirtyEight and Perspctv sprang up to satisfy the nation’s thirst for data representation.

Despite our short attention spans, it would appear that Americans are craving data. We want to experience it: poke it, flip it, and remix it (online) or watch someone else do that (on air). The New York Times and IBM are even offering ways for readers to roll their own graphics, through their new Visualization Lab. So far the options are kind of canned and flat. But the direction is promising (wouldn’t this make a great way for design students to play with displays of information?)

So even though the election cycle has come to an end, leaving us to nurse our withdrawal, we can rest assured that our nation’s pie charts will never be the same. They’ll carry on interactive-er, 3D-er and more tricked out than ever before.

“Scent of a webpage: Five types of navigation pages” by Jared Spool  (of User Interface Engineering)
“Designing the User Experience Curve” by Andy Budd (of Clearleft)
“Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps” by Jeffrey Veen (formerly of Adaptive Path & Google Analytics)

See the full-size tag cloud here

On a recent flight I sat next to an elderly gentleman who did a challenging crossword in record time (before the plane took off!) then busted out an enormous and intimidating volume of non-fiction, all the while cracking sarcastic jokes under his breath for my benefit. While half of our plane spent the flight head-back and drooling, this man wasn’t idle for a second. I was impressed and kind of weirdly jealous.

Like many folks at Tierra and elsewhere, I spend most of my work days in problem-solving mode. Making something visual, writing, wire framing or talking to a client are all a means to this end. So needless to say, I strive to be nimble when it comes to solving problems. I’ve read that our brains thrive when we mix things up. Solving new and different kinds problems can even make us better at solving the ones we encounter regularly. That probably means I should try doing calculus on the weekends…but that’s not going to happen. Baby steps.

For the past few months I’ve been addicted to Nintendo DS games like Brain Age and My Word Coach. I’ll throw down with a sudoku puzzle on the DS at any chance I get – on the subway, waiting for my takeout, during boring conversations with friends (kidding). But the magic of these games is starting to wear off. They used to make me feel like I’d just had a little jolt of caffeine, but that feeling is fading away as they become more familiar.

I’m very curious about the different ways that people keep their brains fit. Some friends and I were once annihilated at Trivial Pursuit by a woman I’d previously considered to be a party girl. Afterwards I asked her how she stayed so sharp and she said that she did the crossword every single morning. My husband sometimes reads signs backwards as a little puzzle to entertain himself. My friend Tina, a creative strategist, makes complex weaving and knittery.

Is there anything you like to do to stay sharp?

Andy Whitlock’s blog Now in Colour posed a fun, collaborative project for designers – post some images of your work as a student and compare & contrast with your current professional work. I couldn’t resist, so here goes.

Reflection #1 – What a difference real live developers make!
As a student, I spent a lot of time making elaborate simulations of interactive environments. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing…there’s only so much time you have in school and it made sense to focus on design rather than trying to master javascript & actionscript.

But…it’s great designing things that actually work. It was extremely satisfying to start working with professional developers who can bring a design to life (especially when they’re very creative and open-minded—shout out to the Tierra dev team). Now that I work in collaboration with developers, instead of making numerous simulations of a chat environment, we can design and build a functional application and then test it out by using it ourselves.

Reflection #2 – A big, interesting problem will never be solved.
I’m still intrigued and challenged by some of the same core topics. My class once spent a semester studying chat environments in an education context. That semested kicked my butt, but it also kicked off what will probably be a career-long interest in online communication and design for education environments.

Reflection #3 – Sometimes the most satisfying design is a simple study.
I always go back to something that my one of my professors said over and over again – “slice it thin,” meaning look a very small, isolated part of a problem and deep-dive into it. Sometimes that means starting out making a super simple study. Sometimes that simple study opens up an entirely new creative direction, or turns out to be one of your favorite parts of the whole project. As part of a much larger school project, I made this study exploring the relationship between typing and visual feedback. It was quick & loose, but among a bunch of other overwrought attempts, it was one thing that people actually responded to.

Simple studies are all good when you’re a student, but when you’re working as a professional, they may never see the light of day. Clients don’t often ask for simple studies. It’s easy to skip them entirely because it feels like there’s no time, no budget and no need. But I find that almost every time I pause within a larger project to work on a simple study I’m glad that I did—especially if we figure out how to use it somehow later on.

Voila. It’s been a nice trip down memory lane. Thanks Now in Colour!