We have been working with the NYU Langone Medical Center for the last four years on their Annual Reports and Research Reports. For this year’s Annual Report the client wanted to try a few photo and printing techniques that are subtle but engaging. There’s embossing and foil stamping on the cover: simple, clean, elegant - and different. It’s tedious for a printer to produce, but when done properly it is very effective. The photos were taken to show a short depth of field, meaning the focal plane is very shallow. Background or foreground objects appear softer and the effect can look dream-like. To accent the larger hero-sized color and black and white images, we added gloss and dull varnishes. The inks are matte, creating an interesting tactility and sheen as one flips through the report.

A small design touch we added to the cover: the two L’s of “excellence” are in an embossed silver stamp and the other letters are in an off-white stamp - the two L’s look like the number 11, for this year’s annual report.

Less subtle - much less subtle - is the organization of the book into “people, places, things,” followed by “Our Story.” The broad statistics are brought to life with specific, emotive stories. You can skim the book and get critical facts in just a glance - they are compelling in their own right and pull you in to read more. Over the text and photography are a mix of “fact” sizes and colors, all of which adds up to a highly engaging and informative reading experience.

You finally find what you want, and you want it now. But where, and where exactly?

Titleist, one of our most digitally-savvy clients, continues to successfully drive their online and mobile marketing efforts and integrate those efforts with their broadcast media, event and marketing campaigns. We worked with them on their Golf Shop Locator, an application getting high marks from users.

There are two categories of shops: golf shops and golf shops who are also Advanced and Regional Club Fitters. Titleist needed a solution which addressed those two categories. The golf shop locator landing page prompts users to enter in their address and search. However, if the user is only interested in finding a Regional or Advanced Club Fitting Center, they can bypass the standard search and view the select locations.

It gets better: A majority of the Titleist audience isn’t aware of the Advanced and Regional Fitting centers. Once a standard address search is entered, and the golf shop location results are displayed, the fitting center locations are given extra emphasis in the results panel. Pop-up windows from “what’s this?” links throughout the section also help define all of the club fitting options available.

These filter-based and “call out” solutions help Titleist promote their Fitting Centers, and at the same time allow a user to do a simple search.

The Titleist Golf Shop locator is built on the Google API and lives within the Titleist website framework.

To Ellen in HR, we’d just like to say: sorry we’re constantly testing the limits of our insurance plan.

On the surface, ACTA seeks to address the theft of intellectual property. Encompassing the seemingly disparate realms of counterfeit products, generic medications, and online copyright infringement, ACTA would create a new, international governing body to police alleged transgressions in these categories. Participants include the U.S., Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, and the European Union.  Notably, Germany has refused to sign, as tens of thousands of German citizens publically protested the agreement and reflected the firestorm of opposition that has been brewing in internet communities in recent weeks.

Of course, this is not the first anti-piracy measure to make headlines in 2012. SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect IP Act) both gained notoriety in January, after a rash of protests against the proposed legislations culminated in a virtual “blackout” attended by Wikipedia, Google, Mozilla, Reddit, and thousands of other web entities on January 18th. Content across the internet was intentionally blocked, instead prompting users to sign petitions opposing SOPA and PIPA. On January 19th hackers switched to the offense, slowing or shutting down pro-SOPA websites. Shortly thereafter, SOPA’s author pulled the bill from consideration, postponing the debate until a wider consensus could be reached.

As is often the case, the disagreement is not over the ends, but the means. SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA all seek to limit the theft and redistribution of intellectual property – a goal that their opponents support, minus a few key, undesirable side effects. Protesters balked at SOPA’s original structure, which gave the U.S. Justice Department the right to seek court orders against websites accused of violating copyright law, to prevent advertisers and payment providers from affiliating with the accused, and could order internet service providers to block user access to the sites. These steps are necessary, PIPA and SOPA’s creators argued, because the current state of the web permits widespread copyright infringement; moreover, it actually encourages unlawful reproduction of content by allowing offending websites to appear in ads and search engine results. To stem the proliferation and profit of violating sites, many of which are foreign, a new level of enforcement is needed. Even with SOPA off the table, ACTA picks up where its predecessor left off, proposing the creation of an international enforcement organization to apprehend rule breakers.

The English majors among you may have read that last sentence with a twinge of foreshadowing; the creation of a new policing entity, after all, is a key motif in dystopian novels. For these bills’ opponents, a future where the U.S. or any other government has the power to affect internet content starts to look like Anthem’s thought-limiting World Council. Naysayers imagined a censored internet that limits free speech and innovation, noting that under SOPA’s guidelines, an entire domain could be shut down for the transgression of one constituent blog or webpage. In effect, this would permanently block sites like YouTube and Reddit, which cull content from countless sources and, inevitably, facilitate the reproduction of copyrighted material – along with infinitely expanding uploads of legal, original content.

A quick personal anecdote. In my K-12 school district, the library computers were equipped with internet monitoring software intended to keep students from accessing objectionable sites. Masquerading as a friendly cartoon dog, “Bess” consistently prevented us from trespassing in the sordid corners of the web – and virtually everywhere else. Dictionary definition sites, encyclopedia and periodical articles, scholarly abstracts, image galleries and research findings were almost always off-limits, often for one offending word buried deep within the useful, relevant information we needed for projects and paper-writing. (Inexplicably, the blocked page often displayed a pop-up message citing the specific profanities or other off-limit words prompting Bess’s intervention. Had we truly been interested in these contraband subjects, we could have easily noted the prohibited terms for future Yahoo, AltaVista, and MetaCrawler searches. Google, after all, was still a twinkle in Larry Page’s eye.) Confronted with an infuriating “Bess can’t go there!” message at every corner, we grew to despise the cyber dog that was installed to protect us from debauchery and simultaneously curbed all efforts to learn, research, and explore. Ten years later, SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA threaten to limit the content of the web in much the same way.

So what’s the answer? Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Representative Darrel Issa (R-CA) think they have one. Their bill, the Online Protection and Enforcement Digital Trade Act (the OPEN Act) is likewise concerned with the problem of combatting online piracy, but seeks to do so in a way that does not censor other, lawful content. Doing so, they fear, would limit creativity and innovation online and introduce new security or architectural problems for the internet as it now exists. Rather than assign responsibility to the U.S. Justice Department or an international governing body, OPEN proposes that the International Trade Commission, which currently considers disputes concerning patents, would be the entity dealing with cases of copyright infringement. OPEN has garnered considerable support from Google, Facebook, the Consumer Electronics Association, and other organizations that spoke out against SOPA and PIPA. Not everyone is happy, though; SOPA’s original supporters, notably constituents in the movie and music industries, believe that any bill that falls short of preventing access to known piracy websites is an inadequate solution. The Pirate Bay, a popular BitTorrent site that allows individuals to download copyrighted multimedia, would not be blocked under OPEN. Concerns have also been raised on behalf of individual artists, who could face additional obstacles under OPEN. The general feeling is that while OPEN would likely benefit from some tailoring, it is already more palatable than the alternatives.

As an interactive agency concerned with users’ access to content on the web, we’ll be staying on top of these proposals as they develop. To read more about ACTA, visit http://ec.europa.eu/trade/creating-opportunities/trade-topics/intellectual-property/anti-counterfeiting/. To read the OPEN bill, visit keepthewebopen.com.

A few weeks ago, Nick, one of our video editors, was waiting for the server to compress and crunch his brilliant work into a viewable, transferable, and integrated file. Time was wasting. I had to remind him of the good old days in the late 70s and early 80s, when I was his age, and the long nights were spent lining up tapes and editing in a painful, laborious, and repetitive all-nighter fashion.

Are things ten times faster now? At least! And thanks to a breakthrough at MIT, things could get another 10 times faster pretty quickly. Video compression. Image compression. Audio compression. Certain types of analytical tools and mathematical analysis. My view: The tools we use in our industry will work better. The leap from idea to execution will be faster. Users will have a richer, more immersive experience. Think: Better 3-D. Think: A quantum leap in mobile delivery. Think: a high-IQ Siri.

The breakthrough – Faster Fourier Transforms. I read about it on Fast Company, jumped to MIT news, contacted people at Adobe, kibitzed with my technically adept and quick posse of innovators, one of whom is a math historian, (“oh, yes, we read that and were pretty excited too”). And the higher math in the research paper looked good to me! Siri, I made that up, but if the mathematics holds, it is only good news for our favorite digital assistant’s brain and voice.

Let’s back-up. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician and physicist who, among other things, is credited with first noticing the greenhouse effect. His transforms are a way of breaking data down into basic elements – kind of like data atoms – so that we can see what it’s made of. Any piece of music, for example, can be broken down into and, by the way, reconstructed from, Fourier’s basic building blocks. The reason that Fourier tranforms are good for compessing music and video is that when you break this data into basic blocks you discover there are blocks you don’t need – overtones of a violen above what human beings can hear, for example – so you just throw them away. The trouble is that cracking data à la Fourier takes a lot of computing, so if you want to do it before closing time you have to do it faster.

Fourier Transform Graphic image by Christine Daniloff, courtesy of MIT News.

Two statisticians, Mr. Cooley and Mr. Tukey, figured out a better way in the mid 1960’s and created the Fast Fourier Transform. Do something fast and somebody will want to do it faster. If the data you’re tearing apart is of a particular kind, a kind that’s not all that unusual, then the folks over at MIT have figured out a way to go Cooley and Tukey one better. Voilá, the Faster Fourier Transform. Siri is getting delirious with glee! Nick may still have all nighters – but it will be for adding a couple of Art Nouveau flourishes rather than grinding out needlessly obese and attenuated video files.

-Tom Anderson

For the mathematics, history, and Fast Company aficionados:

The faster-than-fast Fourier transform
Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office, January 18, 2012

How Speeding The “Most Important Algorithm Of Our Lifetime” Could Change This Modern World
By KIT EATON Mon Jan 23, 2012

With grateful acknowledgement to a math historian and teacher, Scott Guthrey, Publisher, Docent Press. http://docentpress.com/

On February 4^th I had the opportunity to participate in the 9^th Annual Healthcare Conference at Harvard Business School. Topic: The Future of Healthcare: Innovative Business Models.  It was a daylong immersion, with a mix of bright MBA students, healthcare innovators, and medical practitioners.  Six quick takeaways:

1.  Sometimes working on Saturdays is a good thing

I’d say: usually not.  When will the wood get chopped or guitars strung?  A good friend had suggested I attend, and her advice, as usual, was infallible.  I connected with some brilliant people, learned new things, and was fired up about the science, the challenges, the solutions, and the people addressing it all in a smart, engaged way. There were all kinds of connections to current clients, and former colleagues, and some of our recent initiatives. The facilities were exquisite, the demonstrators humorous and mellow, and the pacing of the whole day well-timed.  The day flew.  Wood and guitars sat sullen and mute.   

2.   Innovation is international

Well, of course.   One of the last people I met was from the Imperial College London Business School, new to Boston and Harvard, totally immersed in the day, and looking to make a difference in and with healthcare.  One of the panels  attended had both European and American biopharmaceutical panelists, and the contrast of medical practices, payment systems, and measurement of cost-effectiveness was illuminating. At one of the major presentations there was a note about the use of EMRs in the states, rising to a respectable 60%, but still far behind all of Western Europe.   We are still racing to win the bad penmanship award.

3.   Tailored Therapies can’t come soon enough

I walked into one panel, late, with only one seat available in the pit of the amphitheater, opposite the array of bright panelists.  I took the seat, realizing that this was a commitment, I couldn’t leave, and hoping for non-boredom, some insights.  It beat my expectations, beginning to end.   One prediction from the panelists: we’d look back 50 years from now and realize how flawed our drug therapy approach is today, how we’re “using a bazooka to shoot a mouse”, how more tailored, targeted therapies will get the right drug to the right patient at the right time.  The inside story of the development of the new targeted cystic fibrosis drug was told – wonderful story of tenacious patient advocacy, seizing advances in science, and of clinicians with a deep understanding of the disease. There was also a story about molecular diagnostics firms partnering with pharmaceutical firms for that targeting effect.  I loved the question at the end from a bright student about going back and leveraging all the data from prior clinical trials and existing drugs to increase their effectiveness.

4.   Government can do things incredibly right

There was an FDA deputy commissioner on the Tailored Therapies panel, a clinician, a researcher, who is widely published, widely (and rightly) celebrated, but who has a vision, has his feet on the ground, has the wherewithal to work with the industry and help make good things happen. That cystic fibrosis drug – approved ahead of schedule.   Agencies can do things right – given the right leadership, and right followership.

5.    Best teams have newness and longevity

I was struck in the Tailored Therapy session about how long the industry panelists had been with their firms – they lived and breathed the science, they persisted.  It is a complex business, and bright people need to keep at it. At the same time, it was obvious that there were young people in the room, business students and medical students, that were incredibly talented, and able to understand, extrapolate, and build on prior knowledge. And ready to go.

6.  Technology is a way out of the woods

At the panel session on Healthcare IT: A Blueprint for the Data Revolution, the moderator suggested listening with a simple framework – we need to do more healthcare, for more people, at less cost.   Of course, in hindsight!  But it is great framework.  The only way to do more/more/less is with better technology, both IT and non-IT, up and down the line, from new tailored drug therapies, to easier and faster collations of research, to simpler EMRs.   And patient centric apps, of course.  Hopefully good looking and pleasant and needing a creative hand.

Back to the chores.  It was a well spent Saturday.

The dean at Harvard Medical School, Jeffry S. Flier, had this to say about their new Center for Primary Care: “This Center will more effectively position HMS to develop programs and train leaders in primary care and health systems research, education and policy. The Center will also contribute to innovation in primary care delivery, which we expect to have transformative, global impact.”

The website had to reflect that vision, engage medical students, and engage the entire primary care community, inside and outside Harvard Medical.  It had to be vibrant and community-oriented. 

Home page of new CPC website.

We worked closely with the team at the Center for Primary Care and their colleagues in Harvard Catalyst on the information architecture, content, and development of the site.  Part of the development included creating a logo for the center – one that linked it to the medical school effectively, while providing a unique identity for the Center.

The home page of the new site is rather unique.  There are positioning, video, and news components.  The components can be individually updated – and – for the cause of vibrancy, can be moved around and resized. The back-end CMS – Drupal.

A logo previously designed for the CPC was leveraged for use on the website.

Clicking on the Innovations Conference story takes visitors to a detailed summary of the event.

Part of the joy of the project: participating in events with and for the medical students during the site’s development.  They are engaged. They fully participated in town meetings on primary care. And they produced outstanding work at the Center’s recent Innovations Conference, live streamed on the Center’s website.

Visit http://primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/
to see more.

As Weymouth Design’s first collaboration with IHI, the 28-page report was essential yet practical, maintaining fluid and fruitful content from start to finish. The front spread features IHI’s mission statement, and the back spread features a panoramic portrait of its staff in Cambridge, MA. All 14 featured stories are given their own spread, with content divided into two columns with a full bleed color backdrop of color linked to adjacent color photos. Most of these custom images were taken on location by in-house photographers.

The Report features IHI’s corporate blue and gold color scheme, prominent on the front and back covers of the report. Pull quotes, key facts and statistics are centered in blocks of these colors as well. A secondary palette with cool shades of greens and reds complement the blue and gold.

For more information about this report, see the PDF below.

Taking a unique approach to telling this story, the entire report is built around the ubiquitous lab book. In addition to other sections, programs for high school and college students, graduate studies, residencies and fellowships, continuing and patient education are featured through a collection of graphics, clippings, photos and sticky notes.  The result evokes a well-worn, frequently used reference – as if it has been found lying open on a lab bench.

Using the lab book as a blank palette, pages were prepped, assembled and photographed on a stainless steel surface. The 32-page report printed on uncoated paper to enhance the overall effect.

By clicking on a category and selecting an item, a detail box appeared with a series of product photos followed by a short description.

A “hint” button below the description brought up another box that allowed users to post the desired item to their own Facebook walls, with a comment.

The app has been removed following the end of the holiday season.