I met Arnold Newman about 10 years ago. Mr. Newman is photography royalty. He came to St. Louis for an ASMP lecture. Brian Kuhlman and I had the opportunity to spend quite a bit of time with him during his visit. Mr. Newman was very kind and accommodating.

It's funny how when one's reputation precedes them the actual meeting is somewhat surreal and unexpectedly quiet. The work is larger than the man, if that's possible.

He signed posters and told anecdotes. He seemed like it was just another day at work for him. And it was, but not for us. Arnold Newman died last week.

Thank you Mr. Newman.

STLToday has its new homepage up. From seeing the news page yesterday, I envisioned it would look better. I was wrong. It’s big. Really big. Wide and long. A sea of high-contrast. Why so much same size, no leading, bold type?

I guess you can say it’s newspaper-like because of its size, but it’s certainly not good web. Above the fold is prime web real estate. Could more space be wasted at the top? The feature callout in the center is weak, but I see Flash is suitable for their advertisers now. There’s inconsistent use of section headers. No hierarchy of content other than placement. What’s with the random colors in the “What You’re Looking For” section?

With all the fine examples of news sites and portals out there how can anyone think this design is acceptable? I give them a ‘F’.

STLToday, stop trying to design this site yourself. You don’t have what it takes. Hire professionals. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper was recently redesigned by professionals and it looks good. Do the same for this. Please!

A creative fellow, Transfatty, with a terminal disease trying to make a difference.

I worked with the team that originally designed STLToday. The idea was to have a news site with a magazine layout: white space, uncluttered copy, limited use of banners ads, easy look at, and style. The Managing Director, who is no longer there, had a cutting-edge vision for a news web site.

When the site launched in 2000 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, the owner, also had their news site running, postnet.com, but STLToday aggregated news from several sources – no easy task – and was intended to be different from the newspaper’s site.

Almost immediately the vision began to fade.

Within the first month all Flash was removed from the site. At that time the Macromedia Flash player has 92% market penetration and the few people that complained got their way. Luckily, we were able to replace the Flash elements with DHTML and kept the design intact.

The site lost money because of its policy not to have a lot of ads. They pursued sponsors for sections and tastefully displayed that affiliation, but it wasn’t profitable. The visionary Director was replaced and the site’s metamorphosis hastened.

Slowly, the new Creative Director began to change the look and in a few months the site did not resemble its original self; bevels, drop shadows and bad graphics invaded the tasteful layout. About that time the newspaper closed its site and decided STLToday would stand for all. Here came banner ads, a lot of banners. They also began to employ Flash overlay ads – those are sexy. White space was no more and clutter, compressed clutter, dominated the design.

Last year the site was completely redesigned. A hard-to-look-at red and 3D Photoshop effects prevailed. This design was ridiculous. People must have complained. (As of 6/14/2006 the homepage is this design.)

St. Louis’ number one web site, according to the STLToday, has a new look, or as of today, 6/14/2006, part of a new look.

The new design, shown on the main news and other sections, keeps the red, but it’s toned down a bit. The ads are still everywhere, but there’s more white space and they have widened the layout for 1024px wide screens. I bet they’ll hear about that. Gone are the Photoshop effects – must be a new Creative Director. This is a move in the right direction, but I wouldn’t call the design good, but it is much easier to look at. Hopefully they’ll continue to improve it and get rid of that red altogether.

I’d like to see STLToday be successful and look good, but they have a lot of work ahead. One of their biggest problems is their owner. Another is they run the site on an IBM Lotus Notes system and Domino server. This is not the easiest animal to tame. They would be better served with a different technology. There’s also the whole Web Standards thing. This is a perfect case for Web Standards. Just think of the flexibility they’ll have, less bandwidth use and improved accessibility.

I wish they would have left it as it was originally. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but it was much better than anything they’ve had since.

I’ve never claimed the title of web designer. I find good designers to work with on projects, but I’m very slowly stepping into the realm of web design. Sure, I’ve designed a few sites, am pretty good with Photoshop, have an art degree, a professional photography career and worked with some very talented people, but that isn’t the same as being a designer, although it hasn’t hurt. As part of my continuing education in design, I study typefaces; good designers use type well and type is tough – so many choices – so much bad use.

Type is so important. It is the thing people stare at most when looking at a web page and the web is not type friendly. The low, screen resolution destroys subtlety in rastorized type and the limited variety of system fonts for HTML text can be boring. However, new web design trends have focused more on typography. Mixing serif and sans-serif styles in unique ways, oversized headline type, pixel fonts and CSS techniques haven given the web new flavor and improved readability.

I have found several notable font resources in my quest to learn more about type. Here are a few favorites:

http://www.fontlover.com/ - portal

http://www.fontscape.com/ - portal

http://store.adobe.com/type/index.html - nice histories for each face

http://www.emigre.com/ - cool type foundry

http://www.p22.com/ - artistic fonts

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx - yes, Microsoft. They have a nice resource list and have been doing quite a bit of R & D into new screen type faces.

An article on Vitamin by David Greiner from Campaign Monitor sharing some good info on building HTML emails.

For the past year I have witnessed, an unfortunate saga: a web project led by a marketing firm that partnered with an IT vendor gone bad. The marketing firm has some web experience, but not substantial enough to produce the site alone. An IT “partner” was needed for technical resources and experience in the client’s business sector.

Here’s a list of events and circumstances that have transpired with this relationship:

• Partner could not satisfy interface design requirements. The marketing firm ended up doing a lot of extra work not budgeted
• The first demo of the beta site was not ready and had a lot of bugs. The presentation had to be conducted carefully skipping the functionality that did not perform correctly
• During periodic reviews, revisions were not implemented correctly, or in a timely manner, creating more unbudgeted work for the marketing firm
• Requirements continued to be unmet creating a great deal of frustration and doubts of the project’s success. The “partner” even refused to comply with contractual requirements for no legitimate reason
• Subsequent site demos were done with mixed and often embarrassing results
• After site launch, errors were occurring, excuses, assumptions and accusations abound
• Now the focus has turned to contractual obligations and possible litigation

It’s a shame there are unprofessional companies like the vendor in this story. This company lied, cut corners, had no respect for their client, or the project and obviously bit off more than they could chew.

All these issues are a Quality Control (QC) problem. A good QC plan could have brought attention to the trouble early and early usually means with less costs, or consequences.

A good QC plan:

• Is part of the contract or separate service agreement
• Details the QC process
• Lists requirements, tolerances, expectations, practices
• Assigns roles and responsibilities
• Has a schedule for periodic, performance reviews (with short intervals)
• Explains the consequences for failing to meet requirements

Marketing firms, agencies and other communication firms involved in web development often do not have the resources for this responsibility. A solution would be to hire a consultant to handle quality control. He/She would audit the vendor and assure compliance to contractual requirements and make sure best practices are adhered to during development. The money spent on this consultant would have minimized the extra burden on the marketing firm’s resources. If this person had the right skill set, he/she could also have assisted in development at times where the vendor faulted, keeping the quality of the project intact.

Don’t put your company in this situation. Plan for how Quality Control will be addressed and how these risks will be mitigated. You’ll sleep better for it.

Very well done.

http://www.koreus.com/media/animator-vs-animation.html

I’m for copyright protection as much as anyone, but it seems there are times when it goes too far. Three examples come to mind. The most recent is the litigation surrounding the term Web 2.0. The term was coined by a company for a conference, but has grown to represent more than that.

Two other, bigger, instances of copyright protection gone awry are Final Four, the NCAA basketball tournament, and Superbowl. Recently broadcast media and advertisers have had to awkwardly dance around these two terms. Copyright them if you like, but allow the use for reasonable purposes. They have grown to larger than life proportion and it doesn’t make sense to prohibit their use, since most uses benefit the authors. Copyright can still be enforced in case of malicious activity.

I found this story quite interesting irritating. After being in the business of creating visual communication for over 15 years, I have never been a proponent of producing spec work.

The problem here is larger than spec work; it’s ethics -- as the post points out with its reference to the AIGA. Spec work, low-balling, plagiarism, bait and switch, work for hire, and flat-out lying are all related in my book and shouldn’t be done. They ruin the playing field and cheapen the services that are so difficult to keep priced appropriately.

The elimination of these practices has to come from the top, just as any example is set and the little guy always pays the price for such business practices.

It’s simple. Get paid for your work. Do your best job. Be respected. Everyone wins.

Unfortunately, It's not a utopia and you gotta do what you gotta do, but be prepared for the consequences of your actions and don't bitch when your working for half of what is appropriate.

There have been locator services available for sites for various fees, but just a couple years the only way to build an inexpensive store locator application was using zip code longitude and latitude data. This data was available from a variety of sources, but it is all the same data from the United States Postal Service and US Census Bureau. This data worked well, but lacked street level detail. Each zip code had a center-point (long. & lat.) based on population and as a result, distances of locations close to each other were inaccurate and the data was only for the US.

Recently released scientific data allows us to simply create very accurate and detailed world-wide, store locators by using new technologies:

Google Maps API  - This cool API is a free service that allows one to easily embed Google Maps into web pages with JavaScript. It’s still in beta and has a few bugs, but generally works very well.

MapQuest Open API - This API also uses JavaScript to easily integrate routing, geocoding and mapping into your website.

Maybe it's time to upgrade that old store locator.

Here's a shop that knows how to build a site.

With Flash 8 came new and improved Flash detection. Adobe has a nice article/tutorial on their best solution yet.

Establishing a schedule during planning and getting agreement from all parties is an important part of any project. Once the schedule is accepted, maintaining it during production goes a long way to prevent issues that can jeopardize a project’s success.

Momentum
A great deal of effort is consumed during the start-up of any activity. Having stops and starts in production is costly and can ruin a budget very quickly. When a project is moving along smoothly and work is getting completed, effort is directed to the resources doing the work while administration is minimal.

Continuity
Continuity is an essential part of any creative process. Once a designer, or programmer is in their “zone” they are very productive and the quality of work is at its peak. After a long break, it may be impossible for a designer to get back into the same mind-set to finish their work as intended. Technical people also loose their perspective and have to spend time and effort to pick up where they left off.

Risk
The longer a project takes to complete the higher the probability of failure. This risk is often overlooked, especially by the client, since it’s the supplier’s responsibility to complete the project successfully. Business needs, creative direction, financials, technology, and resources change over time. The project may be affected by any of these changes and require a change in scope.

Cash Flow
Delays affect cash flow in several ways. Billing may be delayed if it’s contingent on milestones, or deliverables and expenses my be higher because of availability, or market rates. Available funding may no longer be available.

Take Precautions

Although work stoppages may not be preventable, there are some ways to plan and create incentives to keep a project on schedule, or minimize the impact they have:

• Have clauses in your contract that address how delays will be handled.

• Do not have your billing contingent on deliverables or milestones. Get paid on schedule even though work may be stopped.

• Only guarantee rates and/or expenses for a specific time period.

• Designate desirable stopping points at milestones so productive stretches in the schedule won’t be interrupted unnecessarily.

• Check resource availability for worst case scenarios, have back-ups and include this extra expense in the project cost.

• Don’t begin work until the schedule is agreed upon.

• Work in short cycles that naturally create stopping points.

I haven't found many sites about designing. Sure there's hundreds of sites that showcase work and have information on the act of producing the work or the author's experience, but not many that have information on designing from a academic or intellectual perspective.

Design Observer is just that