Going Social: A well-designed Facebook campaign earns a small company a big following

Posted by Annie | Published: Jul 08

ModCloth.com homepage on 7.8.2010.
I’ll be the first one to admit it. I’m a Facebook junkie. Every time I think of something funny or someone says something interesting I think, “That’s my new Facebook status!” Because I am such an avid user, I feel like I am somewhat of an expert and because I have a background in advertising, PR and graphic design, I notice and celebrate when commercial “friends” are using Facebook well.

I noticed ModCloth’s ads right away. They grabbed my attention with headlines like, “Indie Treasure Trove” and “Cover Yourself in Cuteness,” and a recognizable layout which almost always consists of a detailed view and then the full view of a piece of their season’s best vintage-inspired clothing. They could not have targeted me more effectively with those tiny little ads that show up in the right-hand column of my Facebook page. And even though I browsed for some months before purchasing, I was continually reminded in those months to revisit. When I finally needed some new rags, guess where I spent $250? You guess right, ModCloth.com.

After my initial order, ModCloth followed up with great customer service. A letter from the owner thanking me for my purchase and an easy, timely exchange. This is important because now when I see their ads, I think of that too. It inspired me to learn more about the company. Because it was such a personal success story of a husband and wife team, I do really feel a sort of friendly connection with this company. I know it’s run by good people, I know they will always have something cute for me to buy and I know they will always give great customer service. I am happy to give them my money.

It’s amazing that 165×240 pixels could begin such a strong connection between retailer and buyer. Those are some powerful pixels. I don’t know if a television commercial or a magazine ad could have facilitated the same relationship.

Now even when I am not looking to buy and I see that little ad for them on the right, I tend to browse anyhow just to see what’s new.

ModCloth.com is an e-retailer that sells affordable independent designer women’s fashion. They’ve attracted a large, devoted following through their unique selection of indie clothing and engaging promotions on the ModLife Blog and social networks. The company is founded by husband and wife team Eric Koger and Susan Gregg Koger.

Posted in Integrated Branding, Social Media | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Education works.

Posted by Cricket | Published: Jul 05

Here’s this amazing trailer for an upcoming documentary entitled Waiting for Superman. The animated infographic was produced by Jorge R. Canedo Estrada of Buck. It’s incredible on two counts…creative storytelling and compelling content about the importance of improving education in our country.

The content is phenomenal and one of the reasons I think it is so powerful is because of the minimalism with which it was executed.  There is a lot of movement and the message is fast paced, but there is a definite rhythm to it. This rhythm is formed through a reduced color palette and a simplified suite of graphic elements used in new and surprising ways. This type of visual problem solving reminds me of American ingenuity.  It’s the same kind of surprising simplicity that if applied to educational policy might inform and yield some results.

I had a few great teachers along the way (including a Mrs. Robinson for first grade) and those teachers are with me every day. I wouldn’t be where I am today without them. We also have a client whose sole purpose is focused on improving our education system by improving teachers and their professional development. Through our work with The New Teacher Project, I’ve learned a lot about the challenges our country’s education system faces.  We need to change policies to improve education and support teachers who are stretched too thin. The end of this trailer asks what we will we do to make a difference. I’m looking forward to seeing Waiting for Superman to learn more. Hopefully it will show up at Sundance in Madison this fall.

Posted in File Under Cool | Leave a comment

Rightfully aQ’sed

Posted by Annie | Published: May 19

all kinds of capital qs

Last summer I went to LA to meet up with my friend Beth. While I was there I met some really smart, cool people. Among them was an ex-designer and photographer working with Beth named Anna. We immediately hit it off when we discovered our mutual distaste for the font Papyrus—which is as prevalent as jade hedges in Venice Beach and Santa Monica.

We talked for a good while about fonts and letter forms. Anna told me about a project she had done in honor of capital Q. She told me her favorite letter was q because in any font, it’s the one letter that you can do pretty much anything with. No other letter has a tail, so capital Q’s can be very interesting and differ radically from one font to another, sort of in the same way ampersands do.

I can’t help wondering what Jessica Hische would say about this. I looked at a bunch of Q’s on her daily drop cap blog and they were all radically different and really fun to look at (like all of her work).

Here are some interesting capital Q’s. Also check out Anna’s project on Flickr.

Posted in Design geekery, Typography | Leave a comment

Design: the bridge between technology and human experience.

Posted by Cricket | Published: May 10

Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art spoke April 26th at Madison’s Museum of Contemporary Art to close out the Humanities without Borders Series put on by UW-Madison’s Center for Humanities.

“Designers take the revolutionary and bring it home”,  she said.

And she’s right. Designers are the folks who take new technological advances and along with the technologists work to find ways to make the technology useful at a human level.  Designers create the interface for the technologies and allowing them to make our lives richer, easier and more meaningful. She referenced many talented individuals and firms for their imaginative thinking including the work of Participle from London bringing design to promote social change through projects like Get Together.  She also showed sculptural works of leather tissue culture done by Symbiotica, a group that investigates the art of the biological sciences to promote learning and understanding of new technologies and their implications on our world.

Paola presented summaries of her work as curator and her process of pulling designed objects and designers together to reveal the world of design to a wider audience and to celebrate luminaries in our field. She also discussed the importance of design and called for a higher appreciation of the importance of design at a technical, social, political and cultural level. As part of that call she cited the lack of successful design criticism in the U.S. as a major gap in the appreciations for design (specifically the lack of a Design Critic on staff at our fair New York Times).

Of course I’m always hungry to see more good design coverage, but I also take issue with her on this point.  Does David Pogue not discuss design every time he reviews a new electronic device for Circuits?  Isn’t design also woven into Frank Bruni’s restauarant reviews–both the design of the dining environment and the design of the menus? And then there’s Thursday’s whole House and Home section–which feels like it’s own weekly homage to design with a capital D. Thursday’s pretty much my favorite morning of the week for that very reason.

Which brings me to this question: Isn’t design too broad a category for a single critic?  And isn’t almost every cultural critic at some level also a design critic? And isn’t the application of the design the important thing to be analyzed–its utility and the message that it sends to the users.

In other words: isn’t it all about how design shapes the human experience in context?

SIDENOTE: I need to give a great shout out to this year’s speaker series that included three of my heroes: Jonah Lehrer (often referenced here); David Eggers, founder of McSweeney’s, 826 Valencia’s writing program and the most awesome Pirate Store; and Michael Pollan, pragmatist, foodie and environmentalist. The whole series was thoughtfully curated and Paola’s talk about the process of curating design exhibits was a fantastic finale. Thanks so much Sara Guyer, the funders of the Humanities without Borders Series. I’m really grateful that these talks were available and free to the public.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Creativity and Neverland

Posted by Cricket | Published: Mar 31

Peter PanThrough the power of imagination we allow ourselves to suspend disbelief and give ourselves the power to dream that almost anything is possible. This was so wonderfully illustrated in Finding Neverland: the story of J.M Barrie, author of Peter Pan. If we’re to believe the movie, Barrie’s success of Peter and Wendy on opening night depended upon planting children in the audience in order show adults in the audience the play through fresh young eyes.

Jonah Lehrer recently commented on an interesting study by psychologists Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson on the power of a phrase “You are seven years old” to completely shift the way subjects answered questions and the ability to create unique solutions to problems.

In their recent paper, “Child’s play: Facilitating the originality of creative output by a priming manipulation,” the scientists took a large group of undergraduates and randomly assigned them to two different groups. The first group was given the following instructions:

“You are 7 years old. School is canceled, and you have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?”

The second group was given the exact same instructions, except the first sentence was deleted. As a result, these students didn’t imagine themselves as 7 year olds. They were stuck in their present collegiate brains.

After writing for ten minutes, the subjects were then given various tests of creativity, such as trying to invent alternative uses for an old car tire, or completing incomplete sketches. (These are sample tasks from the Torrance test of creativity.) Interestingly, the students who imagined themselves as little kids scored far higher on the creative tasks, coming up with more ideas that were also more original. The effect was especially pronounced among “introverts,” who exert more mental energy suppressing their “spontaneous associations”.

…

As the brain develops, the prefrontal cortex grows and results in better restraint and more focused attention. But that restraint also means we allow  ourselves to have fewer ideas. What’s more of those fewer ideas we stick to the safer ones, the ones that are well inside the envelope.

He concludes that this study suggests the way to expand the scope of our imagination is through the process of thinking of ourselves as a child, so that we end up thinking in more child-like ways. “The end result is that we regain the creativity lost with time.”

So here’s what I think this means as a creative professional, one who’s called to find new solutions everyday. We have to believe.  We want to believe. Whether we are to believe in fairies or in our ability to create, stepping outside of our point of view and allowing ourselves to walk in a different pair of shoes (the smaller the better), might be the secret to success.

And this is especially important if we are to beat the ticking crocodile of a deadline while winning the sword fight.

Posted in Design geekery, Perception | 1 Comment

Teux Deux

Posted by Annie | Published: Mar 24
Annie's Teux Deux list

Annie's Teux Deux list

I have, and always will be, a list-maker. It’s a necessity. My brain flips channels like a bored fifteen year-old on winter break at grandma’s cabin up north.

It took me years to perfect a system that could reign in my unruly mind. It required a self-constructed 7”x 8.5” spiral-bound day-planner with covers made from my favorite plastic pocket folders for storing unpaid bills and documents that need attention, sticky notes and flags, at least 10 paperclips one alligator clip and a built in perforated notebook. This book would almost always be paired with my set of Staedtler, multi-colored, triplus fineliners for color coding notes and events in my planner.

One thing that really stinks about this system is that if you forget it at home or loose it, your life falls apart. Or, with my luck, it ends up covered in cream from an exploded bottle of hand lotion or soaked with water from a leaky bottle of water. It can get messy. It also takes a fair amount of time to make sure the system stays in place and doesn’t get out of hand. At the end of every week, it would be bulging with unopened mail, deposit slips, receipts and your occasional candy wrapper.

within the last six months I graduated from school, moved four times, landed a new job, and have been living with 72.5% of my belongings in storage, and my system of color-coordinated list-making has really fallen apart. But like Rome, this personal empire of organization was destined to collapse under its own weight.

Until recently, I thought no technology or invention could ever replace my tried and true pencil and planner. Then I went to an AIGA event where Tina Roth Eisenberg was the speaker and she changed my life. My new, much simpler, electronic system, is working pretty well. Hooray!

If you haven’t tried Teux Deux, designed by Tina Roth Eisenberg’s (also known as Swiss designer and blogger gone NYC, Swiss Miss) I recommend it. It is a really simple way for anyone in any field to take charge of a complicated world one task at a time. Like all of Eisenberg’s user interfaces, the design is really clean and minimal, solves an important problem while remaining intuitive and user-friendly. She was born and raised in Switzerland surrounded by contemporary, clean design and her aesthetic and method of solving visual problems really reflects this.

Eisenberg is a design genius who lets the whole world reap the benefits of her brilliance in really intuitive and usable ways that cost little to no money. We’re not worthy! Stop by VisualThesaurus.com for a free test drive—it’s pretty amazing. Check out her inspirational blog as well. She also started one of our favorite blog collaborations, ffffound.com. Eisenberg currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She owns a very cool little studio in Brooklyn, where other creatives, like the amazing Jessica Hische, can rent a chair and work by her side.

In her online list-making application, Teux Deux, the days of the week spread out across the page, starting with Monday and there is a list for each day. The user can simply enter a task into the text field and it will be added to the list. The user also has the ability to grab list items and prioritize them no matter what order he or she originally entered them in. When a user is done with a task, they can click on it to cross it off! If he or she decides it’s not actually completed yet, no problem, they can just reclick it and the task gets uncrossed and the program puts it back onto the current day’s list. Just like the good old notepad, or pile of scrap paper you love so well, only better. If tasks are left unfinished, the program will automatically move them to the next day. There is even a section for all of those “someday” projects people often don’t write down like “stop biting nails, write ‘you changed my life’ letter to Tina, read War and Peace.” They just stay at the bottom of the page all the time. Crossing those out makes you feel like a real worth-while person, let me tell you.

This new system, paired with my beloved Google Calendar, is paperless and accessible from anywhere with internet access. I’m predicting my next life-changing event will inevitably have something to do with a new iPhone.

Posted in Design geekery | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

What is it with that soap?

Posted by Annie | Published: Mar 23

Ever since I saw it on FFFFOUND! and TheDieLine.com, I just can’t stop thinking about this image of Good Day soap bars. There is just something about this soap. It’s the cleanest soap I’ve ever seen. I have to just stop and praise all the choices that this designer made; the perfect proportions between the square shape and it’s rounded corners; the way that the type is recessed into the soap with hard right angles that allow the type to read through the dark shadow this creates; and the way the curve of the “GOOD” looks like a upside-down smile, but not a frown. It’s so well designed it puts me in a time and place that’s as vivid as a memory of something that actually happened, but never did.

I’m waking up in the most comfortable king sized bed, with the softest, white, Egyptian cotton sheets ever made. I’m covered by a fluffy down comforter—so soft it looks like a giant white cloud envelopes me. My head is supported by a super stuffed down pillow. I’m in this amazing beach house in New England and it’s a warm spring day. The breeze is balmy and salty and blowing through sheer white linen curtains in a doorway where two open french doors lead to a white, concrete balcony with a view of the water. The ocean surf plays hide and seek with me as the curtains move in and out of the doorway.

The funny thing is that I don’t ever see myself actually using this soap. It’s too perfect and beautiful. I think if I owned it, I would display it the way grandma did those rose shaped soaps that sat in a bowl gathering dust, but otherwise retaining their perfect, just-milled shape—a stark contrast to the thin sliver of Irish Spring that sat next to the sink for the purpose of hand-washing.

Posted in File Under Cool, Perception, Typography | Leave a comment

shades of green

Posted by Cricket | Published: Jan 03

It’s a bit challenging to be in the business of making things and to also be a conservationist. There’s an inherent conflict between making and saving. I’ve got more education in environmental studies than I do as a graphic designer and I still care deeply about making a difference. Our firm has adopted and worked toward the mission of the Designers Accord since the program’s inception in summer of 2007. It’s a blurry world and one that is today filled with greenwashers and folks who help to make some of our biggest polluters look squeeky clean in the name of social marketing. It’s a tricky world to navigate and do the right thing. We’re a group of designers that love tactile things – we can fall in love with a beautiful interface design – but there’s something about ink and paper that just sucks us in and lures us to make tangible real stuff that people hold (and hopefully covet). That leaves me feeling just a little conflicted.

After a lot of navel gazing – here’s where we’ve landed on our sustainability.

We power down.  Everynight – after we’ve done our backup, the computers are turned off, and unplugged. No vampires. Just quiet time.  When we get in each morning we rely on daylight and not artificial light until we’re getting ready for a meeting.

We wear sweaters when it’s cold.  And sometimes those fingerless gloves.  And sometimes the leopard print Snuggie comes out. We know that cooler temperatures keep us on our toes and more alert. And when it’s hot we try to keep the office at a temp that’s good for our machinery – but not so cool that we need to wear a sweater in the summer.

We only print when we really need to. Most of the time we proof and transmit everything to clients with PDFs and when it’s time to look at it really closely – comp it up to make sure everything will produce correctly – we make a printout – and then we recycle that when we’re done.  We recycle everything we can.

We all walk/bike/bus to work whenever we can.  Some of us walk in everyday, some of us bike most of the year, we share rides and we do what we can to keep our footprint small.

But here’s the big thing. Our design solutions are smart and go the distance. We design stuff to last.  We don’t believe in throw away media.  This saves our clients money and ultimately serves them for awhile. Could we make more money if we pushed our clients to design and produce temporary pieces – sure , but we just don’t think it’s a good idea. Our view is that temporary pieces should be distributed electronically – use social media outlets and email to do that work and reserving the printable stuff to deliver when something needs a big tactile impact.

Our work is small and flexible.  Our solutions usually fit multiple purposes — we do more with less. We make things easy to grab and easy to keep.  We don’t make big glossy stuff when a small simple thing will do.

We only recommend working with sustainable materials – we specify FSC certified papers, 100% post consumer recycled materials, or at a minimum materials with recycled content.  We design our pieces so that we use as much of a press sheet as possible. This saves our clients money and reduces waste.

We’re always looking for ways to do things better – if you’ve got tips we’re all ears.  What do you to keep your footprint small?

Posted in Design geekery, Sustainable Design | Leave a comment

Hatch+Hamilton=Love

Posted by Cricket | Published: Dec 19

Hamilton Wood Type Museum located in Two Rivers, Wisconsin where the Twin Rivers empty into Lake Michigan. The Museum is located in the old mill building right on the river where Hamilton Wood Type became one of the largest producers of wood type back in the heyday of newspapers as the only media source.  Jim Moran is the curator/director of the museum and he is hard at work archiving the collection of type and slowly renovating the building.  The press room is still active and Jim says that he prints every day he’s there.  Jim brought Jim Sherraden from Hatch Show Print up for a workshop on letterpress printing with wood type.  Fourteen of us from across the Midwest plus one workshop from Lancaster, PA  gathered for this amazing weekend of Hatch at Hamilton.

Jim and Jim plus Mary Sullivan told great stories- patiently helped us with the machinery and let us loose with blocks combined from the Hatch collection and the Globe Collection from Chicago – a group of blocks that were used for promoting circuses, stock car races, carnivals and commercial sales.  Some of the Globe blocks hadn’t been used in 50 years.  It was incredible to see what we all accomplished in such a short time.

I learned a ton about the process and technology of inking the blocks and printing well  but I also learned some good stuff about my own process to bring to my daily process.

1. Slow down, think, and be patient. I set some type. Something I haven’t done since my one foray in the letterpress workshop at RISD.  I had grand plans for a multiline poem. But once I got there I realized setting 3 words was going to be all I could really handle.  So I settled for our current mantra – right this way.  Using type that had amazingly irregular widths.  I set everything up – and realized only after I’d gotten everything locked in on the printing bed with the furniture just right – that there were some kerning issues with the i and the g.  Did I fix it? No. Do I regret it? Yes. every single time I look at it.  Next time I’ll slow down and think a little bit more as I go.

2. Embrace happy accidents. OK some might call these mistakes, but my favorite print from the weekend has this rich texture that comes from a not completely inked block that had been inked with mulitple colors layered on top of eachother. The result was a weathered quality that was beautiful and unexpected.  One of the other folks in the workshop had a test sheet that she picked up and realized that she’d created a really nice texture to print onto.   The structure and limited time of this workshop wasn’t conducive to too much method – so improvization became king at least for a day.

3. I love ink and paper for a reason. And I need to build a practice of working analog especially now. It’s so darned easy to jump into illustrator and mock something up – but I need to remember to step away and pick up a pencil – or better yet a brush and work away from the machine.  I’ve got a good hand – with the ability to create some good line quality.  My hand is better than my brain sometimes and I need to let it do some of the work. The results are more innate and more human.  I think it’s easier to relate to a hand drawn line than it is to a perfect straight line.  The energy that went into making that mark shows.

4. It’s so fun to make a mess. The making is the fun part.  It doesn’t need to be beautiful…sometimes it’s way more fun and inspiring just to make a mess.

Posted in Design geekery, File Under Cool, Typography | Leave a comment

Taken by Design

Posted by Cricket | Published: Nov 27

So I bought this really cute bike basket for my burrito bike, a Schwinn Continental. The basket is cut white plastic with flowers. It’s cuter than cute actually. The basket comes off the bike to double as a shopping bag too.  It made me smile the moment I saw it. I’d fallen in love with it. It seemed the perfect intersection of form and function so I  had to have it…and that’s when I got taken by design.

I pulled my old metal basket off the bike – which required a fair bit of wrangling. The old basket had served me well for more than a decade. Sure it rattled over bumps and all, but it was trustworthy to carry all my precious cargo: my laptop, the six pack from Party Port, my satchel and last minute groceries for dinner. But when I saw the new one -  I immediately got  excited to pimp my ride. I installed the new one all by myself and when I got done I proudly took it for a spin down the hill to the store – I tossed my apples and the weekly paper in the basket and began to pedal home.

(insert here: sound of  needle falling of the record) I watched the basket tilt down and start rubbing on my front wheel and make it all but impossible (and dangerous) to ride further. I walked home and took everything apart, and back together, soliciting some extra elbow grease to really tighten the brackets on the handlebars that allowed the basket to flop down. Only to repeat this process again and again… And Again.

I got a lot of compliments on my basket when riding around. Yes the bike was adorable. But this week I rode to work with my satchel over my back and my laptop in my left hand. And my basket was virtually empty. Carrying anything more than just my bike lock is a ton of work, not to mention dangerous.

I’d been taken and I was seething mad and just a little more than embarrassed. I’m smarter than this, gosh darn it. Why didn’t I see through the hype?  The marketing pictures looked great – I saw myself in the pictures happily and comfortably strolling the grocery aisles and then carrying those few groceries in the basket on my pedal home from work. It seemed ideal.  I make my living as a graphic designer and firmly believe in pragmatism and function. In my world it’s a given that function comes before form. Since buying my bike basket I’d seen it show up on pages of design annuals, and featured in articles for magazines like Dwell and Metropolis. So it seems like one could safely assume that it would be functional as well as beautiful.

Did anyone test this basket with cargo? Did anybody feel the plastic lip of the basket jab into her back when carrying it with the shoulder strap??? Does the designer of this basket, sleep well at night – and does she have this basket on her bike and use it for any practical purpose?

Posted in Design geekery, Perception | 2 Comments