Robert Cooper
Interactive Creative Director, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
Robert leads the interactive design portion of Ogilvy’s 360° Digital Influence Group. With clients such as Ford, Snap-On tools, and Select Comfort Beds, Robert has experience in marrying the user experience of social media with well-known brands.

I left the DC Design Talks feeling creatively energized last Friday. It was great to see such an enthusiastic gathering of local, and not so local, design and developer talent in one place, rallying around the cause of creating great interactive, online solutions for their clients and maybe more importantly, each other.

Particularly interesting to me was Thomas Vander Wal’s presentation, “Coming to Terms with Sociality”. He described, with notable efficiency, what is going on out there behaviorally among the connected. Measuring the social engagement level of users for any project is important, and too frequently it is assumed that everyone is ready to dive in head first, sharing, contributing, and collaborating. There are many levels that lead to uber engagement, which Vander Wal classified as the “Heavy Contributing User”. If everyone was one of these, it would be easy to develop interactive initiatives for our clients that spread like a virus all over the planet. But as he outlined in his 45 minute, rapid-fire examination, there are a handful of stages or levels of engagement that should be considered when gauging your target audience for social media aptitude. These stages of engagement build upon each other.

There are those who have been on a social media evolutionary path where they’ve become more engaged as their sense of identity was enriched through sharing, following and connecting with others. On the other end, there are others that have not yet explored the tools, may only be aware of the surface of social media through peripheral exposure via traditional media. To create the most effective social online engagement for our clients we need to recognize the position on social media evolutionary scale of our audience.

All the presenters did a fabulous job. It was a great event, and as a DC native I’m glad to see such a groundswell of activity around our interactive design community.
Above is a detail from an art piece by Robert Cooper inspired by the Design Talks.

Abi Tropea
Designer, Belmont Inc
A designer who works primarily in print, Abi has a fantastic knack for screen printing and has a personal admiration of letterpress design.
“So, okay? Here tonight, we have, ah, apple and orange. We all different, but in the end, we all fruit.” (quoted lovingly from My Big Fat Greek Wedding)

There seems to be a common misconception that print and web design are vastly different disciplines. I plead guilty to pledging my allegiance to CMYK simply because I have more experince with ink on paper than pixels on screen.

Within the first few minutes of DC Design Talks, I was reminded of how much we have in common. Speaking on web typography, Samantha Warren of Viget Labs talked about the “balance of communication & expression under restraints.” That is the eternal challenge whether the concept is conceived in print, web or space design. Her call to “challenge yourself rather than focus on limitations” is necessary for great work regardless of the medium.

Nathan Curtis of Eight Shapes spoke on creating a component library. A topic I assumed would be irrelevant to my everyday work flow ended up being strangely familiar. Nathan’s advice on building a library parallels the way we build brands. It is collaborative, efficient, allows for open communication and effective implementation.

So apparently we are not so different after all, something I knew but needed to be reminded of. The creative process is the same. It still takes knowing when to follow the rules and when to push the limits. And if all else fails we’ll always have our common love of the grid.

Keith Muth
Front End Developer, L-3 Communications
A problem solver, Keith enjoys connecting front end design with back end programming. Keith graduated from JMU’s Special Media Arts and Design program and went on to make front-end development his full time career.

I’ve never had actual formal design training…unless you count people like Samantha showing me her favorite font books and describing her emotional attachment to DIN 1451 (because the “R” has a straight leg). That is exactly why I was excited about DC Design Talks. I saw the possibility for it to be a crash course in fundamentals of design and discover how I can get the same inspiration designers find everyday. As it turns out, you can learn a lot by leaving your boring code at home and listening to how designers create their ideas. Alex Giron’s presentation on “Finding Design Inspiration” gave really good tips on how to spark creativity by surrounding yourself with books, art work, or even games. I think he made a valid point that you need to make your environment fun in order to find creativity. It really made me think my work surroundings and the changes I could make.

While listening to the speakers, I realized that web designers are amazing User Interface experts (I used to think designers just made designs that looked good!). Their advice can make a website not only visually appealing, but functional as well. Patrick Haney’s presentation showed just how effective simplicity can be in web design. I thought his reference to Dan Cederholm’s principle of “suggesting the box” was a good design tip. You don’t need to always draw a box in your design, but merely suggest one is there using single lines. The “rule of 7 things” was also good advice; you should really limit the number of options to around 7 things or else people are going to start dying (…or just get really confused). If you want to see how NOT to layout out a website, please visit MySpace.com [not worthy of link outside of this website] and count the number of navigation items are thrown at you. I also heard multiple times that Patrick is “not a sausage” and although he promised to tell Shannon and I the story at the bar, but we never got around to hearing it.

One of the more interesting talks was about something I knew little about. The wonderful world of user experience design and documentation, presented by Nathan Curtis. Until I heard him speak, I thought the presentation was going to be about component libraries in Flash, such as SlideShowPro or some other add-on. Turns out a component library is basically “a combination of elements that creates a purposeful and reusable environment.” In other words, you identify common items in your designs for a website, and then you label them and put the items in a library so they can be reused by everyone on the project. It’s a crucial part of a site planning process that is generally overlooked, but completely necessary. Nathan showed his step-by-step process of making a component library, which even involves physically cutting out the components, arranging them on paper, and gluing them onto legal sheets for review. I thought I was going to lose interest in the topic, since I thought “such extensive planning isn’t really related to the scale of sites I do,” except the opposite happened. This was partly thanks to Nathan’s comparison of component libraries in user experience design with the components in a Lego set, but also because I realized this is exactly the type of planning we were trying to do when redesigning Army.mil! Of course, ours was much more elementary than what Nathan was covering (probably since Nathan is what we call an “expert”) but I still wish I would have seen his presentation prior to undertaking such a large redesign. I will definitely be checking out Sun’s Web Design Standards and Yahoo’s Pattern Library to see how the big dogs are doing it so I can plan for better designs in the future.