Our interactive design team came together for several hours of inspiration and sketching over the past couple days. It was great to get our NY and VA offices together via video to take a big picture break. Several designers led the inspiration discussions (which I'll blog about later this week) and our UI Directors led our sketching exercise. They planned an interactive group exercise for us, freeing our ideas by eliminating the limitations of the computer while focusing on broad strokes without the noise and clutter of details.

Our exercise reminded me of this Core77 video of a design director at Converse sketching a summer sneaker concept in under five minutes -- it's pretty cool:



Core77 also recently launched this interesting sketching site. Check it out for more inspiration on varied techniques and conversations. How does sketching improve your creative process? What tools do you swear by?

We just released a yummy tool to help people find quick meal ideas on the go: http://iphone.food.aol.com

The design is simple and beautiful. Quickly search by cuisine/ingredient or browse our "Dinner Tonight" suggestions to find easy meals in seconds to make at home.

Never again will I wander through a supermarket feeling uninspired. This application changes the way we'll shop. Check it out today

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 this year's South By Southwest (SxSW) conference, I had the pleasure of listening to Kathy Sierra speak about how to create passionate users. She reminded us that we can make our audience fall in love with our experiences if we can make them feel great about themselves while on our sites.

Here are some of her suggestions on how to do this:

> Try to create human-ness in our designs. Recreate subtle, real-world elements -- like the iPhone screen scroll bounce -- in our animations to make things feel more alive.

> Read facial expressions during usability tests -- you have to see people's faces (not just read a report afterwards) because we naturally simulate other people's thoughts in our own brain. When we see a face frowning, we infer what that person is thinking. They're not articulating it, but we can see it and use those perceptions to influence our design strategies. (Click "Read More")