2008 themes and clips

Looking back over the posts from 2008 a couple themes and clips stood out for me - luckily I don’t post very often!

AGENCY INNOVATION
Agency Brand Positioning
“What agency doesn’t promise ’strategic thinking, creative solutions and results’?”too many promises in your positioning statement? solution: pair it down - how do your clients define you, what work defines you, what work do you want to define you in the future?

Transformation Design
Transformation design, like user-centered design, starts from the perspective of the end user. Designers spend a great deal of time not only learning how users currently experience the system and how they want to experience the system, but also co-creating with them the designed solutions.

Design Thinking + Doing
‘Here’s the old approach,’ says Bogusky. ‘As an agency you’re given a product, then you come up with your consumer research and figure out what’s going on around the product. Then you figure out how to position the product or lie about the product so it seems to answer all the issues around it.’

BUSINESS INNOVATION
honeyshed
Honeyshed has a nitch market with their trend spotted products. Its entertaining, even if it is sponsored. It offers value in ad revenue, analytics, and potential new business opportunities pouring out of the brand relationships it brings.

Brand Digital
In other words, the discovery of what people DO is many times different than what they SAY. This knowledge could come from observation in a shop-a-long, an ethnographic interview, or by looking over a social media monitoring dashboard (an interactive tool for finding out what is said and done online relevant to your business or brand)

Nike ID and Nike PHOTO ID
An excellent integration of interactive technology into the physical world.

VISUALIZATION AND FLASH
thought pile - a visualization of ideas
1) getting users up to speed and not intimidated by these kinds of experiences. 2) creating sites with relevant visualizations that are functionally useful. and 3) adding or generating value to the site’s content.

gridplane (and instrument)
although it seems like there is redundancy (a site in flash and HTML) the site’s singular content can be picked up by search, navigated smoothly in flash, and seen on mobile.

COLLABORATION
kluster
Kluster is a place to harness the power of community collaboration to get stuff done.

The Facilitative Leader
Facilitative leaders help play off of people’s strengths, think collectively, and push an organization forward.

FORM AND FUNCTION
Branded Utility (aka Form and Function)
“advertisers want to build brand loyalty by providing utilities that both improve people’s lives in some small way — even if it’s simply a tool for customizing pizza”

zeus jones gift guide
What a refreshing strategy to see an agency support their brand positioning (marketing as a service) and provide a beautiful utility

WORK FLOW AND EFFICIENCY
Feeding your feeds
Basically, feeds are the common thread in sharing mixed-media discoveries across the web, a tumblelog puts all those web discoveries together in one spot. And allows you to keep up with others easier.

Flash Catalyst
A collaborative direction for designers and developers - rich internet applications (RIAs) will be built easier. Rapid prototyping will become more rapid.

You don’t always have to change it.
The examples may include direct changes; “make the logo bigger”, increase type size, “pump up the color”, add more copy about the product. To subjective changes like “make the image, ‘pop’”. As if these are really going to make the concept or execution THAT much better?