Studioblog (n): a blog by Studiobanks about design, marketing, internet, business, Charlotte and more.

QBN Sessions

Robbie 0 Comments

QBN recently held their first QBN Sessions lecture at The Getty Center in Los Angeles. The event brought together 12 preeminent designers, artists, photographers and film makers to speak about their creative process. They've just posted videos from the event on YouTube, including clips of Shepard Fairey, Michael Muller and Joshua Davis. Moreover, there's plenty of additional photos on Flickr. It's good to see QBN doing it up right and saturating all the outlets. In case QBN sounds familiar, they are the group behind Newstoday.

The New AAF Charlotte

Robbie 1 Comments

We recently launched the new AAF Charlotte website to coincide with the beginning of their new season and mark the name change from Charlotte Ad Club to AAF Charlotte. The new site better organizes the group's content as well as adds some new features, including member profiles, company pages and a vendor search. Despite the addition of profiles, this isn't an attempt to create yet another social network. Try to think of it more as an advertising resource for the Charlotte region, as well as a way to keep up with AAF Charlotte happenings. Basically, if you work in an industry that deals directly or indirectly with advertising, you might want to look into joining AAF Charlotte.

MTV Hats

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With the launch of their new, hyrid XHTML/Flash website, MTV kicked off a new project called MTV Hats (aka Header Art Treatments). With some flexibility in the layout, due in part to templates from Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits, MTV is able to accept, approve and drop a variety of header artwork from artists and designers into rotation on mtv.com. Anyone that has ever watched MTV knows they've applied many different treatments to their logo over the years, so this project is not surprising. It is, however, very refreshing for the MTV Design Team to figure out a way to pull more designers and artists into their community. The MTV Design Team says it best though:

We love our logo. For real, we wanna take it out for an expensive candlelit dinner... TWO appetizers. Since MTV's inception in 1981 our brand's been the subject of countless artist interpretations by some of the world's most beautifully warped minds. We plan to keep that spirit alive with the new mtv.com and push it to the next level... YOU.

Google Analytics Redesign

Robbie 3 Comments

Early last month, Google launched a redesign and restructuring of their stats service, Google Analytics. The new look is the combination of Urchin, the acquistion that birthed Analytics, and Measure Map. Jeffrey Veen, formerly of Adaptive Path/Measure Map, lead the design team responsible for the complete rehaul. The focus was to take the daunting task of navigating the immense amount of detail in Analytics and make it more intuitive. Now, I'm not going to list all of the new features here (there are many lists already out there). The only point I want to make is to say that the Google Analytics redesign was successful, in my book. It's inspirational to see that a small team can take the amount of information generated by something as complicated as web stats and make it effortless, digestible and visually appealing. If anything, that success echoes the fundamental goals of design.

Now they just need to do something about that account home page!

HTML 5 vs XHTML 2

Robbie 0 Comments

If you've noticed references to HTML 5 or XHTML 2 pop up around the web and aren't aware of the differences between the two, then be sure to read "HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web" over at Digital Web Magazine.

The article lays out the pros and cons and the general arguments for each language. As you'll read, there's quite a lot in the pipe as far as updates to the functionality of forms, basic client-side APIs and the structure of markup.

Some additional reading:
The future of HTML, Part 1: WHATWG
The future of HTML, Part 2: XHTML 2.0

We Love The Avett Brothers

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The Avett Brothers, hailing from Charlotte (rather Concord/Mt. Pleasant), just released their new album Emotionalism on May 15th. A few of us made it down to their in-store at Manifest this past Tuesday. According to their management, around 700 people passed through the store during the event and 300 copies of the album were sold. All in all, they played 13 songs and mingled with double the attendance of their last in-store there in 2004.

If that wasn't enough, the guys recently performed "Paranoia in Bb Major" on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Videos of the performance have mostly been deleted from YouTube by NBC, but we found one!

Microsoft Continues to be an Inglorious Copycat

Robbie 0 Comments

Not that most of us who deal with web design don't already feel Microsoft to be the leading cause of daily frustration, but those guys continue to come up with new ways to infuriate our industry. If it's not lack of standards support in Internet Explorer 6, it's the completely-avoidable Eolas update last year.

The latest "next generation" product from the folks in Redmond goes by the name of Silverlight. One of the intentions for this proprietary, web-based runtime is takeover a bit of the Flash/Flex market from Adobe. While some healthy competition is good for innovation, Microsoft is just playing follow-the-leader yet again. The name Silverlight even invokes the same feeling as Flash. Moreover, one of the development tools for animation in Silverlight, Expression Blend, was code-named "Sparkle." The scariest thought is that designers or developers might actually have to rely on Microsoft applications for creative work.

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The New AIGA.org CMS

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Designer Naz Hamid recently posted some screens of the new AIGA.org content management system (CMS) on his website Weight Shift. It's a page-based publishing system, which differentiates it from our own record-based Toolbox CMS. But, I'm not trying to pitch you on our Toolbox.

The lesson here is not to neglect the visual appearance of a CMS. Developers are usually great at what they do, but they are not designers. AIGA realized they were going to be spending a lot of time maintaining AIGA.org's content using that interface. Wisely, they contracted separate design teams to build the front-end and back-end for their newly redesign site and then handed those designs off to development teams. Hamid's informed choices on the layout not only make the site's content and structure easy to update and understand, but it gives AIGA something nice to look at while they do it.

The Web Design Survey, 2007

Robbie 0 Comments

Do you make websites? If the answer is yes, be sure to go take The Web Design Survey 2007 from A List Apart. The goal of the survey is "to increase knowledge of web design and boost respect for the profession."

ExpressionEngine Redesign

Robbie 0 Comments

Last month, Digital Web Magazine published an article about the redesign of EllisLab’s ExpressionEngine site by 31Three. In the article, Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain, the man behind 31Three, walks through an abridged version of his entire design process. From a change in work environment to wireframing to design exploration, Bennett-Chamberlain provides some great insights for designers to reference and apply to their own process. As evident from the finished product, the attention to detail put into the project is admirable. The gist of "It Doesn’t End Here," the closing remarks, is one of the most important ideas contained in the article.

In that regard, a website isn’t a static design, and once it launches, it’s not mine anymore—it’s a living, breathing entity that will change as others interact with it, and as it grows.

Designers and clients alike would be better for making Bennett-Chamberlain's sentiment their mantra; our work is never done. Not only are projects that continually change and grow more successful, but they end up staying relevant longer and out of that undead state too many projects slip into.