Control Shift Blog

New and major Key Experience Team releases!

Peter Rivera — 2008-07-03T10:59:00+00:00

Filed under: advertising and promotion, beautiful things, flash

The team has just refreshed our AIR-based Top 100 Video widget with a great new Intel-sponsored skin. Download the latest version to apply a groovy new Intel desktop to your computer. To get to the desktop file click the in-stream Intel ads that appear at the bottom of the videos. Several performance improvements were also made to this release.

As if that were not enough: the FUZE "unbreakable" campaign microsite has just launched within AOL Music. Conceived in a brainstorm with Coke's online media agency, this advertiser program shows just how advantageous it can be to wrap great programming around a rich advertiser experience. The Flash site was built by the development team within two weeks (!), after a design gestation period of approximately three weeks (that is concept to sketch to approved design). We were fortunate in that the work was accepted by the clients very early in the process. They were great partners in that regard and helped us make the deadline by expediting approvals and empowering the AOL team to make it happen.

Check out the hammer and try to find the hidden clues :-)

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PicLens makes web media a truly immersive consumer experience

Peter Rivera — 2008-07-02T09:51:00+00:00

Filed under: aesthetics, beautiful things, information design, inspiration, photography, product design, reviews, technologies, "wish I had done that"

For those of us that think visually and like to click on pictures (ok, that's most of us btw), PicLens is a pretty amazing app that brings the Web to life as a visual medium. Just download the extension and PicLens turns image and video feeds from top sources into an interactive "wall of media" that animates smoothly across your screen. So smoothly, in fact, that you may actually get motion sickness playing with it (like I did).

Like most interactive things it really has to be experienced to be appreciated. If you have ever felt that image or video search should be more compelling than this one is certainly for you. I recommend everyone on my team try it out. Though if you haven't wanted a more visual, interactive Internet than this plug-in will probably go into the "cool things" bookmark graveyard you never go back to visit. I do believe the new "Shop Amazon" feature is a stretch though.

Speaking as the General Manager of PIXCETERA, this one is a tough act to follow I must admit.

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Keep Your Web Design Skills Sharp

Jason Cranford Teague — 2008-07-01T12:01:00+00:00

Filed under: conferences and events, CSS design, culture of design, AOL design standards, careers

The Web is always changing and so is Web Design. Whether you just got out of design school or have been pushing pixels for decades, there's always something new to learn.

Every other Thursday, AOL presents speakers who will help you stay on the cutting edge of your profession, hone your skills, understand industry best practices and keep you ahead of the competition. We'll meet 12PM-1:30PM on alternating Thursdays in Dulles and New York to hear about new and advanced topics in Web design.

As a special bonus, the first session comes with lunch provided free! Expand your knowledge of Web Typography and fill your stomach! Who could pass that up?

If you plan to attend, please RSVP Jason Cranford Teague (j.cranfordteague@corp.aol.com) at least 24 hours in advance of the meet-up.

Click "Read More" for session dates and descriptions.
Web Typography: Beyond Arial and Times and Georgia
10 July 2008 - Dulles, Va
17 July 2008 - New York, NY
The type face you use says as much to your audience as the actual words on the page, but, up to now, Web designers have had an extremely limited palette of fonts to choose from. All design is about overcoming the limitations of the medium, and Web design is no different. Learn how to use fluid typography, browser-safe fonts, and downloadable fonts to create robust typography without having to resort to type in images or Adobe Flash.

Web Graphics: Transparent Images in Web Design
24 July 2008 - Dulles, Va
07 August 2008 - New York, NY
Most designers have given up on using transparent images in their Web designs. GIF only supports colors being on or off, and JPEG doesn't support any transparency at all. Of course, the PNG format supports alpha channels, but everyone knows that they don't work in Internet Explorer 6, right? Actually, they do just fine if you know a few simple tricks to turn on the transparency. Learn the tricks of using PNG and how to begin incorporating transparent visual elements in your Web pages to open a whole new world of design possibilities.

Web Production: Improve Your Web Design Workflow with Photoshop
14 August 2008 - Dulles, Va
21 August 2008 - New York, NY
Are you taking full advantage of the new features for Web designers in Adobe Photoshop? If you are not using Smart Objects, Layer Comps, and Custom Workspaces, then you are doing things the hard way. Learn how to substantially improve your work flow, increase consistency, and cut hours off of design time for a project by using a few simple techniques.

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Make Monday "Fresh Perspective" Day

Peter Rivera — 2008-06-27T18:17:00+00:00

Filed under: culture of design, inspiration

So what am I getting at here? Basically, we all need to shake it up sometimes and get different stimulus going to remain creative and fresh. Fight brain rust, you know? Try some of the following methods to see things from a new and different perspective and supercharge your innate sense of creativity.

Click "read more" to, um, read more.
1. Try a different route to get to your job. Don't follow the same old path. For example, go an extra subway stop and walk back. Or plan a new route that exposes you to new streets, new buildings, new inputs. You may be a few minutes late, but you also may be twice as jazzed with ideas when you get there.

2. Ask a child's opinion on something. Kids see the world without all the gunk you've built up your entire life. To them, things are far more clear. If you're designing something show it to a kid. They may say "I don't get it." But you also may get some gems like "it could use more elephants", or "the colors look like a bathroom", or "That's lame". This may just put you back in touch with your calcified sense of wonder and inner-candor.

3. Combine the two most absurd ideas you can and see what happens. "Science Fiction and Westerns" is one of my favorites. I always wanted to write a screenplay in these mashed-up genres as a personal challenge (but, alas, never did). Would the results be foul? Possibly. But I just found out "Cowboys and Aliens" was just greenlit so somebody got away with it (with Robert Downey Jr, no less!). Anyway, the point is that combining seemingly disparate ideas is the source of innovation. Start mashing up the absurd! Be stoopid. New killer ideas will be spawned.

4. Do something you normally criticize. If you don't lke sports, go to a baseball game. If you hate romantic comedies with Cameron Diaz, watch one. Strike up a conversation with someone you think is lame. You may have all of your initial feelings validated. Or you may expose yourself to a whole new world. Creativity ensues.

5. SIgn up at some cool new Web 2.0 website and really explore it top to bottom with a critical eye. Some won't take you very long. But looking at a competitive site thoroughly may trigger your competitive streak and get you revving on how it can be improved. And before you know it you are in creative mode. EVERYTHING, can be improved to the point where it doesn't even resemble what you originally started riffing off of in the first place. Folks, you may have heard that there are no new ideas. Sorry to type this but it's kind of true. Innovations build on the past and do not spring whole cloth out of the ether. But there are ways of reinventing old ideas for the first time (!). If that makes any sense.

Got a good tip to shake yourself out of automatic pilot and see things from a different perspective? Bring 'em on! Comments box below.

And, ok, any day of the week can be Fresh Perspective Day. But it is always best to attach some kind of date to things or otherwise they have a tendency to drift.

Ideas rule.

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Increasing usage through stunning experience design

Allison Bucchere — 2008-06-27T16:49:00+00:00

Filed under: conferences and events, information design, inspiration, strategy

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.

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101 Photoshop Tips in 5 minutes

Peter Rivera — 2008-06-25T11:43:00+00:00

Filed under: culture of design, video, weird web

This is kind of funny... and surprisingly useful as a reminder of some techniques that were getting a bit rusty for me. Not much more introduction is needed. Here it is. Thanks to Stephen Lenz for the forward...

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Wordle bundles, bundling words

Rachel Been — 2008-06-23T23:41:00+00:00

Filed under: beautiful things, content, culture of design, information design, product design, weird web

Wordle is poetry design meets thrift store shopping. Take a bundle of words, a quote, a shopping list, a love letter gone awry, and ingest the sentences into wordle. Your words are regurgitated as a well designed and seemingly organized thought cloud. Wordle randomly mixes and matches font, layout, color, language, and your input, into a gallery piece or a printable design.

I started creating one a day, documenting my daily food intake. That guilty bag of blue M&M's suddenly became sandwiched between coffee and asparagus and perpendicular to turkey instead of hanging over my head.

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Stitch multi-media into any Website on-the-fly with Apture

Peter Rivera — 2008-06-23T21:30:00+00:00

Filed under: content, information design, product design, reviews, strategy, syndication, technologies, usability, video, web development, "wish I had done that"

Another company with a name that looks like a typo.

Apture is a killer new publishing application that lets you hook interactive multi-media modules from the Web onto your editorial. It has to be experienced to be really understood, so, for example, if you were writing a blogpost on the Aurora Borealis and wanted to provide definitions, pictures, and video from top sources like Wikipedia and YouTube, you could do so with just a couple of clicks. And then your audience gets to experience multi-media and related content on your website.

It's rare I say "wow" these days since I'm steeped in the Web all the time, but I have to say that this particular capability is stunning in its implications. Now ANYONE can have a site that is supported by some of the Web's top content providers (the Web 2.0 ones, that is).

Here are some examples of media stitched into a sentence (overdone for effect):
"The Summer's reigning blockbuster is still Iron Man, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hot on it's heels. Me, I'm now rooting for The Incredible Hulk. And Will Smith's Hancock has yet to take a bow."

OK, the sentence is bad, but the multimedia in-page is really differentiating. Only real flaw is if there is no great content on any of those properties accessible within the application. For this type of interactive plug-and-play experience I can sure live with that.

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Twitter For Dummies

Peter Rivera — 2008-06-23T10:02:00+00:00

Filed under: culture of design, information design, strategy, video

I love this little video expressing the value of twitter as "real life". It's simple communication around a not-so-simple topic for many. Clicking more at the end of this video will take you into a primer on "social networking". Hey, not that most people reading these words need this type of thing, but the simple cut and paste paper approach is really engaging as tutorial. And sometimes we just need a reminder that not everyone lives and breathes this stuff like we do. Thanks for Geno Yoham for passing it on.

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Men's Fitness launches

Allison Bucchere — 2008-06-21T00:52:00+00:00

Filed under: aesthetics, CSS design, identity design, inspiration

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.

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Zen and the Art of Presentation

Jason Cranford Teague — 2008-06-19T11:34:00+00:00

Filed under: aesthetics, beautiful things, conferences and events, culture of design, information design

Last week at the Voices That Matter Conference, I was privaleged to attend a great presentation on how to give great presentations. Garr Reynolds, the author of Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, wowed the crowd by creating a compelling and informative presentation using Power Point (actually he was using Keynote, but Power-Point has become the "Band-Aid" of slide software). Unlike other information design experts (ie. Edward Tufte), Garr has a lot of hope for Power-point presentations, but with a few helpful suggestions (paraphrased here):

Keep it Simple. As Garr taught us to say in Japanese, "Simplicity is not simple". We naturally want to embellish our slides to show off how much we know, but this invariably ends up clouding the message. Keep it to only one or two points per slide, make them large, and elaborate in your speech not in your slides.
What's your point? Too many presentations either do not know the conclusion they are trying to reach or try to make too many points. Know what the goal of your presentation is and how all of your points are connected.
Slides are not handouts. If your slides can say everything you can, then why are you up there talking? Slides should not be able to stand alone, but should only reinforce of what you are saying. Instead of your entire deck, give your audience a simple hand out a few pages in length that summarizes your main points and provide links to more information and resources.
Have fun. There is nothing more boring and uncomfortable to an audience than watching a boring and uncomfortable speaker. You are not a stand-up comic, but try not to act like you are delivering a eulogy either. Think about how your presentation flows from slide to slide.

After the presentation, I picked up a copy of Garr's book, and I can highly recommend you read it. It's not just for public speakers, but for anyone in information design. His principals are equally applicable to presenting information in print, video, and Web design. And it's a fun read too!

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A natural history of the "Cards on the Table" module

Peter Rivera — 2008-06-17T20:28:00+00:00

Filed under: information design, strategy, AOL design standards

Since our website redesigns last year, our main pages have been re-fitted with a promotional module called "Cards on the Table" (or "CoTT" for short). This was a replacement for the classic "Dynamic Lead" module (the usual giant animated picture with text that seems ubiquitous on programming websites across the Web). I based the design on the simple notion that quickly exposing a site's value at the top of the page was a good thing for a time-starved audience. Since users don't have time for animations and rarely use controls to see more promotions, we had to come up with a new strategy to reach an audience skeptical that our sites had value. This post explains the design challenge of the new dynamic lead from a variety of angles and the outcomes.

please click "read more" for the goods...
First let's take a look back on the prior design (see major portals including our own). The form factor of the DL has always been driven by a couple of print-based assumptions which I feel are wrong for the Web.

The major notion is that editors always know what is good for us and will PUT THAT ITEM FIRST. This is a key assumption that drives editorial and art direction teams in almost all realms of publishing and media. It is top-down. It is reinforced by newspapers and TV every day as "the lead story", the "cover story". In print it actually works out pretty well (or at least it used to). Some people need to be told what is most important, the reasoning goes and this is, of coarse, true. When translated visually you wind up with big juicy promos, or "hero shots" on a Web page shouting "this is what you should care about!".

The richer manifestations of this approach have nice animation, are Flash-based, and, in themselves, are quite nice designs. Tabs or other navigation devices allow the user to jump-cut to any of the promotions underneath. We've done a lot of variations on this theme in the past as have our competitors.

As we embarked on our redesigns in mid-2006, I had to ask: "Is everyone interested in the same lead story?" The answer, obviously, is of course "no". The next postulate was: "Does anyone have time to click around this thing and find something of interest?" Again, the answer is no when you step back and put yourselves in the shoes of consumers.

The more we sketched, the more that the idea that someone was going to wait around 8 seconds to see what promotion came up next made less and less sense to me. Users divine the value of a web page in a micro-second--there is a lot of competition for their attention. And our own user research shows that when content or utility is hidden behind tabs or other interface devices, usage plummets on the components that are hidden.

Also, a LOT of effort was going into the writing and design of promotions that many people would never actually see. Some designs for panels were going back and forth between designers and editors 4 or 5 times before they were deemed "right". The design and photo teams in particular were screaming for relief. So, ease of maintenance had to be a business factor of the re-design as well. That led to the standard photo sizes and the non-layering of text and image for ease of publishing. A panel could now be easily created in a matter of minutes--as opposed to the hours it required before. Great!

But design insights are not always based on objective data alone. Firsthand observation and experience are critical as well. In my own corner, as a fan of music, I was starting to dislike the AOL Music site because it was always promoting teen pop acts. Didn't the site have more to offer outside the base? Couldn't we cater to a wider variety of musical tastes at first glance? Why did I have to hunt around for the cool stuff? The content was there, it was just buried beneath the surface rarely to be found. To attract a new audience on the Web we had to be about more that one programming idea. One shot to get it right. Would you want to bank all of that on one picture of Britney Spears?

So why THREE exposed in the solution? Well, two is not enough to establish a pattern. And two is just not enough to convey you have a lot of content on your site. Three panels communicates to the user the breadth and depth of what you have for them and increases the odds that you have a match to their interests. Three promos also visually anchor the page by creating enough mass to attract the eye. On a related note, the aol.com team did a test with just two promotions in the DL and it failed to delight users. Three it became as a standard in programming.

How have they done? Very well. In fact it is the standard module on most all programming mains and many hubs.

Unfortunately, as successful as all of the sites we redesigned have been it is hard to isolate the leads effectively until true A/B testing can happen on the channel level (coming soon). And the redesign of the Cards on the Table promotional module did not happen in a vacuum. We have to remember that we simultaneously added more prominent search, introduced left hand navigation, a stronger right rail of content and cross-linking, standard global navigation, and new cross promotion in the footers.

Advancing on the design, a new release comes out this month that allows the programming teams to have a "hero shot" again as a larger picture that cuts across two of the three panels. It will be used with discretion to "break through" on bigger stories that need more heat or traffic and will help to communicate something is extremely special (Grammies, Superbowl, Oscars, etc.)

Recently, I was surprised to see yahoo! adopt the design on their women's site, shine. Almost to a pixel I couldn't tell the difference with our own module. Cool (well, sort of). Nice to be copied now and then.

Well, that's a lot to convey I realize. Just wanted to get it all down. We're already working on the next generation of it now (and the 2.0 version is not even out yet!). But that's the biz.

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MySpace redesign is almost upon us...

Peter Rivera — 2008-06-14T15:44:00+00:00

Filed under: culture of design

I just reviewed the screenshots on USAToday and I look forward to checking it out next week. Always lots to learn when a major site does a re-do (117 million unique visitors can't be wrong, right?). That said, going through the gallery of screens available at this link, I am a bit...underwhelmed. Not sure what I was expecting, but the world's ugliest website (and, famously, one of the most successful) apparently did not really want to do a redesign as much as add a bunch of new features. That's cool, but the design itself is still wanting and really doesn't communicate "redesign" in my view. Again, excited to click around and get a sense of the new site. Always dangerous to throw rocks in this business as we ourselves have to put out redesigns that occasionally get trounced.

Obviously, their team needs to get ready for tons of complaints and hate mail, even regarding the improvements. That's just the way it is when you try to improve life for your users. The familiar is sometimes more powerful than a superior solution. You just have to have the courage to get through the initial freak out of the faithful. On the other side of the hill is probably (and hopefully) a larger audience. As we work on the next generations of AOL Programming, this factor always rings true in our work and our results.

Good luck guys!

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"Design For the Viewer" for Social App & Widget Conversion

Grant Cerny — 2008-06-12T21:50:00+00:00

Filed under: conferences and events, information design, product design, syndication

At this week's "Graphing Social Patterns" conference in Washington D.C., attendees perched on ends of seats, focused on gleaning hints or tricks or otherwise silver bullets to turbo-boost their web properties' social syndication quota.

"Design for the Viewer," advised a panelist.

"Not just the user. Design for the Viewer."

Focusing on the "Viewer" rather than the user in this context means to "make your widget noticeable." Utilize your arsenal of brand and creative design to grab the user's attention, quickly. As Chris Anderson recently observed, in the "attention economy," a person's time actually is money and gaining even a split-second of it will commensurately enable monetization opportunity.

Make your placements visually vocal. Make them shout "This Thing is Grabbable!" or "This Thing Does Something With Facebook!" or "Like MySpace? You'll Like This Too, Then!" Images move faster to cognitive recognition and association. Images are sexy, free-tv-bundled FIOS where text is generic dial-up.

"Grabbability" - the ability to be taken and embedded elsewhere - was noted as a function without standard iconography and widely misunderstood or plain missed by the target audience. Separately, the Facebook logo (and by extension other logos with a brand afterimage) was cited as an element which "speaks to" Facebook users, and increases clickthrough by a multiple.

Text alone will not suffice to evoke the concept of intersite portability - at least not within the split-seconds available before whimsy or flashing hamsters distract. Often, site owners utilize text to describe a social app's value, and the text gets lost in a quick scan with other page text. To gain notice from attention-lacking social surfers, employ something visual, persistent, and relevant to the viewer's experiences or affiliations offsite.

The inference drawn is to design a system of visual prompts or cues (suggested to me earlier by John Kilpatrick) for what page elements refer to activities a Viewer may carry on to other favorite web destinations. And then, one will hope, back again.

Web Safe Fonts: Beta

Jason Cranford Teague — 2008-06-10T13:42:00+00:00

Filed under: conferences and events, CSS design, inspiration, web standards

This week I'll be at the Voices That matter Conference in Nashville, TN speaking on the topic of Web typography, but I wanted to give everybody at AOL a little preview of the center-piece of my presentation: Web Safe Fonts.

Web typography is pretty much synonymous with limitations. Limited controls, limited styles, but, most importantly, limited font-family choices. The first of these limitations will require changes in the browsers, however, there are a surprisingly large number of fonts to choose from, but only if you are willing to work with a more fluid typography. Most designers are familiar with the 11 "Core Web Fonts" that are industry standards. Primarily, we will use Arial (or Helvetica), Times New Roman (or just Times), and Georgia has become popular in the last few years. You will occasionally see Verdana and Trebuchet MS tried, but these are not the most elegant looking of fonts. We use these fonts because we know that they are pre-installed on most computers. Yet most computers will also have many other fonts pre-installed on them, either by the operating system or by specific applications.

I have created a list of "Web Safe Fonts" showing fonts pre-installed on Windows and Mac as well as fonts installed by iLife on the Mac (which is standard on all Macs) and Microsoft Office for both Mac and PC. Although not all of these fonts will be of general use, it does balloon the list of reliable fonts from 11 to around 200. To make selection easier, I have also indicated which OS the font is pre-installed for, ranked each font on a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1 for fonts almost certain to be installed and 5 for fonts unlikely to be installed), and the source of the font.

Let me know what you think of the list, and if you spot any fonts that should be or should not be in it. The site is in "Beta" while I work on vetting the list and adding functionality (like the ability to sort the list), so any constructive criticism would be most appreciated.

View the Web Safe Fonts >>

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TopCoder contest for AOL News

Peter Rivera — 2008-06-10T12:59:00+00:00

Filed under: culture of design, process, syndication, technologies, web development

Jonathan Meyers, the Program Manager for AOL News, passed on this great tip that we have posted an open competition cash-reward for an Elections experience. You can see it in the screen shot above at the bottom. All of the basic requirements are listing on the page.

For the uninitiated, TopCoder Studio is "the meeting place for clients who need creative work done and creative people looking to compete for that work." Nice to see an AOL project posted in an open marketplace like this.

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The hot and not-so-hot...

Peter Rivera — 2008-06-09T12:48:00+00:00

Filed under: culture of design, inspiration, reviews

My current picks from the major food groups of media: MUSIC, GAMING, PUBLISHING, and MOVIES. If there's anything good on TV I may include that as well. Since websites get covered here all the time, I'm just going to skip over those.

This set of selections is totally subjective, not endorsed by AOL, slightly skewed toward design, and, ultimately, pointless in nature.

warner bros.SPEED RACER still lingers pleasantly in the memory. Sure, Iron Man is the better film, but I feel this one got an incredibly bad rap from the press eager to have first blood in the Summer movie season. On IMAX, it was incredible and visually AWE-INSPIRING. An incredible design effort went into this film. Where Indiana Jones was lazy as heck, this big shaggy movie tries its heart out. The Oscar for Art Direction? Too bad everyone will be too hung up on the box office to give credit where it is due. A shame overall.

DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE"S new album Narrow Stairs is a musical revelation and another in a string of well-crafted and heartbreaking releases by the band. The lyrics evoke Paul Simon at his destitute and shattered-relationship best-- beautiful word-smithing that resonates and effortlessly rises above pop music cliches. When I am jamming on a Keynote presentation or tooling about with my photos on flickr, this is the current soundtrack of my nights and weekends.

NINJA GAIDEN 2 is my gaming poison of choice this month. I have been waiting for this game for four or five months. Renowned as the most difficult platform game on the market since 2004, I am proud to say I have completed the first game all the way through and am on Level 3 of this blazing sequel. It's bloody, it's pointless, it's infantile, but after a long day of work there's nothing like wall-running over a moat of lava or slaying the minions of Hell to put things in perspective.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, is Malcom Gladwell's next book after the excellent "The Tipping Point", and was my commuting read this month. I know it came out two years ago, but it is a great read relative to strategy and design in that it tries to scientifically explain intuition and that feeling you can get about things at first glance. The book explores why that feeling is usually right on and often pummeled to death by excessive amounts of data pulled in to validate decisions (otherwise known as "analysis paralysis"). Illuminating. I wanted to send a copy to my Mom and say "you see? All those years you accused me of not thinking!? That was TIME WELL SPENT!!!"

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Current Logo Trends

Allison Bucchere — 2008-06-08T16:36:00+00:00

Filed under: aesthetics, identity design, illustration, inspiration, reviews

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

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Writing a Great Creative Brief

Peter Rivera — 2008-06-06T10:16:00+00:00

Filed under: culture of design, process, product design, strategy, AOL design standards

In AOL Programming we have a document that should be used at kickoff meetings to align multi-disciplinary teams to the mission at hand. It is our take on the classic agency document called a creative brief. Briefs serve the purpose of aligning team members around core strategic principles without inhibiting their creativity in finding a solution.

Click "read more" for my take on the Creative Brief.
What you want to accomplish with a brief is to establish the problem the team is committed to solve and to INSPIRE them to solve it. If you feel you already know the solution before you begin, you're most likely not tapping into the potential of your team and inspiring them to ownership. Focus on stating the problem; then see what happens in the solutions.

Our brief asks several questions that elicit thinking and information gathering on the part of the author/leader. Leaving areas blank says a couple of things: as the leader writing the brief you have no idea what the answer is (dangerous) and/or you have no unique insights into the problem (even worse). Cutting and pasting from prior briefs is fair in some cases, but if there is no unique insight in the brief, don't expect it from the work. This all starts upstream with the author.

At the end of this post is a list of the questions in our brief template, updated this past January to reflect our new process. There are logical questions to help mitigate risk--hard lessons learned when someone doesn't ask "what is driving the date?", or "what assets may we use?", or "what partners are involved?". But I want to focus on what actually makes a brief great and differentiates it from a requirements document. Here is the first:

1. consumer insight.

A product or creative initiative should be driven by solving unmet consumer needs. If the brief does not paint a picture of the end user and what will motivate someone to habituate to the website then the work will be poor or mediocre almost every time. A consumer insight is not simply demographic data, though that is important in itself. Age groups, or income brackets are fine to have in a brief. However, that is not a motivation to problem solving. What makes a GREAT brief is an insight that is apparent from the data. What do you truly know about your audience; capture it here.

How are users finding you in their daily routine?, where do they go afterward?, what keeps them up at night?, what trends in other areas of their life are bearing down on them? What do they consider important in life? A good brief does not try to answer all questions, and every solution is different, but do your best to find an angle that gets your team inside the mind of the consumer's motivations, not your own.

For a website for Michelin the insight came from first hand observation at the point of sale. Some team members went to a tire store to watch transactions with customers (an exciting day I imagine). Even if the customer asked for a Michelin tire, they observed, the salesperson talked them out of it and actively sell them a cheaper brand! This observation led to a solution that allowed the consumer to print a one-sheet off the website to counter a salesperson's claims against the purchase of the Michelin tires.

This idea can only come from putting yourself in the customer's shoes and truly having insight into the problem.

2. a single driving idea.

In advertising this is the "single-minded message" that permeates all decision-making (hopefully). It manifests itself as great, focused creative and a central brand proposition (site or function in our case). The user is not overwhelmed by the solution, but understands instantly what it is the that team is trying to convey throughout the total experience.

Creative that is muddled or barely functional is usually based on a lack of focus and decision-making around what is the single most important aspect of the solution. Generally, this comes about when team members want to hedge their bets and throw it all in: "double-down". Or "triple-down". This is not only costly to produce but simply not effective. Simplicity sells.

3. it is a brief, keep it short

No extra points in my view for forcing a creative or technical team to read seven pages of unedited cut and paste from Forrester reports. If you have reports, share them as separate supportive info. Kitchen sink briefs are, sadly, not read. It shows in the work in the end. Team confusion. Excessive, aimless reviews. Sound familiar? Go for haiku.

That's it for now (keeping it brief!). So much more can be said about writing a great brief. As we create more and more customer-centric and yet advertiser-friendly solutions in AOL Programming, it will become especially critical to speak in the language of a killer brief.

And remember, if you are in a position to write a brief: inspire, as opposed to educate.

APPENDIX: OUR CREATIVE BRIEF 2.0

Overview

Elevator pitch: State the basic idea and the project objectives.

Consumer insights: Provide helpful user research or traffic/feedback data that will guide the team through the assignment, but more importantly, what does it mean?

Success: How will the success of the overall program be judged? How will management measure the team's success in delivering?

Deadlines: When is the project expected to go live and what is the reason driving the date? (examples: live event, peak season for commerce, holiday promo or marketing blitz tie-in, etc)

Direction

Tone and Voice: What feelings or impressions should the visual design and copy evoke?

Assets: Are there any unique assets we can or should leverage?

Partners: Are there any partners on this project? Have any deals been signed that could influence the content or experience?

Branding: Is designing the program's identity part of the objective? Are there specific MMX factors for rolling up page views? Are there partner companies to represent?

Marketing & Syndication: How do you plan to promote the experience?

High-level Requirements: Keeping it simple, list expected features and functionality. Brainstorm with peers in other groups.

Immediate next steps...
o Alert the sales integration team to the brief.
o Work with the design team to sketch out some low-resolution ideas for approval.
o Work with Project Management to lock resources.
o Get to a final or interim schedule in place (depends on scope of engagement).
o "Greenlight" in weekly executive reviews.

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Interesting "Visual Collage" product coming soon...

Peter Rivera — 2008-06-05T10:52:00+00:00

Filed under: aesthetics, beautiful things, flash, information design, inspiration, technologies, usability, "wish I had done that"

Well, considering that that experience has little to do with words, I'll just say "check it out"...

But, if you like to read, the site says: "VUVOX is excited about the coming introduction of a new personal expression platform - called COLLAGE. This dynamic media creation suite will enable everyone to easily turn their photos, videos, text and audio clips into interactive story panoramas." At last someone finally built one of those. Been waiting... Thanks to Jonathan Meyers for the tip.

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