I ran across this interesting blog post about a website that has businesses post a prices they’re willing to pay for some design work then designers can try to land that project (or cash prize as I like to call it) with their submission of logo designs. Here’s the article if you want to have a quick read through.

Colorful metaphors aside he makes some valid points even if he did get threatened with a lawsuit (please don’t sue me I’m here merely to observe.) It’s a dangerous scenario when a client posts a couple sentences description about a logo design for the whopping price of $200 and then expects designers to battle it out posting their blindly informed visual concepts for the customer to choose from. It is a dangerous trend and damaging to design community at large in my opinion. It also perpetuate stereotypes that designers are merely there to make something pretty and anyone can do that..a sort of Miss Universe beauty pageant where the contestants aren’t allowed to speak.

In our society of commodization the last stronghold tri-fecta is that of creativity, innovation, and strategy. You simply can’t outsource that or box it into a plastic package for sale in the checkout isle. Sites like the one he mentioned among others with similar business approaches only cheapen what we do into a 5th grade art contest trying to please the judge with the prize of a some cash in our pockets. There is no give and take between a client and the designer, no partnership in the creative process. Designing is a relationship between the client and creative architect where each educates the other. The designer explains his reasoning for his visual approach to a business problem and client teaches the designer about their business leading to a better final design solution. If we degenerate into a design community of lowest prices goes based on a few short sentences about our client then it’s game over. You might as well just select from some clipart as a customer since that’s the quality you’ll be getting. Think of it as an investment, spend the extra money and get something that is at that professional caliber your business deserves. You’ll be happier, your clients will be happier and the designer will respect himself in the morning. There are lower cost design services out there that still offer quality work but making it a contest doesn’t do justice for anyone.

“Anyone can perform open heart surgery just give them the right tools”

“Usability Testing Castaway”

We’ve been working closely with MSU Usability Center to conduct testing on a  high profile website client. This testing came after the fact we built the site but now I can see the benefit of testing through iterative phases. While not cheap to conduct an organization that truly wishes to make their site focused and effective should definitely consider running their site through this valuable process.

The testing entails a series of questions they ask typical users to run through in finding some information in the web site or to perform a specific task such as purchasing something. The subjects are monitored on video and they’re encouraged to verbally talk about their process as they decide where to go as well as offer up suggestions that would improve their experience. Meanwhile we as developers watch the testing in another room and can’t seem to yell loud enough through the wall “click on the link that says e-commerce!!” all the while they were just looking for a link that says “Buy this item here.” I think we as web developers and designers often forget that we’re not the typical average user. We often fall into traps of using jargon and terminologies in our sites that an avergage user wouldn’t understand. Many times this is the verbage coming from the organization but they too aren’t the typical user. They come from the perspective of how their business runs and already have their own biases in using internal terminologies that can further confuse a user. If you want to make a happy customer they need to achieve the goals of your site, enjoy the experience and come back. A effective useable website will provide them answers quickly and be presented in a logical layout that strengthens your branding but more importantly accomplishes helping your user find what they need. A happy customer means a happy website owner.

Often during the study we noticed a simple thing of how something is labeled would confound and confused users even if it made complete sense to us.  Simply adjusting the verbage to something more simple and clear to the customer and not to expectations of the organization or developer increases click through rate immediately and drives them to the answer they were looking for to begin with. We should always be conscious of how the site is reading right down to how we verbalize the links or the sub headlines. User center design starts and ends with the users and the sooner we can have them involved the better the site will be.

Below is my latest design work. A promotional poster for John Carpenter’s Halloween that I created on the Wacom Cintiq 12WX Digital tablet. It’s a very comfortable and easy to use digitizer that allows me to draw in the most natural way, directly on the actual screen. It’s got a pretty hefty price tag of $999 but in comparison to my Intuos this just blows it out of the water and well worth the investment. I finally feel like I’m back to real sketching and illustrating except now I have a “undo” function built in. The tablet also  has a great feel to it with the pen and active digital eraser as well as the customizable buttons and track pads on either side of the drawing surface to program all your shortcuts. There’s quite a few cables for it for the DVI, power, and USB hookup but it’s pretty easy to setup, install, and configure. The Mac immediately recognizes it as a second monitor and in no time your sketching away.

 This poster has landed me an opportunity to work with Cinema-suicide.com to do movie posters for their midnight film showings at a local theater in New Hampshire. I can’t expressed how excited I am about this opportunity. It brings together my love for b-movies, horror, sci-fi and my love for illustration in an all you can eat buffet of coolness.

here’s a video of the Cintiq in action.
 

I stumbled upon this amazing bit of new software called “Screenflow” from Vara. Simply amazing it honestly looks like something Apple would have done themselves. It’s a very high end screen activity capturing program that  can capture hi-definition video or video playing from a DVD source or anything else going on the screen. It uses an algorithm to only record the portions of your screen that are actually changing. So you can record your live isight camera and chat or even video game play and have your voice over and mouse movements all captured to a movie file.  Then you can use the advanced editor that has things like the integrated callout features or the ability to drop in your own media. very powerful stuff for creation of high end demonstrations. Watch the demo at http://www.varasoftware.com/products/screenflow

Apple always makes great interfaces

I found this neat little feature in Quicktime Pro that allows you to import a mask layer image directly into your movie clip. Basically I needed to crop down a movie but not actually shrink the content to fit into the smaller window. I Only needed to crop off the extraneous data at the bottom of the clip so it would be a much smaller file size when I imported it into Flash as well as being more in tune to the shape I needed for the background of my animated header. (I do not in anyway condone the use or creation of animated headers..please consult your physician before attempting to make your own animated header.)

So heres how. First open your quicktime movie and go to “Window” then “Show movie Properties” and you’ll get this nice little dialog box. Can you sense the power? It does a lot of other nifty things but I just wanted to crop my film.

You’ll notice that you can choose a image to create a mask in the left box. I quickly created a image in photoshop the full size of my movie which is 380 by 216. Then in my image file I create a thinner black box where my movie would play through and saved the file out as a 2 color .GIF. Quicktime then cuts away the white and crops down to the black box automatically. I select the “extract” button in the upper left and blam! I now I have a perfectly sized self contained movie file with the extra stuff cut away. Very handy! Hey I know it’s not rocket science but it’s the little things that impress me.

Katie Landers at needsum.com dropped me an email to checkout the early information on Acrobat 9. I figured it was just going to be another hash of useless bells and whistles that Adobe lately has been adding it’s bloated software suites lately. Honestly I do love designing with Photoshop, illustrator, and inDesign but when they charge $400 for a few minor features and tweaks then it is getting a bit ridiculous. Adobe Acrobat 9 and Adobe Connect Pro may change my tune though as they’re actually offering some very compelling collaborative features. I’ve only read through it briefly but it looks like it maybe what people have been waiting for in regards to true online document collaboration. Google Docs has tried it without much success, Microsoft attempts are many and still just as confusing as before though Sharepoint is about their best attempt thus far. But what Adobe has done is leverage the popularity of PDF format and tie it in with  simple to use collaboration features. They made it blend it with the application and made it intuitive for the first time user. PDF’s also support streaming video and flash animation embedded within them so you can create some really media rich documents. Users can have different levels of editing permissions on files and you can now  view and respond on comments in a rich internet application environment. I also like how easy it is to make online interactive PDF  forms. That can open up a whole new relm for e-learning and online surveys since it tracks data submitted through them.

You can also switch to a live collaboration session to invite people to look at your edits in real-time instead of timeline based efforts of back and forth notes.

Here’s a link to their guided tour. 

I could definitely see this beneficial to collaborating on a design with a client or other employees as well as a QA of their content and pages and look forward to giving it a try. Finally Adobe you’re starting to think beyond the bloat and consider real solutions for businesses and customers. Make things simple…make them integrate and tie it all together in a familiar interface for publishers. By getting desktop publishers on the band wagon of online collaboration they may finally bring businesses to the solution.

It would be funny… if it wasn’t so infuriating.

Blogging Heroes is a compliation of interviews with 30 of the top bloggers in the industry. While there wasn’t a lot of “secrets of my success” revelations in this book, it is still a very inspirational dialog of how people that had a passion for something became successful in their field. They never went out to persue fame with their blogs or to make mountains of money. In fact many of them don’t put advertising on their sites or generate revenue directly from it. They simply wanted to write about what they loved and were open and honest about creating a open dialog between them and their readers. Readers can tell when you’re trying too hard (such as the annoying market jargon) or are being insincere (bias product reviews to benefit your advertisers.) It’s also important to find your niche as a blogger as there are a lot of voices out there covering a whole array of topics. You have to find that unique approach and voice.

SEO techniques aren’t view as critical because if you build great content people will find it and word gets around but you need to make sure web standards are adhered to and you have URL titles that are readable. Both users and the search engines also expect you to be consistent with your reviews. This is something I struggle with as well with huge gaps in time between posts. You run the risk of losing your viewers but don’t simply post everyday just for the sake of posting. Try to develope a regular routine, perhaps it’s just a weekly posting like I do on www.dchighway.com. That way you can give yourself some time to think about what you want to say and in my case fix a thousand typos and go through a few re-writes. You also may wish to consider writing a few reviews in advanced so you have some backups to fill in those weeks when you’re behind. If only I would take my own advice!

Crosslinking is vital. Always talk with others in your field. Link to them, talk about them, comment in their sites and make it a sincere dialog…not just a quick link back to your own site. It all ties back to your personal brand and how people will perceive you. Be honest and open about who you are, continue to sharpen your writing skills and be patient with your blog’s traffic. It takes time and dedication but with sincerity, commitment, and passion the success will follow.

Last weekend my wife and I made our yearly trip to the Motorcity Comic Con. It’s a mish-mash of comic illustrators, comicbook and merchandise vendors, b-movie and former tv show stars, and the largest collection of geeks you can hold in a single building outside a Star Trek convention. My wife has been going to it for the last few years and actually enjoys it quite a bit though she was hesitant at first. Who could blame here though when you see a guy dressed as rainbow-brite, or someone with a fake eyeball hanging from the side of their face while they muches on a bag of popcorn? But hey that’s Comic Con culture.

This year was actually considerably busier than last year which is surprising given the Mad Max Road Warrior level of gas prices we’re approaching. If Tina Turner shows up siphoning my gas tank I know it’s time to head the the bunker. It was tough to squeeze through some aisles but they changed the layout of the event and that actually made the illustrators area much easier to get around in.

Each year I bring two sketchbooks so that I can get drawings from some of the talented artists there. They usually charge anywhere from $5 to $30 on average for a quick drawing or inking. It’s great to see some of the wide range of styles and creative approaches and I really value having anyones work in my book. I don’t necessarily go for big name illustrators and prefer to get work from a variety of everyone one. I was only able to get about 4 sketches this year as many of them were already booked up for the day trying to get some sketches done for other people. That actually turned out to be a good thing as it gave me an opportunity to chat with them a bit more since I wasn’t frantically hunting down my sketchbooks shuffling them from artist to artist like some sort of art addict (which I am). In fact I get so engrossed in talking with fellow creatives that my wife and I got separated from each other in the crowd. In that much foot traffic I thought there was no way I’d track her down again until the place closed up, but luckily my friends from work, Chris and Mandy, ran into her and called on the cellphone to meet up at the front of the show. We went out to lunch as well which was nice to spend some time talking away from the stress of the office. Some of the artists I chat with regularly are Mark Bloodworth who illustrated my Lost Highway promotional poster and is currently working on a new one for me (I can’t wait…it’s gonna be sweeeettt.) Mark has a great passion for illustration and also loves b-movie and cult films like myself so we definitely see eye to eye on what type of illustration work I need. He’s a very accomplished artist doing work on the original Hellraiser comicbook series which I didn’t even realize that until after viewing his website when we first met a year back. I also like to hang out with Dave Aikens and his buddy Alan for a while. Both amazingly talented and nice guys. Dave is an extremely successful illustrator doing work for Hasbro and Nickelodeon among others. I designed his website for him quite a few years back. He also does the artwork for the awesome boardgame “Zombies!” He’ll often gets the requests to draw Dora the Explorer as a zombie but Nickelodeon would be none to happy with him. Alan always surprises me with this stunning quick inkings he does for my sketchbook. I just give him a abstract concept like “creepy trick-or-treater” or “creepy thing under the stairs” and he takes it and runs with it (see trick or treater sketch below.)

I think the big highlight was briefly chatting with the publisher of Mad Scientist magazine. It’s a neat little b-movie magazine that’s got some well written articles and features about classic b-movie films. He seemed interested in having my contributions as a b-movie writer and illustrator to the magazine so we’ll see if that leads to my big break. Next stop Hollywood and my own late night b-movie show! I sent him an email and plan to follow-up with a call soon.

I Also talked to Tommy Castillo whose work just blew me away at it’s level of detail and artistic style. We’re hoping to work out a deal for him to do the cover to my b-movie review book which I plan to have ready by the end of the year if all goes well. I think his painted approach to a vintage cover would suit it well. It’s so hard to find the time to persue writing the book but I’m chipping away at it.

So we were on our feet for hours and got pretty worn out but stayed until closing to get one last drawing in before they packed up for the night. I unfortunately missed the costume contest but saw most of the contestant walking the aisles earlier. You have to admire their creativity and dedication in putting some of their extremely detailed and realistic costumes together. I think there was a Star Wars theme this year as I saw lots of storm troopers and a trio of princess lea’s in slave costumes. As always I was so inspired and fired up for my own creative endeavors from meeting and talking with other illustrators. We definitely look forward to next years event. I believe there’s another convention coming up in November in Birch run called XcapeCon so we plan to check that out as well and will be bringing extra cash…mostly for gas money. Hope to see ya there.

Here’s a few of the sketches I got this year.

Hey I love to shop….online….away from people…far far away from people. I also love to talk with people but I don’t enjoy being in the mist of a mass amount in the thralls of consumerism. I especially don’t like malls which are giant mecca’s to the mighty dollar. I prefer to find what I need online at a good price and have it shipped to my door. No gas money wasted, no dealing with parking, a stress free environment where my chi is balanced and all is right with the world (insert chirping bird noises here.) But the dreaded annual trip to IKEA was upon me yet again. We went to the Motorcity Comic Con in Novi this year (I’ll post about that later) which is a hop skip and drag your ass screamin’ to Canton home of the mega-super-duper-plex IKEA store. My wife insisted on going since it was so close by. I was hoping she’d forgotten.

It’s pretty easy to get to. It’s sort of like when you’re going to Cedar Point you can see the rollercoasters over the horizon but in this case it was a enormous blue and yellow warehouse the size a football stadium. It would have to be the colors of the dreaded UofM as well already irritating me. IKEA has a lot of great things going for it though even if they choose the wrong colors. They offer family parking with nice friendly signs of a silhouetted family including a baby stroller…trust me you are handicapped when you have to drag a stroller and a screaming 5 year old into one of these stores. But it’s very nice of them to give us family folks our own parking spots close by. Also inside there’s a play area you can drop of your kids at which is supervised. Reminds me a bit of fencing in rabid racoons but it works. Score another point for IKEA. But then you start up this escalator on the beginning to this never ending pathway of homogenized plastic and wood furniture and trinkets most of which when you buy you have to put together yourself.They even supply you a map if you get lost! There’s some short cuts to checkout and different departments at certain points but we know what happened to the frontiersmen that tried to cut through the mountains, they ended up lost and ate each other. No thank you! Speaking of eating, I want to give props to their awesome restaurant they had there which was my high point for the trip. a good meal for under $5 including fruit, veggies, and swedish meatballs and throw in a amazing cinnamon roll for $1. The Swedish chef from the muppets would be proud.

I understand IKEA’s attempt at bringing minimal and functional together into their designs but for some reason everything just took on a sort of giant sterile blandness. There was no warmth or decor it was just flat and streamlined and mass produced. Their couches lacked comfort, and their chairs forced you to sit up like you were attending a posture class. The couches were tiny like they were built for a midget named Gunter. I want a comfy chair I can sink into and relax in not one that auto-corrects my spine.

This Swedish company is known for it’s functional design and low prices but in my opinion it’s design that strips away too much personality when it comes to home decor and that can really create a cold impression on some people. I know other people love this style and good for them. Differences in tastes in styles make the world go around but I prefer more patterns and different textures and vintage wood grains and things that are hand crafted. A style that’s more inviting for a home. This stuff just doesn’t do it for me. Weird as how I love Apple’s product design but I just don’t think that translatesto home furnishing at least for my own tastes.

So if you plan to visit Canton, pack some survival gear and hiking boots. You’ll need them just to get out of housewares. I for one will stick my online adventures in shopping and then put my legs up on my comfy couch and take a nap.