Honda’s Missed Marketing Opportunity

Recently I saw a commercial for the Honda CR-V launching their new marketing campaign called “The Leap List.” The leap list is a list of things to do before you die, preferably using the CR-V to help you achieve them.

While I like the concept, and the commercials are very well done…

The Interactive Brand

What is a Brand? In the words of Marty Neumeier, “A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.” This gut feeling is effected by every point of contact that person has with the…

Design and Version Control

I think it may be safe to say that as a part of the design community, we’ve all experienced loss of files, the constant saving a new version by renaming with a filename of “_final.psd” or “_final_seriously.psd” or “_final_imeanitthistime.psd” and even then having our developers working off of the wrong designs…

Designing Successfully When Following Strict Brand Guidelines

Throughout my design career, I have come to loathe the phrase “strict brand guidelines.” To me it meant shoehorning bad colors into good design, having no creative flexibility at all, and/or getting shoved out by an overbearing internal designer. However, recently I have gained a fresh perspective about designing within brand guidelines…

Can the Microsoft Surface take down Apple’s iPad?

After being first to the game, Microsoft is now late to the game with their new Surface tablet. Not a bad thing if they can come up with a better product, which they believe they have. The premise is that the Surface can be a tablet, for when you want that,…

Responsive Imulus Site Design

With the redesign of the Imulus website we felt strongly that it needed to be a responsive site. As our focus has shifted to designing for a more mobile world, our site needed to evolve with us. Beyond that, we wanted the site to feel more like an app than a…

Additive Color vs. Subtractive Color

As designers, most of us are familiar with CMYK and RGB. CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (the K actually stands for Key meaning the key plate that aligns the color but modern printers do use the color black). RGB stands for red, green and blue. We also know…

New Microsoft Logo

Once again, I must go against the grain of popular opinion and provide my insights about another logo redesign that missed the mark.

Recently, Microsoft redesigned their logo into a boring compilation of flat multicolored boxes and overly simple type. Jeff Hansen, Microsoft’s general manager of brand strategy claimed “The colors are…

Web Designers Guide to Designing for Retina

It is common knowledge among designers that by blowing up a photo from its original size to double its size in photoshop, the photo will look awful. Obvious pixilation and fuzziness. With Retina display, the web with it’s old DPI standards looks exactly like that – fuzzy and pixilated.

Obviously most of…

Retina Display vs. Photo Budgets

It’s pretty clear that the future of web is dictated by technology. We’ve seen Flash recede back, replaced by HTML 5 animation all because Apple denied Flash animation on the iPad and iPhone. We’ve seen bigger, more complex designs because load time is no longer as slow as it once was….