About a week ago, I was treated to a presentation by the National Retail Federation featuring Columbus native, John Jay, Executive Creative Director & Partner at Wieden + Kennedy, Graceann Bennett, Managing Partner and Director of Strategic Planning of Ogilvy & Mather, and Eric Erickson, VP Creative Director at Target. The presentation took place at the Columbus College of Art & Design’s Canzani Center and was filled mostly with students, along with rows of professional designers seated in the back of the auditorium.

John Jay started off the presentations with “The Pursuit of ‘IT.’ I’m not sure if he ever got around to defining ‘IT’ really, but he did give us a list of bullet points accompanied by W+K examples of each, varying from Nike commercials to the Storm Trooper Dancer from Tokyo.

*Be Competitive
*Be Innovative (not just creative)
*Be Forward
*Be Honest
*Be Fearless
*Be Collaborative
*Be Connected (to culture and influences)
*Be Fun
*Be Global
*Be Unexpected
*Be Strong
*Be Authentic

A large part of his keynote presentation focused on the influence of China and Japan in pop culture and design. According to Jay “China will be driving the world economy by 2014.”

==

Next up was Graceann Bennett, speaking on the successes (and downfalls) of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty.

Bennett started out with a slide declaring “the root of every game-changing moment is as good “enemy.” Rally for a cause - something you want to fight.”

In Dove’s case, the “enemy” was the philosophy that beauty is one-dimensional.

The typical beauty campaign is comprised of three concepts:

1) To be beautiful is to be flawlessly featured, youthful and perfectly proportioned.
2) The bigger/more outrageous the claim, the better.
3) You have to wow women with complex science.

Overall: Your are broken - we will fix you.

Dove’s Plan:

1) Truth & Integrity
2) Kitchen Science
3) Beauty comes in all shapes & sizes.

Part of Dove’s success in the Campaign for Real Beauty was by creating a cultural debate, which resulted in free advertising on morning programming such as the Today Show and numerous news articles highlighting their cause.

“Keep the viral ads in the cultural conversation. Be relevant in the culture at large. Continue to talk on distinctive images that harm self-esteem.”

Dove’s Viral Ad: Evolution

==

The final presenter of the afternoon was Eric Erickson, Vice President and Creative Director for Target. His talk centered on the four key factors of Target’s Success, including:

1) A Man

2) A Mantra: “Expect More. Pay Less.”

3) A Monument: Target donated $100,000 to preserve the historic farm widely thought to have been the place where the cherry tree that young George slew once stood. They also agreed to fund the scaffolding surrounding the renovation of the Washington Monument. Looking for an attractive solution to a potentially ugly construction project, Target executives asked Michael Graves for help. This began Graves’ partnership with Target.

4) A Metropolis: New York

Target behaved less like retail, more like a brand.

==

Perhaps the strongest message I took away from that afternoon was to allow yourself to be influenced by all cultures, and remember that talent is mobile - you’re no longer just competing with designers living in your city or even in your country. Traditional collaboration is changing. This holds especially true for those of us who work remotely, whether from state to state or country to country.

To paraphrase John Jay: “Integrate talents around the world, only the connected will survive.”

–jayna

Every business can benefit from some form of intranet whether it is a collection of online tools or a large corporate system. The problem is that many organisations make fundamental mistakes in how they approach their intranet. I want to address 5 of these mistakes.

I have been asked a number of times to talk about Intranet development and I have always avoided doing so. This is partly because I am not an expert in the field (although that doesn't normally stop me talking about something!) However, it is also because intranets are a massive area and one in which so many mistakes are made. There seems to be a huge amount of naivety about developing and running Intranets. Against such a backdrop I am somewhat unsure where to begin.

In the end I have decided to take 5 of the most common misconceptions about Intranets and see if we can shed some light on why they are wrong.

A money pit

"The intranet is not important like the website. It doesn't generate a return on investment"

This seems to be a common perception especially among senior management. Unlike a website, the intranet isn't perceived as business critical. Instead it is seen as nothing more than a hole into which money is poured. The problem is that an intranet doesn't typically generate revenue. However, it does generate a return on investment.

The real benefit of an Intranet is in productivity gains. If used a correctly it can:

• dramatically reduce the time to access key information
• act as an effective method of disseminating information
• be a way to manage workflow
• become a key component in improving communication

Accessibility free

" I don't need to worry about accessibility because I know exactly who is using the site"

The perception that you don't need to worry about accessibility on an intranet is naive. Just because you don't have users with disabilities at this stage doesn't mean you never will. Moreover, accessibility is about a lot more than the disabled. By building your intranet with accessibility in mind you can offer up the chance to deliver it to other devices such as mobiles.

Finally, many people who are not registered as disabled have accessibility issues. This is especially true with an elderly user who may have poor eyesight or arthritis. Building your intranet with accessibility in mind can improve the usability for everyone.

Browser specific

"We only need to design for Internet Explorer 6 because we use that across the entire company"

Single browser support on your intranet is a risk. Building for the peculiarities of one browsers can easily come back and bite you later. A company wont stay with the same browser forever. Even an upgrade from IE 6 to IE 7 could easily break your site. Build from a solid base of web standards and you have the confidence that changes to the browser platform will have a minimal impact.

The other advantage of this approach is that it is entirely possible to open up parts of your intranet to suppliers even if they do not share the same IT infrastructure as you.

Employee motivation

"Its not like a website, people are required to use the Intranet as part of their job"

It is true that people are expected to use things like the intranet as part of their job. However theory and reality are very different. I have seen many intranets effectively abandoned because they were just too difficult to use. It is quicker to use other methods (such as the telephone or email) to find the information required.

An intranet will only succeed if it:

• has the right information
• is easy to use
• is engaging

Some of the most successful intranets are those that work as hard to be sticky as any website would. Adding social features is a good way of doing this as well as making sure your site has the right "killer" applications. However, most importantly you need to ensure that the site is easy to use and people can quickly find the content they require.

Unregulated content

"The idea is that everybody adds and maintains the content. It doesn't need a web master"

In a utopian world an intranet should not need a web manager. Each employee should add and maintain their own information on the system. However, the reality is that this doesn't happen. Some people are simply too busy to "mess around with the intranet" while others upload far too much erroneous "stuff".

An intranet needs a web manager in the same way as a website does. It needs somebody to be a guardian for the content ensuring that the right stuff is online and organised in a logical manor.

Conclusion

Developing intranets is a huge subject and one that I shall return to in the future. However, hopefully these few misconceptions have helped challenge your thinking of how to approach their design and build. Although designing an intranet is very different to designing a website, it is actually surprising how much they have in common too.

Looking for web design services? Then contact Paul directly or visit Headscape

What level of education is required to understand your blog? Take the blog readability test. Basement.org? Junior High School. That awkward time in your life where hormones and XBox rule everything.

It’s Friday! How did it come so fast!

• Keep case
  A type of case for DVDs, videogames and sometimes CDs. What a horrible name. Packaging engineers creating words that the industry picks up and eventually the people that buy this stuff are forced to negotiate.

Re-watching some Ridley Scott movies on DVD recently, I noticed a recurring motif: pivotal death scenes featuring a passive, non-human observer:

• Alien: Jones the cat looks on as the xenomorph claims its first post-natal victim in Harry Dean Stanton.
• Bladerunner: A genetically engineered owl—of course it’s not real—pays scant attention to the brutal killing of Dr. Eldon Tyrell at the hands of another of his creations, Roy Batty.
• Gladiator: During the combined patricide and regicide of Marcus Aurelius by his son Commodus, the camera comes to rest on a bust of the emperor within sight of the murder.

…or it could just be a series of coincidences.

---

Tagged with film analysis

Siggi Eggertsson has launched his new personal portfolio site.

I may not be the first to air this idea, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. Google pr0nrank refers to the number of Google Image Search pages it takes to reach a NSFW/dirty/titillating image for a given search term.

winston churchill is 48; an image of a bodily organ near a face appears on the 48th page of results.

aficionado is 1. The first row of results contain suggestive bikini ladies.

In neither case, of course, was I expecting to find such images.

For years I've been advocating the use of valid, semantic, accessible, well-structured HTML. It's a bit of a mouthful to say, but thanks to an acronym being coined on the Microformats IRC channel almost seven months ago, I can now shorten that to POSH instead.

POSH, in case you haven't heard of it already, is short for "Plain Old Semantic HTML", and is obviously much quicker and easier to say than "valid, semantic, accessible, well-structured HTML". Unfortunately POSH - semantic markup - is also something most people building websites or creating content for the Web have yet to discover. <sarcasm>Perhaps a fancy acronym will help speed up adoption.</sarcasm>

To start writing semantic markup, you need to:

• Validate your HTML
• Stop using tables for layout
• Use semantic elements and attributes for their intended purpose
• Use semantic class names and id values
• Use as little HTML as will get the job done

It would sure be nice to see widespread use of semantic HTML sooner rather than later. So get out there and make sure all the websites you design or program use semantic HTML. Teach all your colleagues and clients about semantic HTML. Use it, talk about it, blog about it. If you don't already, start Explaining Semantic Mark-Up.

The more people use the semantics of HTML correctly, the more reason for various user agents to improve their support for it.

A few practical semantic HTML tips:

• Use heading elements (h1 - h6) for headings, and make sure they create a logical outline of the document.
• Use tables to mark up tabular data, and use the full set of features (caption, th, scope, headers etc.) provided by HTML 4.01 to make sure that the tables are accessible. Learn more about that in Bring on the tables.
• When marking up a quote, use q or blockquote. There are some tips on using them in Quotations and citations: quoting text. And don't forget to Use only block-level elements in blockquotes.
• For images, make proper use of The alt and title attributes.
• Use HTML list elements (ul, ol, dl) to mark up lists. More info in Tommy Olsson's Lists and Mike Cherim's Using HTML Lists Properly.
• Use the em and strong elements for emphasis, not to make text bold or italic (i.e. do not mindlessly replace i and b with em and strong).

Got any other tips?

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Post Expose, a community screen printing and design center based in Long Island City, Queens, will be opening its doors this Friday for a celebration & exhibition. Post Expose was founded by our classmate Sarah Mead, who also made a...