PixelMEDIA Inc.

Riding the Boston subway recently, I noticed several people crowded around one of the doors in the center of the car despite a clearly worded warning: DO NOT STAND IN FRONT OF DOORS. They stayed at the door during several stops, but did not get off. People getting on and off had to squeeze by them. The train wasn’t especially crowded; there was plenty of space away from the doors. So why were these people huddled in the one spot they were not supposed to be?

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If you have participated in taking a website in a new design direction, you may have noticed the difficulty in separating the form from the function. Here at PixelMEDIA, we employ a useful deliverable know as a mood board. In its simplest form, a mood board combines numerous elements into a collage that establishes an overall tone and creative direction. In many cases, we use it when a brand “refresh” is needed or if there is a lack of defined brand guidelines for the web channel. If you are currently working on a complete rebrand, you may consider this method as way to explore and establish typography, a color palette, or a style of a photography or illustration.

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The goal of any good web firm should be to provide clients with the best possible online face to the world.  Notice, however, that I use the term “best possible”.  The reality is that we as developers, designers, information architects, content strategists, account managers and project managers, are often limited by the budget, particularly in this difficult economy.  While a $100,000 website redesign might be off the table during tough times, “small victories” in key places can happen as part of the regular support and maintenance of your website, and often have a big impact.

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Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the Ad Club’s Edge Conference. Positioned as “It’s where you go to get inspired,” the conference focused on topics ranging from the effects of technology on the creative process to the extremes agencies go through to retain a large client.

The presenters included an impressive list of industry heavyweights like Baba Shetty, Chief Media Officer at Hill Holiday, Suzie Reider, Director of Ad Sales and Marketing for YouTube, and Lance Jensen, Creative Director for Modernista! All had engaging presentations but the most profound (at least to me) was Brian Collins, Chief Creative Officer and Chairman of COLLINS. His discussion touched on a few, well articulated points, but the most interesting to me was the effect of society and its direct influence on art and creative endeavors. (Read More…)

I’ve been working with a client who came to PixelMEDIA looking for an Information Architect to turn an existing desktop application into a browser-based user experience. They invited us to support their in-house programmers and a third-party visual design company. At the initial project kickoff meeting, it became apparent that the three parties at the table had wildly differing ideas on how the application worked and what the vision for the next version of the product should be.

But it also turned out, that the majority of the client stakeholders were puzzled as to what PixelMEDIA was providing. They didn’t understand what Information Architecture was, and hadn’t even thought about the overall user experience for the product. Yet, they had requested an IA. How odd. (Read More…)

A few weeks ago, I posted a question on the whiteboard outside of the Experience Design Cubes:

What’s the difference between ‘information” and “content?”

I wasn’t looking for answers, just ideas and maybe a spirited discussion. Heck, the best I could do was. “I know it when I see it.” Check out some of the responses from the whiteboard.

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Well, Bill Gates said it during his CES keynote, which sucked by the way. Surprise. The Wiki has a page on it, however anemic, and there’s a group called NUI (e.g. – Natural User Interface) that has assembled to explore this emerging area of interaction design.

So I of course explored last night; thinking what is it? A new word for the same old shat, or something truly different? And if it is different, how different, and how does it compare with what we’re familiar with today, or is that not fair to ask? NUI is actually pronounced ‘new’ – so maybe someone’s thought real hard about this, being new that is.

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