Archive for ‘Design

Think Kit: My favorite book of the year: Steve Jobs

Posted by Justin Shimp

Dec

2011

Filed Under: Design Everything Else Think Kit

Steve Jobs
Written by: Walter Isaacson

I have been a fan of Apple products for awhile. It’s odd to say that I am a fan of a company versus a music group or other sort of media. But Apple’s perfectionist design fills me with so much appreciation and joy on a daily basis. It feels good to know that someone took their time designing every aspect of the products that I own and perfecting it with lots of thought behind it.

This book is about the person behind the genius of those products that I appreciate in my daily life. It is based on close to fifty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years as well as interviews from family, friends, rivals that interacted with Jobs during his lifetime.

Interaction seems to be enough, in this book you get a really good idea of why Steve Jobs is as famous as he is. He was a fireball of intensity and this book covers a lot of his high points and low points throughout his life.

He was a guy who was either completely pleasant to be around or he was yelling madly, cursing, crying and fighting to get his own way. He was a control freak and an egotist but despite all of these negative views that you get to read about in this book, I couldn’t help but be awestruck and inspired. Much in the same way many people who have been verbally harassed by Jobs clearly admit it in the book but without any hint of remorse; their admiration for the man trumped over any lingering negative views they could feel for him.

I believe Jobs was a rare talent. Talent that few of us we get to experience in our lifetimes. His attention to detail and his drive for “insanely great” products revolutionized and touched many different areas of media and design. Some of these include computer hardware and software, forming the arguably best animation studio in our human history, revolutionizing the music world with iPods and iTunes, and finally changing the way we communicate with the amazing commercial success of the iPhone.

This book paints a great view of the man and you learn to love to hate him by the end. His life was highly inspired and his ability to get things seemingly impossible tasks done was a feat of greatness that I am not sure I completely comprehend even after reading the book.

I highly recommend it to anyone with a curious mind about how a crazy dreamer changed many aspects of our history, and also how behind the myth there is just a simple man with intense focus that has many lessons that can be easily applied to your own life to achieve similar results. It is a book that can inspire you while also sucking you into what made this man such a enigma.

Click here to check prices for the book on Amazon.

This post is part of Think Kit 2011.

Beautiful Brown County’s Beautiful New Website

Posted by tyler

Nov

2011

1
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Filed Under: Design Development SmallBox

When we travel somewhere, whether it be for an extended weekend or longer, for work or for play, there are things we obviously want to know in order to make the experience memorable. What are the best places to eat? Where will we be staying? Is there anywhere to shop? What do we have to see and experience before leaving?

For Brown County Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB), they knew a more user-friendly website that answered all of those questions and more for visitors would be key to their future growth.

The Challenge

For years, CVB knew their website provided valuable information to visitors, but content was hard to find unless visitors knew exactly what they were searching for. Navigation was unorganized and hard to manage. CVB wanted their visitors to find lodging solutions much more easily and quickly.

CVB needed a custom web solution that was clean and user-friendly – allowing customers to easily find lodging locations throughout Brown County. They also needed a solution that was easy to manage, provided valuable information to their customers and offered a fun experience. They wanted their customers to be able to search for and find valuable information easily.

Brown County CVB has partnerships with local businesses as well. Restaurants, lodging, shops and other multi-faceted organizations have pages and information on CVB’s website for people visiting the area. For years, CVB was spending countless hours inputting information from their valuable partners who operate businesses throughout Brown County. Anytime a partner needed an update to information, CVB was responsible for updating that on the site.

They needed a custom solution that allowed all of their partners to login and update their pages and information that was important to them and potential customers.

The Solution

After two years of deliberating on building a new web presence, Brown County CVB partnered with Smallbox. Brown County CVB knew they wanted an Indiana company to build their new website and after they learned about Smallbox’s success with the 24-Hour Web Project and involvement in the community, they felt that the partnership was a good fit.

Smallbox built an incredibly robust content management system that would provide logins and editing capabilities to CVB’s unique partnerships. Not only did Smallbox address Brown County CVB’s lodging concerns and make it easier for visitors to locate local lodging establishments, we applied the same technology and functionality to restaurants, shops and other organizations in the community as well.

Smallbox implemented multiple calls-to-action on Brown County CVB’s new website that drive traffic to upcoming events and an interactive map where visitors can browse all of the businesses and establishments by location.

The Results

In browncounty.com, Brown County Convention & Visitors Bureau now has a robust custom web solution that is extremely easy to navigate for visitors.

Whether you’re looking for a place to stay, shop, eat or see, or if you’re looking for things to do, it’s easy to find simply by browsing and making your way through the website. You can search by things to do, see, eat, etc or by location through an interactive map. No longer does a person have to know specifically what they’re searching for in order to find it.

Clear and easy-to-find calls to action blocks throughout the site help drive visitors to finding information and content they’re looking for.

Brown County is beautiful. CVB’s new website and CMS provide the tools they need to sufficiently show off Brown County. The Smallbox CMS is easy to update content with new photos, video or other media like a live “Leaf Cam” where visitors can monitor color changes in the trees and make trip decisions based around “peak times” throughout the year.

With the addition of partner logins, Brown County CVB team members save substantial amounts of time and resources from fielding requests to edit, exchange and create new content for each individual business on the site. Now, individual businesses and partners can manage their own content anytime they want.

Feedback from users has been incredibly well received. Brown County CVB partners predominately love the flexibility the site and CMS have to offer.

Check out Brown County’s new site here.

The One-of-a-Kind Million Dollar List

Posted by tyler

Oct

2011

1
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Filed Under: Design Development SmallBox

One of the most important aspects of philanthropy is simply awareness. The more transparent a foundation, charity or other organization is about their mission and needs, the higher probability there is for people to interact through donations or other contributions.

We are so excited to have worked with Center on Philanthropy to launch The Million Dollar List, a one-of-a-kind online database. Here’s the story:

Challenge

Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University wanted a comprehensive resource that projected philanthropic gifts of $1 million and more to anyone who was interested in learning about philanthropy, donating or raising funds.

They wanted to raise awareness through the transparency of giving. Anyone should be able to search to see where donations are coming from, the organizations receiving them, and where else needs for donations might exist.

Solution

Center on Philanthropy came to SmallBox with a big vision in functionality and a short timeline. Not only did we want to make this extensive list of data searchable, and easy to understand, but we wanted to make it fun for visitors to the site!

One million dollars is a significant amount of money to donate, and therefore we needed to provide users with the ability to easily discover where they want to give. We implemented a search functionality that allows users to search donations by donor, recipient, location or subsector.

An Indiana resident who is passionate about both higher education and his local art community and wishes to support it through donating $1 million, but wants to know where his money is most needed, can visit www.milliondollarlist.org and search by location. From there, he can search total donations received by sector and will notice that higher education has received over 57%, while Arts, Culture and History organizations have received just over 4% of total Indiana donations. He can easily and quickly click on organizations to learn more about them and discover where his contribution best fits.

SmallBox scaled processes to fit within Center on Philanthropy’s quick 4-week timeline. We wanted to see what tools were already available that would fit with this big picture, but we also wanted the user experience to be easy and fun. We made sure that while the deadline was tight, our quality of work didn’t waiver.

An effective and interactive interface, even one that contains extensive data, shouldn’t require instructions. The content and functionality should do all the work. We wanted it to be easy and fit Center on Philanthropy’s needs and the needs of visitors to the site.

Results

In milliondollarlist.org, Center on Philanthropy has an awesome searchable, powerful and free tool that arms their audience with a tool to easily make decisions, learn about philanthropy and raise their awareness on where needs for substantial donations might exist.

Anyone can visit the site and learn about philanthropy by seeing who has given, where they gave, discover trends in giving and more. The site covers more than 60,000 gifts of $1 million and up in one single database. A visitor can search throughout the entire world for donation information, or segment their list as small as individual donors or recipients.

SmallBox’s content management system allows Center on Philanthropy to be more efficient in their reports on giving. They no longer have to take the time to update extensive spreadsheets. The data updates on the site and is easily exported in as large or small segments as needed.

Together, Center on Philanthropy and SmallBox launched the most comprehensive, free, online public record of gifts of this size.

Recap: 24 Hours of Awesome

Posted by sara

Sep

2011

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Filed Under: Culture Design Development SmallBox

We’ve had some time to rest up and recover from the all-night frenzy of planning, designing and coding known as the 24 Hour Web Project. In its third year, SmallBox designs and develops a site literally overnight for one Indianapolis nonprofit, all for free.

This year, we doubled the challenge and took on two websites — one for Earth House and one for INDYCOG. Keep in mind, we don’t do templated sites. Each nonprofit received custom web solutions, built from scratch just for them. Yes, we lost a little sleep, but we had a blast and we certainly learned a thing or two along the way.

Stronger Collaboration
Working at the rapid-fire pace and in such proximity, all in the Earth House Café, the team gained a better understanding of each person’s role. We had more face-to-face interaction, less emailing and IMing to solve problems. Post-project, I hope we continue to get up from our desks more often to talk through our work together.

Content Doesn’t Have to Be So Painful
Managing the content population process for a new website can be a bit of a pain point. Taking on two websites meant there was really no room for error. During the project, we tested out a new product built by our own Joe Downey — a content population tool — and we all felt this tool was key to our success. There were no surprises about unfinished content. The team could see where we stood at a glance at all times. We can’t wait to use it on regular client projects.

And a reaffirmation…

We Heart Indy
We also confirmed something we already knew. Indianapolis is a great place to do business. Earth House and INDYCOG are both amazing organizations, adding cool events and promoting healthy living in our city. Many of our friends and partners stopped by the Earth House to cheer us on. And some awesome folks supported a side aspect of the project — a mini-donation drive for the recipients.

Our Broad Ripple neighbor, Just Pop In matched the first $500 in donations — a goal which was met, then exceeded. We were thrilled so many people stepped up to support Earth House and INDYCOG. We’re not sure if it was our sweet moves (see our dancing and acrobatics in our donor recognition videos throughout the blog) or the fact that these two nonprofits are adding so much vibrancy to our city, but at the end of the day, each walked away with more than 500 bucks in addition to their new websites. We can’t thank Just Pop In and all of the amazing donors enough!

Have an idea for us?
Though it seems this year will be tough to top, we’re plotting ways to make the 24 Hour Web Project even bigger and better in the future. Please let us know if you have any ideas to share in the comments!

p.s. Want to see the Before and After?
Go here for Earth House
and here for INDYCOG.

Insights from Re:Build 2011

Posted by leigh

Aug

2011

0
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Filed Under: Culture Design SmallBox

Last Friday, I attended the one-day Re:Build conference with a few other SmallBoxers. We returned to our Broad Ripple headquarters re-energized and with a little validation of some of the practices we have put in place at our own office. Below are some of the insights that really struck a chord. (Justin also shared some of his takeaways here).

HEY LADIES

We need more girls! The ratio of male to female attendees was somewhat expected, yet still surprising. I hope it was a fluke in terms of attendees and not the state of our industry.

KEYS TO CLIENT SUCCESS

Don’t go it alone! Involve your clients in your process— it can build trust and value in your work and can make the approval process go more smoothly.

And don’t abandon your client either. Don’t rely on your client contact to be able to sell your creative internally without you. Always arm them with your rationale, in a way that the creative will “present itself.” One great way to do that is to submit creative and rationale via video.

BE THE USER
Adapting the experience. As internet capable device technology continues to evolve — creating a wide variety of viewing experiences across a multitude of different screen sizes — the best designs adapt. Enter responsive web design. What’s that you ask? To put it simply:

Responsive web design appreciates what the user wants to view where they want to view it, ALWAYS.

Who are you calling stupid? Sometimes the infinitely simple things need to be said. Don’t make your users feel stupid, stupid.

WORK LIFE
Embrace your limitations. Creating within strict limitations often takes MORE creativity.

Watch out Mad Men. Much like art directors and copywriters, I’m betting that Designers and Developers will be the “creative team” of tomorrow.

Hey forest, don’t forget the tree! Dig into the details, but always remember to step back once in a while to see the bigger picture too, and don’t be afraid to recalibrate where needed. It’s imperative to find the right balance, to see the forest AND the trees.

Fun + Work = FURK SmallBox prizes our ability to laugh together while we do good work. If we focused only on work, we feel we’d lose some of the playfulness that sparks our creativity and fuels our work. In fact, FUN has its own category in our recently published Manifesto.

Many of the insights expressed at the conference were things that I have espoused throughout my career (and of course also at SmallBox) though it was exciting to see them presented in such a fresh and compelling manner.