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.

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.

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.

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.

Last Friday I attended re:build 2011, which took place in Indianapolis. The stage was aptly located right below a basketball goal (Hoosiers, anyone?). I wasn’t too sure what to expect but I was blown away by every speaker and the attendees. The speakers were intelligent and captivating and I walked away super inspired with ideas to bring back to SmallBox.

Here were 5 of my takeaways

1. We shape the future of the web.
Faruk Ates brought up the topic of how designers are the sole architects of how the web will be in future. It is up to those of us using the web to continually push boundaries and evolve the web by experimenting with new technologies and devices. Technology is a field of lifelong learning, and you can easily fall behind. But the rewards for keeping up to date are priceless, as we are shaping the future interactions of our children and our children’s children. It’s a truly marvelous privilege when you shift your perspective this way.

2. Content has experience.
Every day since working at SmallBox the big buzzword seems to be content and its importance to the web. Rightfully so, because content is what drives user experience and is at the core of what people use the internet for. Users will gravitate toward content that is rich and intuitive to use, and over time websites with poor content will be weeded out. Keeping content as a priority in the web development process can have amazing results if done correctly.

4. Limitations breed creativity.
SmallBox CEO Jeb has talked about this before with our team and I keep it in mind often throughout the work week. It was not too surprising that these bright and intelligent speakers also talked about putting limitations on ourselves to foster and grow creativity inside a project. Putting restrictions on our work gives it scope and usually leads to more interesting and introspective work. A painter has the limitation of his canvas, a musician has the number of tracks/instruments he can put on one song, and a web designer has only so many pixels to manipulate in a browser window/device. By setting limitations, we force ourselves to be resourceful and creative.

Re:build was an amazing event that I was happy to attend. I recommend it to everyone interested in web philosophy and emerging trends on the web. It was a delightful experience and I cannot wait to go next year. Many thanks to the events organizers for a fantastic job with a Hoosier touch.

This summer we’re lucky enough to have Cody and Neil, two talented design interns helping us get things done and working on various projects around the ‘Box. Both are already doing great work and infusing themselves into the team. We pulled them away from taking out the trash thinking of greats ideas to answer a few questions. Say hi to Cody and Neil!

Intern Cody

Cody just finished his junior year at Ball State where he’s majoring in Visual Communication. He’s created designs for a number of mobile applications and dabbles in photography as well.

IMPORTANT STUFF
Bands you listen to: The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Vampire Weekend, Bob Dylan, The Postal Service, Phoenix, Modest Mouse, The Killers, The Strokes, MGMT, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra.

Special design skillz you bring to the team: I have been designing for web and electronic devices (iPhone/iPod/iPad) for about 2 years, and really enjoy doing it. Something I bring to the team is that my design is very adaptable to each project. I can design fun, bright and flashy or clean, serious and professional.

QUESTION TIME
What is your favorite typeface? Helvetica Neue Thin
What is your favorite Photoshop or Illustrator tool? Pen tool
What is the square root of pi? 1.772453850905516027298167483314
What are you excited to learn this summer? I REALLY REALLY want to learn how to code a website from the ground up!
What do you do in your spare time? Video games, listening to music, playing guitar, being outside, and playing sports.

LIGHTNING ROUND
Write the first thing that comes to mind when reading each word.

Helvetica: The documentary
Cheetos: Cheesy Fingers
bicycle: Riding my bike at my grandparents when I was a youngster
drop shadows: Should be used like an expensive cologne (or perfume), less is more and only acceptable in special occasions.
angry birds: DAYS and DAYS of my life gone.
molecular biology: Ha Ha… Seriously? Im for it?

LAST BUT NOT LEAST
Anything else you want folks to know about you?
I work best under pressure. I really appreciate feedback, negative or positive. I like using all caps when I want to emphasize something in text!

Intern Neil

Neil is a graduate of the Media Arts & Science program at IUPUI and creates his own music.

IMPORTANT STUFF
Bands you listen to: This list could go on and on, but for brevity’s sake I’ll just narrow it down to a select few: Aloha, Dodos, and super talented local friends.

Special design skillz you bring to the team: A mad sense of minimalism and swiss design.

QUESTION TIME
What is your favorite typeface? The Scandinavian in me wants to say Helvetica – but I love Caslon, and lately have been on a pretty big Trade Gothic kick.
What is your favorite Photoshop or Illustrator tool? Does the type tool count?
What is the square root of pi? 1.77245385 – Did I look that up? Absolutely.
What are you excited to learn this summer? Looking forward to further honing my design skills and learning a lot more about CMSes.
What do you do in your spare time? I play music and I ride bikes as much as I can. Currently, a lot of time goes to wedding planning as well.

LIGHTNING ROUND
Write the first thing that comes to mind when reading each word:

Helvetica: Switzerland
Cheetos: Orange fingers
bicycle: Underused & freeing
drop shadows: Great – when used carefully
angry birds: Temporarily life consuming
molecular biology: People that are smarter than me.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST
Anything else you want folks to know about you?
Anything else you ever want to know – just ask me!

A new gaming experience on iOS has taken interactive to a new level, and it’s SuperBrothers’ Sword and Sworcery EP. Beyond angry birds or slicing fruit, Sword and Sworcery EP delivers a multimedia experience you can’t have on any other system.

I cannot say that I have played such a rich and original game since the Team ICO games on the PlayStation. Heavily influenced by Jungian viewpoints on mythology and storytelling, Sword and Sworcery EP puts in your pocket an entire world that you can carry around and jump into anytime. The graphics are nothing short of breathtaking. Beautiful pixelated graphics with amazing painstakingly rotoscoped animation, in the same vein as Price of Persia for the Apple II. This game fits my ideal aesthetic of graphics in games. I am more a retro type of gamer and feel very unimpressed by big fancy 3D cinematic sequences. I would much rather have dazzling and fine attention to detail that creates a world that is not realistic but I can still place myself inside of it.

What’s different about it?

A Game with a Soundtrack

What is also great about the music is that the entire score is released on 180 gram vinyl LP. It’s titled “Ballad of the Space Babies.” So cool! This just adds another layer to the concept of the game. The combination of tangible and digital allows you to revel in the sweet EP goodness that comes out of your iDevice, as well as enjoy the physical release of the album and its distinct artwork.

Built for Social Sharing
Directions and Dialogue in the game are all presented in short sentences, all under 140 characters. Any text you encounter in the game can be immediately tweeted to your twitter followers with the hashtag of #sworcery. In fact, they purposefully went with a unique spelling so that #sworcery stream will only have mentions relevant to their game.

The hashtags works well in their case especially because the content is so great. I wouldn’t mind someone tweeting every single thing in the game and flooding my twitter feed mainly because the writing is top notch and humorous. You can tell the writing team are fans of Tim Schafer and the Monkey Island Series.

The Verdict: If you game, get it.

I didn’t even tell you about the story. And I think there is a reason why, it’s best to be experienced on your own. So go get it!

As a designer, I spend a lot of time in front of the computer creating designs and solving design problems. Sometimes, I get tunnel vision and find that I’ve spent the last four hours staring at the screen, wrapped up in the details of this color over that, this element here or there. If I stare too long and too often, I usually get what I like to call the Brain Numbs. My whole head feels foggy and I seem to have run out of ideas for a little while. I start mumbling incoherent phrases and my office mates start looking at me funny. I can’t be the only person who experiences this, so I thought I’d share ways to take a break, come up for air and find inspiration in the world outside of the computer screen.

A nature-inspired photo taken with the Instagram app

It’s the little things
The first thing to do is get up off your chair and take a walk, preferably outside. If it’s too cold or the outside doesn’t lend itself to exploration where you are, a stroll around the office will do. Take a deep breath in, then let the air rush out. Look up, look down, look at something up close, look at what’s far ahead. Take a few more breaths. Look around as though you’ve never seen this environment before. Notice and find the little things. Snap a photo of them. (If you have an iPhone, I suggest trying out Instagram or Hipstamatic.) We tend to get used to the environments we see everyday, so making a point to look at things from a different perspective forces us to use different parts of our brain, which in turn can open different pathways to solutions in other parts of our lives.

Get out and about, play, stretch yourself
You can do obvious things to find inspiration, like visit an art museum. But also consider things like heading to a playground to play, making shapes in the sandbox, or grabbing a box of sidewalk chalk to doodle with in your driveway. Take a walk in nature and find interesting patterns or color palettes. Roam the streets to check out band posters and other neighborhood art (or you can cheat at gigposters.com). Stretch your brain with a crossword puzzle (also fun to do collaboratively) or try some sudoku.

Cruisin’ the magazines

Consume (sort of)
Head to your favorite grocery store and check out how items are packaged and labeled. Go to your favorite local, independent store and browse handmade wares by local artists. My favorites are Artifacts, Chelsea’s and the Village Experience — they always seem to have something neat and eclectic I get inspired by. (Buddha board, anyone?) Or next time you’re at your favorite restaurant, check out their menu and the decor. What paint color do they use? What other details exist? Head to a movie and pay attention to its style and art direction. Or, really, just get lost in the movie. Lastly, one of my favorite ways to get inspired is to head to the bookstore to browse not only the magazine section, but to check out the latest books and book cover designs.

I know there are tons of other ways to get inspired, hopefully these ideas will get you started. Next time, we’ll talk about how to take inspiration from some of these places and apply them to various aspects of design work.

In the meantime, how do you get inspired?