I’ve been working behind the scenes on a little thing called the RE:DESIGN Conference. It is a whole series of events around Design and the format really encourages intimate conversations led by session leaders.
The first event is themed around Creative Directors and I’ve had the privilege of trying to get many designers whose work I’ve long admired and many friends, colleagues and mentors to come speak at the conference.
Here is a quick rundown of those I know, and how I know them, arranged in autobiographical order:
Lawrence Azerrad was in my class at California College of Arts & Crafts (CCAC, now California College of the Arts (CCA)). I am envious that he has the pleasure of working with my favorite contemporary band Wilco.
Mark Fox was my one of my teachers at CCAC and I interned for him. A lot of what I know about logos and symbols I learned from him.
Neal Zimmermann was one of my bosses in my first full-time design job. Always funny, he would push us junior designers to kern five-letter words for a week, earning him the nickname of “The Kernel.”
I worked with both Angie Wang and Eric Heiman at Zimmermann Crowe Design (ZCD) and they have both since become inspirational educators and design practitioners.
Colleen Stokes was my boss at USWeb/CKS (which became marchFIRST). Her designs were always impeccable and she eventually moved to New York to work for a number of style and fashion brands.
Adam Connelly and I met at marchFIRST (formerly USWeb/CKS, formerly CKS) while working on the Sega account. We would cross paths again at Apple and Razorfish. His wealth of indie music knowledge is amazing.
Shawn Hazen and I worked at Apple together. Although we were in different groups within Graphic Design, we were both part of the growing team of highly-skilled designers cranking out layouts with Apple Myriad on white.
I met both Cinthia Wen and Christopher Simmons while working on a side AIGA/SF project dubbed “The Pub Project.” Both are CCA alumni and both are brilliant.
Dan Buczaczer is the likely outcast of the bunch. He is not a designer, but he and his company are incredibly creative when it comes to innovative ways to get one’s message out. He is also my neighbor in Oakland.
Dave McClain and I are counterparts at LEVEL Studios. We also both previously worked for Razorfish (formerly Avenue A | Razorfish, formerly SBI.Razorfish, formerly SBI and Company, formerly marchFIRST). Don’t remind him that the Oakland Raiders beat the Denver Broncos at Denver, in their 2011 season opener.
I cannot wait to see all these people in Palm Springs in November. I think it will prove to be a very fun, interesting and inspiring time. More info at the RE:DESIGN website.
I’m really proud to announce that DesignScene for iPad has shipped today. From idea to release, it’s been about a year in the making. Here’s a little trailer I made in case you missed it:
I’ll be frank and say that this app was really made for me. Like many designers I spend a lot of my time going from website to website looking at stuff and reading up on trends. I eventually started using RSS feeds but even my feeds got unwieldy. I dreaded opening up Google Reader and seeing “1000+” unread items.
When Apple announced the iPad 12 months ago it struck me that this device was the perfect thing to visually browse through all of my design-related feeds. It didn’t take me too long to sketch and comp up something.
Of course I am just a designer and had zero Objective-C skills whatsoever. I can do simple HTML, CSS and even PHP, but real programming languages elude me. I knew I had to find a development partner. Problem is that there are tons of people like me with an idea, while developers are in high demand. I asked my network of friends and contacts, posted on Craigslist and BuildItWithMe but didn’t really find anyone. I had a couple of meetings with friends of friends who were iPhone developers but they had their own objectives. Finally I got in touch with an old friend who was working on his first iPhone app.
I presented my idea to David and he liked it. We decided to go to iPad Dev Camp which took place a week after the iPad shipped and just a couple of weeks after David and I initially talked. We built the prototype for DesignScene at the camp (and received an Honorable Mention). We were off to a great start.
The reality of day jobs and personal lives slowed progress down as we got into the spring and summer of 2010. But in the fall as chatter of curated content emerged we kicked ourselves into high gear. David worked on functionality (there’s a lot of backend processing that actually happens so that the app is as fast as it can be) and I worked on reaching out to sources to get official permission.
Fast-forward to today, and DesignScene is now available for purchase on the App Store. We’ve worked incredibly hard on this, sweated all the details (there’s actually a maintenance upgrade that we released hours after 1.0.0 went on sale), and are really proud of what we’ve accomplished. Of course we could not have done this without the immense and loving support from our families. A million thanks to our wives and kids for putting up with our late night hackathons.
We are going to keep working on to improve DesignScene (we have some neat features we’ve been thinking about) but we’re also going to think about other apps. Stay tuned and wish us luck!
FEED 2009 has now been released and I feel privileged to have been a part of this one. If you haven’t already checked it out, please do so. The report and findings are very compelling and eye-opening. [Download PDF]
I wanted to share a little bit about the process we went through in designing the new report.
When my friend and colleague Garrick Schmitt first approached me, he already had an editorial direction in mind. He realized the data was so profound that the usual packaging of articles around the report would actually take away from it. So he wanted a smaller format with less content. He referenced books by Marty Neumeier: simple layout, large type, lots of infographics. The theme for the book came down to “customer engagement.” The data shows that when brands engage with customers in an experience of some kind (like an event, contest, etc.), ninety-six percent (96%) of their customers are more likely to consider, buy from or recommend that brand. Ninety-six percent. You never see a number like that in a survey. (To get that number, add up the sometimes/usually/always percentages for the consider, purchase and recommend results.)
So the answer was obvious in my mind. The design had to be simple (and elegant) but it really had to have an organic touch; it’s about the customer after all. I started thinking about Darwin’s journal and his observations and drawings of animals. I toyed with having the whole book typeset in a font I could make from Garrick’s handwriting, accompanied by scientific drawings of consumers. As soon as I thought about looking at illustrators who had a realistic style, someone immediately came to mind. Earlier in the summer I worked with a freelance copywriter named David Fullarton who was also a talented illustrator/artist. His work combines collage with portraiture and witty copy. His style would be the foil to the business-speak and myriad bar graphs and pie charts. He was perfect.
When I briefed David, I gave him a draft of the report and some loose direction. What he came back with was sheer genius. Because of his copy in conjunction with his art, the illustrations became another layer of commentary about the state of our industry and even our hyperconnected society. Yelpers are not only reviewing restaurants, but also doctors and schools. It doesn’t seem far off that they might be reviewing police officers in the future.
Meanwhile, I took another look at the nameplate for FEED. Last year’s design element of the small rectangular bars was inspired by the holes in computer punchcards. This year, I took the idea a little further by incorporating the actual shape of the punchcard and making the name a part of that.
Garrick and I also talked a lot about the format of the physical book. He liked the idea of putting it up on Blurb for anyone to order their own copy. The small 7x7 size felt right for the amount of content we had. In addition to Blurb, we have also offset-printed 2,000 copies of the book. For this I chose a natural white cover stock for the interior pages which alludes to Moleskine sketchbooks and fits well with David’s illustration style. And we even made temporary tattoos of the back cover illustration.
At Razorfish most of my days are filled with high-level, large-scale strategizing or pushing tiny colored squares around on a screen. It’s always nice to work on a small project and make something that can be felt, picked up and even smelled. I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I have enjoyed making it.
Today my friend Aaron Clinger and I launched a project called TweepRoll. The idea for the site came about when my friend Kate and I were talking about celebrities who use Twitter. She said she could see how reading celebrities’ tweets could totally suck her into the Twitterverse. Later in the day it dawned on me that a lot of other people would feel the same way, so I started sketching out a site for the Twitter-lurker, the curious, the toe-dipper.
In the days and weeks after thinking about this idea I kept reading news items about celebrity twitterers. From The New York Times to Entertainment Weekly, Twitter and the famous people who use them were going mainstream.
I brought my genius developer friend Aaron into the project and we designed, built and launched TweepRoll in three weeks. It’s been a really fun side project for us and I hope you enjoy it!
Although he has been designing since the seventh grade, Roger Wong officially began his design career in 1995. He is currently group creative director at LEVEL Studios in San Jose.
This site is an outlet for his musings on design, advertising and culture.
