Monday, November 24, 2008
Employee Handbook Cover
Here is an idea I was kicking around Friday. I have an employee in a relaxed and content state-of-mind. Why? Because they now have all the answers they need as a Penton employee and as a result, they have been transported to a higher state of consciousnesses. (Are you buying this?) I thought maybe this could be represented by an employee type seated in a lotus position with either a mountain background or on top of a water cooler which could also represent a mountaintop, metaphorically speaking. OK, enough of that. I also have Tiffany's Illustrator file and I'll contribute an idea along that line too. A really clever idea for that one ought to be occurring to me any minute now.
Friday, November 21, 2008
The Final Cover
As mentioned below, Gene and I (and Jennie) came up with some ideas for the Penton Employee Handbook Cover. Here are the finalized versions of the two covers we are submitting. We may still do a third for the series, but have decided that two is good for now-- unless someone else wants to volunteer to do the third one (and we'll even give you the illustrator file to make it easy on you)?!
Thursday, November 20, 2008
A Minor Refreshing of Supermarket News
Recently, Steve Miller came up to me (via email) and asked me if we could re-examine Supermarket News' homepage. He wanted to:
Add their tagline "Smart. Timely. Preferred."
Place more focus on the call-to-action for "Subscribe to Premium Content"
Make the SN logo and the "Supermarket News" more legible/apparent/etc.
Originally, he suggested moving the folded notch in the SN Premium Highlights section to the right side along with a link that reads "Subscribe to Premium Content". This would help in fulfilling point #2, but we knew more could be done.
With the points above in mind, the black bar was dropped lower on the page and above it, we broke "Login" out from the utility nav and expanded on it in the upper right corner. This way, there's a clear touchpoint for users that are either logging in / creating a new account / or upgrading. Before, all of this resided under the link "login".
In the updated homepage, the logo was made bigger and "Supermarket News" now sits on the black bar giving it more visual presence. To the right of it is the tagline that was originally requested by the property.
To avoid detracting attention and inducing banner blindness to the call-to-action in the upper right corner, we dropped the leaderboard lower on the page. This allowed us to create some white space in between the logo and the login area.
Below is the before and after. I took some numbers down for the clicks on the login link and will compare them to the new results once these changes have been made. Please stay tuned for the results!
The Penton Employee Handbook (Rough Concept)
So Tiffany and I (and Jennie) took a collaborative approach to try and win the iPod that Penton is giving away for whoever comes up with a decent book cover for the upcoming edition of the Employee Handbook.
We quickly worked through several ideas, some of them included a silhouette of a hand on a Penton purple book to an image of a fist on the cover. After kicking these ideas around in the cubicle, we did a quick search on Google for "Employee Handbook" and found something interesting ...
SONIC's ingenius handbook cover design.
From this design, we started intermixing our idea with Sonic's and we came up with a theme: "Things you can and cannot do with your hands". After some more thought, Tiffany made a good analysis on how the idea can be too restrictive. So instead, we shifted to "Things you can and cannot do at work"... which seemed pretty obvious. Below is one of the concepts for the cover. Tiffany will be coming up with other versions of it so stay tuned for those!
If you guys have any ideas, feel free to post em up whether it be in words or sketches... :)
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
The Art & Science of CSS download
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Nav Menu Designs
A nav menu showcase I stumbled across.
Maybe something here to inspire you - or not.
Here
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Newspaper Website Design: Trends And Examples
Contracting Business Mockups
Here are the mockups for the CB site. Thoughts?
100 Free Postcards from OvernightPrints.com
In case you guys felt like you needed a design outlet that doesn't involve the web, OvernightPrints.com is offering
100 FREE Postcards (4"x6").
Coupon code: 100NOVCP. Expires in 5 days from this post so get to it!
Monday, November 10, 2008
Those who don't learn from history...
Someone asking for a cached version of an old site design today reminded me of the existence of The Wayback Machine:
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php.
In case you're unfamiliar, it essentially allows you to browse historical versions of any site, back to 1996! While we're unlikely to accidentally repeat a design from ten years ago, it's still pretty cool to track the evolution of site designs over time. Enjoy.
Friday, November 7, 2008
"Email will be rockin' in 2009" - yesmail
Besides Yesmail preaching to the choir last week about best practices for this new thing called "email", I came across an ingenius idea for newsletter content.
In How Magazine's recent newsletter (from Oct 20th), they included content from their forums (area highlighted in pink in the snapshot below). It's a great way to show readers that we actually care and to further motivate people to continue frequenting and populating the forum.
Check out the attached image and let me know what you guys think. Also, feel free to share any other ideas for content to toss into our newsletters that would make it "rockin' in 2009".
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Typography and the Web
So recently Jennie mentioned she wants us to use more typography skills when it comes to designing sites. I feel like typography is sometimes overlooked on the web. I came across this article that showcases sites where the only real design is through type. Pretty interesting.
25+ Sites that Use Typography As The Only Design Element
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
10 Easy Steps to Become a Better Web Designer
I agree with
this article completely. We take a lot of these for granted but it's nice to have this as a reminder every once in awhile.
Wall Street Journal Redesigned... Crit Away
So during the hectic election, I was perusing some of the news sites and came upon Wall Street Journal (
WSJ.com) and guess what, they just redesigned. Let me know what you guys think.
Does it retain it's previous brand? How's your user experience? Are you an existing subscriber? What are your thoughts?
Crits away!
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Contracting Business Homepage
