At a Digital Media conference I attended yesterday, the CMO of comScore shared the following fact:

Of the general mobile phone market with web browsing capabilities, only 14% actually browse the web on their phones. However 90% of iPhone users browse the web.

Wow.

Mobile phone companies have been pushing their web browsing phones into the marketplace for years, yet not until Apple created a better experience -- a better design -- could usage increase this tremendously.

We saw a similar result when we launched an updated navigational system in our StyleList site several months ago. Our traffic rose ten-fold the very day it launched.

As we evolve our web sites, let us take note. Success is not always about getting new features into the marketplace. Sometimes the greatest success can come from inventing new solutions to radically transform current features into even greater effortless and delightful experience.

Our Men's Fitness Center launched recently. Check it out to learn about calming foods and tips for getting your abs in shape. Perfect timing for the summer. Kudos to the design team for developing a strong creative in short order, tackling both the visual design and all of the CSS.

When the LogoLounge authors reviewed 27,000 logos for the compilation of their fourth book, they noticed several trends. On the whole, designers are moving away from artificial highlights/Photoshop tricks and moving toward a more clean + vivid era.

The image about showcases four of the trends -- foldover letterforms, fine line drawings, flourishes (which have been around for quite some time, so I'm surprised to see them still in play), and jawbreakers. See all the 2008 trends on logolounge.com

Oh, how many times have we wished that the value of the design profession was immediately understood by the world? Perhaps talented designers would have been engaged to craft an alternative to the "butterfly" ballots that confused voters in Florida in 2000. Perhaps our grandparents would have a better understanding of the work we do.

Well, now I have an opportunity to help. A few days ago, I was elected to the board of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). This professional association for design is committed to demonstrating the value of design to the public (amongst other important goals).

We have a responsibility to help society understand the power of design to make life easier, more understandable, and simply more delightful.

I look forward to representing AOL with those I encounter through my involvement with this leading trade association and to helping the world understand the value of design.

What would you like to see from the AIGA? Share your thoughts here and I'll be happy to bring them to the table to help give the important work we do every day more visibility.

When working with remote development teams in Bangalore with business hours that barely overlap with ours, we need to employ new techniques to enhance our communication to create greater efficiencies.

A Senior Art Director on our team regularly captures screenshots of issues that need to be updated and includes notes in a PDF for absolute clarity (see example above). These visual instructions are key to great communication.

Back in March, a group of us at SxSW had a conversation about some other ideas on how to maximize our remote collaborations:

> Try having designers brainstorm and sketch during the day and have developers craft a prototype overnight as an example of very agile development.

Click "read more" for more ideas >>

Apple gave our new Horoscopes iPhone application their coveted "Staff Pick" designation. Check it out to use our Love Match tool, Weekend Love Scope and to get an eerily accurate forecast of your day.

This week, we launched a redesign of ParentDish.com, a site that offers great insights on parenting topics.

The project was one of the best-run and most efficiently-produced design efforts I've seen. This is attributed to the team's focus on:

> clearly defining roles and responsibilities between our varied teams at the onset,
> crafting a solid creative strategy + moodboards with buy-in from all key stakeholders before developing design solutions,
> conceptualizing a significant suite of identity options, and
> fostering ongoing communication amongst the design and development teams to bring about a fresh take on a compelling site that helps raise kids of all ages.

Kudos to the team on their great work.

I'm thrilled to report that we have seen tremendous growth across our AOL Living sites over the past year with AOL Body increasing page views 760%, Food 319% and Home 475%. Overall, AOL Living is the third-highest-ranked women's network of sites on the web.

How did we do this? Our editorial team's strategy has been to offer practical, solution-oriented and highly relevant content to increase consumer engagement.

Our creative team has augmented this strategy by keeping a close eye on user behaviors/needs on our sites and competitively. We do in-depth user profiles and varied mood boards at the beginning of our projects to ensure every design decision we make is tied back to core user needs and the message we plan to share.

Our design team continues to dream up rich design experiences that reflect a welcoming, inclusive tone to resonate with and deeply engage our audience. And the results are stunning.

At the SxSW conference, I enjoyed hearing Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert share best practices for design critiques. Here are some key takeaways:

1) Introduce your varied concepts without interruption

2) Introduce the team discussion by asking "What works? What doesn't?"

> Keep the conversation moving, as the team may get hung up on details. At this early stage however, it's best to capture overall feelings instead of tiny details.

> Make sure each design is discussed adequately. Sometimes the team will say "that's the one!" and not chat about the other designs, but much can be learned from what is/isn't working in the other designs to help the refinement stage.

> Stay "problem-focused" as the team will likely share solutions instead since it's easier for them to articulate those. A typical "solution" is to take one thing from the first concept, another from the second and yet another from the third. Recognize that if you say "yeah, we can do/change that" during the review, it may screw up the design when you actually try it out. Say that a potential solution is something you'd like to explore, but you'll keep the actual problem in the forefront and will solve that in the refinement stage.

Click "read more" for more tips.

Our AOL Food team launched several new features last week, including a series of Get Cooking videos, enhanced search functionality and category sorting. These incremental improvements lay the groundwork for many great features that we have in our pipeline to launch in the coming months. It demonstrates the team's ability to break down large ideas into iterative launches to get great features in the hands of our audience quickly.