In Our Opinion

We had the opportunity to work with some great clients and produce some results-driving work in the first five months of 2010.  Big websites, small websites.  Videos.  Photos.  Annual Reports.  New identities. Branding programs.  Executive speech support at major events.  It has been pretty busy, in a good way.

One motivator during that period: a ping pong table.

In the beginning man created the telephone, and it was good. It was too good, in fact, to stay on kitchen counters and living-room coffee tables; we wanted our phones out in the streets, portable, ready whenever we were. We gave them booths on the corner, we wired them into car consoles, but it wasn’t enough. We wanted to plug into the world without plugging into a wall, and cellular technology was the answer. Today, these mobile multi-taskers seem overqualified for the jobs they were first intended to do. They’re still phones, yes, but they are also GPS-powered maps, morning alarm clocks, handheld gaming systems, music repositories, cameras, and now, more and more, personal computers - complete with internet access. But how ubiquitous is mobile browsing? At the moment, not very. But it will be.

When Macromedia launched the first versions of Flash in 1996, no one knew it would grow into the uncontested multimedia standard. The internet was young, Adobe and Apple were friends, and cell phones were still, well, phones– no GPS, cameras, games, or apps in sight. Fourteen years later, Flash is under new management and at the heart of a back-and-forth that has prompted debate about everything from closed versus open systems to anticompetitiveness and corporate image. As the heads-of-state at Apple, Google, RIM, Palm, Microsoft, and Nokia weigh in, Flash’s domination of desktop internet may become a flashback in the age of mobile browsing. But here’s the thing: it’s not that serious.

Yes – we are iPhone-crazed and Apple-philic. Of course we want to make all of the websites we do look great on a 27-inch iMac, an iPad, and on an iPhone – and we want them to look good on Androids and other Smartphones. But a site created for a desktop or laptop is not optimal for a Smartphone sized screen. It takes extra effort to adjust the content and design, and to deploy and measure. At what point does it make sense to go that extra distance?

Here’s five things to consider.

So is the new iPad just for innovative media companies like the New York Times and innovative booksellers like HarperCollins, or can you use it for your business?  I am thinking primarily of business communication content than business utilization.

We were asked this question by a potential client several weeks ago, who was commissioning a website redesign. Of course we gave the precise answer, 24 months, based on plugging into a redesign algorithm the site traffic, the online sales, the relatively modest size of the site, the brand index, the competitive site metrics, the x-factor of new web technologies and best practices, and the loudness of the moon-howling by disgruntled employees and distraught executives.  There were other variables, of course, but they were lost in the howling, and we did answer 24 months.

One of my favorite writers, Italo Calvino, published a book of essays about fiction in 1985 called Six Memos for the Next Millennium, that describes the characteristics of what fiction can and should be. The titles of his essays can serve as a useful construct for many creative endeavors, including websites. Asked to speak about trends in web design at Boston College in September, I used Calvino’s construct to talk about those trends.

Turn back the clock to 1983, when one of the first AIGA chapters was
established in San Francisco. As the professional organization for
design, AIGA serves as a network for designers, supports design
education, provides programming, and is an advocate for design as a
strategic tool in the business community.

When it comes to managing creative people, the most loaded word you can use is the word “manage,” as though it were actually possible to control the process. So let me dispense with the word. In fact, a word by itself hardly ever suffices to define a complex situation. Parables do a far better job. I discovered just such a parable a while ago on the walls of the Galena Lodge, a cross-country ski destination 25 miles north of Sun Valley, Idaho.