A friend recently invited me to provide IA and visual design for A. B. Smeby, an artisanal bitters manufacturer in Brooklyn, NY. The site is up, and I’m happy to have been involved with such a cool little enterprise.

It’s a small (one-page) site, but I did do a quick wireframe for it.

You can click the wireframe to make it bigger.

The wireframe helped to define where things went, what those things were, page width, icon needs and placement, product shot needs and placement, number of columns, links, and copy. It also helped my development partner to gauge whether the ideas I came up with were within development and maintenance scope.

This was the second wireframe I did for the project; the first one implied a design that was way out of scope. Wireframes are a great sanity check.

Sometimes I show these to clients, sometimes I don’t. In this case–since we had arrived at a one-page site, and the visual design was more than half the impact–I didn’t. It was just a means of defining the work to be done on my end.

Here’s the final product (click to see detail).

If you compare the screenshot with the wireframe, you can see how the design evolved.

A note on the site’s visual style: the client had requested a design that followed the current revival of interest in old-fashioned type and Victorian flourishes. This was a great fit for the brand, which is all about old-fashioned production methods. For this design, I researched bottle labels from the Victorian era. The yellow in the banner is from an 1890s Chinese ink bottle label, and the typography is related to the look of an old bitters label from 1900 or thereabouts.

I suggest you order some bitters. They’re tasty.

Via Om Malik at GigaOm: a fantastic video of a Dice 2010 presentation by Jesse Schell, founder of Schell games and a former Disney Imagineer.

You should watch this for two reasons:

1. Schell is an incredible speaker.
2. He makes some very interesting points about how people engage with technology, namely that technology convergence is a myth. He adds that if real life were more like a game (do stuff and accrue points!), it would be easy to influence how people behave.

Given the success of socially networked games like FourSquare, I think Schell is pretty much right on.

In FourSquare, users “check in” to places like bars and theaters in order to earn badges, and the people with the most check-ins for a given location are anointed “mayor” of that place. Even though there aren’t necessarily real-world payoffs for this behavior, the players can get very competitive.

Where Schell’s hypothesis might fall apart is in the case of people like me: I’m not a gamer. I joined Dodgeball, FourSquare’s Google-owned precursor, but I failed to engage with it. I stopped checking in. I don’t play any other video games, either, so I doubt that Schell’s system of awarding points for behavior would hold much appeal for me.

It would be interesting to research the proportion of gamers to non-gamers in the general population. I wonder what the split is, percentage-wise, and which is more common? At what point does it make sense to apply a gaming metaphor in order to shape real-world behavior?

Not the intended outcome of Southwest’s social media strategy.

Southwest Airlines has made a concerted effort to embrace online social media. They blog. They tweet. They’ve garnered admiration for their success in establishing and extending their brand through direct online interaction with customers.

And then, Southwest threw Kevin Smith off one of their flights for violating their “Customers of Size” policy. Except that he wasn’t violating it, actually (he could fit comfortably in the seat with the armrests down) … and they were rude to him, and they fat-shamed a fellow flier on the replacement flight he booked, and then there’s the small matter of Kevin Smith being a film director famed for his internet savvy, and his lack of filter.

Did I mention that he has 1,656,564 Twitter followers as of today? And that Smith broadcast his thoughts about this situation as it was happening?

All this after he was recognized by one of the flight crew. They should have known better.

The response from Southwest has been to restate that Smith was in violation of the policy, and that they’ve apologized. 600+ blog comments tell me that this response was probably inadequate.

The moral, if there is one (beyond the fact that SWA needs to tell its employees to adhere more strictly to the letter of their “Customers of Size” policy), is that when you reach out to your customers online, you are personalizing your interactions with your customers. And when you have a personal interaction with a customer, you can’t switch to sounding like a stubbornly illogical automaton (in this case, one that recites corporate policy boilerplate) without the customer reacting badly.

Southwest now has to deal with not only the enmity of millions of people on Twitter, but with one of the most enthusiastic users of social media out there. Kevin Smith is running with it.

I was shocked to read today that Alexander McQueen had taken his own life. He’s a designer whose career I’ve followed closely; his work was inspired by London nightlife and the style of the demimonde, and executed to the highest level possible (a very compelling combination). The clothes he made were a bizarre and fabulous dream.

He was very influential, beyond creative, and a true original. His absence will make the design world much less interesting.

Addendum: Women’s Wear Daily has a very thoughtful piece on McQueen’s career.

Image from McQueen’s spring/summer 2010 collection, from Style.com

[Note: this entry dates from the May 2009 revision of Facebook's site]

Facebook is bugging me. Not because they revamped their home page, but because their revamp suggests to me that they are ignoring a ton of opportunities that they’ve got every means to take advantage of, right now. But instead they feel threatened by another web app that has feeds (Twitter), and their response is to make their site look like that site.

It’s kind of a waste. more »