Communicating with Typography | Vectortuts+
Type is always communicative, even if it wasn’t designed with that goal in mind, but there are some great ways to really make it shout…
Article on typography I wrote for VectorTuts some years back.
Peripheral Designs for OneWed
Occasionally I have to take a break from the heftier challenges of UX and product design to create gorgeous or helpful marketing assets. Here are a few examples.
A Beautiful Upgrade
I’ve been wanting to update the header of OneWed for a LONG time now. It’s amazing how fast products can change in the startup world, and yet they can be so slow if you only have 3 team members.
The Problem
People weren’t using our minimalist navigation. People really weren’t exploring the site and had a hard time grokking what we did.
My Solution
Put the meat of our project up top, in an eye-catching way (note the colorful icons!), to encourage exploration and give a better picture of what the site is about.
This had some interesting consequences: I was forced to merge the information architecture of our photos with that of our (previously separate) articles and galleries section. It’s not a perfect solution, but I’d say it was a huge step up in the time we had available.
The Result
Well, we just passed Martha Stewart Weddings’ traffic a few weeks back. I don’t think that’s due to my new header, but everyone I’ve spoken with in testing has expressed an interest in clicking on every damn link in that header, so I think we done good.
Still a long way to go, as usual.
Working from home today!
I’ll do pretty much anything to be in the sun, or near it, or around it. I love my job, but I hate offices.
There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.
- Nigel Marsh in his TED talk, How To Make The Work Life Balance Work
Or, you know, Henry David Thoreau in Civil Disobedience and Other Essays…
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
…and Chuck Palahniuk in Fight Club:
I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables - slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war… Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
My New Desk
Moved my in-office desk to the sunny side - finally!
Social Equality Educators Logo
Sometimes you do a quick pro-bono piece and you don’t think much of it, even if its for a good cause. And sometimes you do a quick pro-bono piece and it turns into nationwide news.
Social Equality Educators is a Seattle-based organization of teachers fighting to defend education and improve the state of affairs.
They’ve been making the news lately thanks to member Jesse Hagopian, whose tireless, public, and always clever activism got him arrested for attempting a citizen’s arrest at the Washington state capitol to protest budget cuts to education, interviewed by Keith Olbermann after the act, and has recently interviewed on CNN and quoted in the Wall Street Journal to represent Seattle’s Garfield High in their refusal to issue the MAP test to their students.
Wanna help?
- Sign SEE’s petition to support teachers refusing to give the ridiculous MAP test!
- Check out the Social Equality Educators website (if it’s not down due to high traffic).
- Check out Jesse Hagopian’s articles on Common Dreams.
Kind of amazing where a little design help can go. They’ve started using another one here and there which is unfortunately very ineffective. So hopefully I can support their momentum and improve the one I designed.
But man, how COOL is it to see your logo on some awesome activist action?! I hope it helped, even a little.
A Brief Guide To Life
From Zen Habits’ A Brief Guide To Life:
less TV, more reading
less shopping, more outdoors
less clutter, more space
less rush, more slowness
less consuming, more creating
less junk, more real food
less busywork, more impact
less driving, more walking
less noise, more solitude
less focus on the future, more on the present
less work, more play
less worry, more smiles
b r e a t h e
OneWed.com - New Website Launch!
Responsibilities: product design/branding, web design/ui/ux/look & feel, front end dev, copy
Our OneWed V3 relaunch was more of a product design win than a UI design win. Being a startup, we wanted to re-imagine the product, but we wanted to get it out the door as soon as possible. Now that it’s out, I have a million things I want to change to make the brand promise more clear, and to make navigating the site easier and more enjoyable.
Having said that, the product design win set the foundation for a hugely improved product.
When we acquired OneWed, it was a site with a ton of traffic, few repeat users and a severely outdated design. Relaunch V2 was basically a design clean-up, but it was kind of like putting lipstick on a pig. The site suffered from feature glut, a weak brand promise and little to no connection between different aspects of the site.
I joined the project and worked with our CEO/marketing guy and our lead/only engineer to re-imagine the site. We took stock of what assets we had, tried to better understand what our target audience actually wanted, and looked for the intersection of the two.
As a result, we lopped off an entire arm of the site (the wedding planning tools) and reworked the information architecture and gave the site yet another visual makeover.
What we ended up with was a site that still had quite a few features, but now they all make sense with and support each other. Our new brand promise is “actionable inspiration” - a place where nearlyweds can go during the wedding planning phase to find photos, products and vendors that will help them get inspired as well as shop and book for the wedding.
As said, now that the site’s up, it seems clear to me what mistakes I made (and fortunately, how to fix them). Right now, my main goal is to make our brand promise and what the site actually does a LOT clearer, as well as make navigating the site easier and more fun.
If I were to point out what we could have done better, I would say that we designed for features we haven’t released yet. Looking at photos to find local vendors you want to hire is a brilliant idea - but it’s useless if you can’t search by your location. There’s a few issues like that.
Most of all, I think we need to improve our conversion funnel. We want to help people shop for products and book vendors using photo inspiration, but we just don’t make it easy right now. That’s what I’m working on right now.
And so it goes in the startup world!
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