Business Week's Best Buildings of 2009

Business Week recently posted images of its annual Architectural Record award winners for 2009. There are some beautiful architectural designs from all over the world, take a couple of minutes to view these magnificent works of art.

Best Buildings of 2009

Time for Creativity

I’m the senior web designer & developer at IIR, a worldwide conference producer, and I thought I'd give guest blogging a shot. From time to time I will appear on NBD and share some of the design and development experiences of our in-house design department.

Not so long ago on a computer very nearby, I launched a website for the 4th year of the Front End of Innovation Europe (FEI Europe) conference. It is a conference that focuses on the front end or discovery portion of innovation. It’s a sizable event so there was a lot of info to organize and communicate clearly. Even though it is heavy on the production side, it was a great event to work on this year because I had more creative involvement than I normally do. A quick rundown on our process at IIR: the Marketing Managers (MM) and Conference Producers (CP) go either to the in-house print department or an outside designer for the logo and color foundation and then the piece comes to the web department to make it, as my Creative Director likes to say, web-tastic.

This particular job was outsourced for branding and then brought in-house for production. There usually isn’t a vast difference between the web and print pieces design or content wise. This website, though, was going to have extra stuff! That wasn’t in the brochure! The event is based around these 7 critical factors needed for innovation to occur and the CP decided she wanted each factor to have its own page with a large photo to illustrate the accompanying text. The images were not already chosen by the outside team either; I got to choose them. This may not sound like WOW! but as I said our websites are usually created straight from the brochure. What really made it ‘wow’, though, was that I had time to work on the project. The team had come in almost two months in advance so there would be no hot, impatient breath on my neck wondering what was taking so long.

I started with the 3 factors that the CP had finished writing. In my initial search of Shutterstock, I was coming across a lot of images in cool gray and white tones that had a nice modern feel.

I thought that might be a good way to pull all the factors together, using a consistent color scheme. The CP chose the alternate color photo versions I provided which proved to be a good thing down the road. The factors Organic Growth and Customer Demands would have proved difficult to illustrate. Trees don’t feel very organic when in a generic white forms with cool gray shadows. And Customer Demands didn’t need any help in the difficult category. Most of the photos on Shutterstock were of customer service people with their headsets on looking really slick or surveys with checkmarks. The survey image would work but it just wasn’t interesting enough. I was so frustrated at one point that I made my own version!

I reread the copy several times and decided to stop focusing on ‘customer demands’ since that was a dead end and instead focus on the word ‘strategy’ since this was part of the factor; the strategy of balancing what the customer wants with what the business needs. This proved much more fruitful and the final version using chess pieces came together.

All and all the project was successful. The CP had such a great reaction to the pages when she saw them: an open mouth smile from ear to ear. That kind of reaction always works for me.

Adobe's Photoshop app comes to Android

CNet.com reports that Adobe's has introduced a Photoshop app for the Google Android. According to CNet.com, the version for Android shares the same, simple editing UI as the iPhone/iPod version, both of which let users make edits by sliding their fingers across the screen and undo any changes made. It also features some very basic photo editing tools like crop, rotate, and image flip, as well as controls for adjusting exposure and tweaking color tint and saturation. Android users even get one new tool that iPhone/iPod users don't even have yet, which lets them straighten a shot against a grid.

As a designer, will you be utilizing the Photoshop app on your smart phone?

Treehugger: How Insects Do Graphic Design

Petz Scholtus of Treehugger.com recently covered the Bits 'n Pieces--launched Material Connexion in New York, a dialogue between the analog and the digital technologies within design in a post-digital era. A sophisticated machine transformed the movements of a few bugs into beautiful patterns and logos and printed them out as fast as the insects performed. Scholtus writes, A path and obstacles that have been put in the insects' way influence the their behaviour, and gives them their design brief so to speak. The machine translates the movement of the bugs into graphics, which are then printed out as posters; a beautiful result of a collaboration between the designers and the insects and an engaging way to let nature do its thing.

What do you think? As designers, what inspiration do you get from nature and even from insects?

Package Design Ideas for November 2009

Lauren Hartman of Converting Magazine discusses a few fantastic package design launches set for this month. One particularly fascinating story comes from the Coca-Cola Company's relaunch of their Cappy juice. Hartman writes, Coca-Cola says it's counting on the packaging, introduced in June, to meet the rising consumer demand for new product offerings. The Elopak Slim® carton was selected following extensive consumer research that highlighted the new package as the best fit for Coca-Cola's premium, contemporary juice brand and met the consumer's desire for original beverage-packaging ideas. The tall, svelte carton design distinguishes the juices and nectars from the rest of the market. The stylish package is slimmer than a conventional gable-top carton, with harmonious curves and a large cap for easy pouring.

For more coverage on this design and other, please visit Hartman's article.

Meet Stella: Not New But Improved

In Sunday's New York Times, writer Allison Arieff introduced us to Stella, a giraffe bath toy that looks old fashioned but contains some very modern elements. The product, which contains Renuva (a soy-based alternative to polyurethane) is a step forward in creating items that are more sustainable and healthful. Arieff writes, while Stella is one of a kind, designed for W.W.F.’s auction, it also functions as a compelling example for designers and manufacturers of Renuva’s potential uses. In this way, product design becomes a way to highlight a new material and bring it to market.

To learn more about Stella and Renuva, please visit Arieff's original article here.

Yosemite gets a natural upgrade

The San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote about the new design improvements that the park is making. Each improvement is especially designed to fit in with natural surrounding, while keeping the focus on the scenery. For instance, there are new granite boulders that separate the parking lot and the park that simply look as if they're part of the scenery. They focus on what the buildings have to look like in order to fit in, focusing on their architecture and the building materials used. Read the full article here.

Fail Whale: BBC Meets with Twitter Designer Yiying Lu

Users of Twitter have all seen it--the dreaded "fail whale" that signals that Twitter is over its capacity. The icon has become famous in its own right, so the BBC set out to meet with the designer of this pop culture icon, Yiying Lu. Click below to listen to the audio recording of their conversation.

If given the opportunity, how would you design an over capacity icon?

Montana goes retro with new license plate design

The Missoulian reports that Montana is redesigning its basic license plate design for the first time in five years, and is looking at a retro-inspired design that harkens back to the plates of the 1970s and earlier.

The plate will feature a simple, solid background of either blue or green - a committee is still deciding the color.

Gone are the mountain ridges along the bottom, and a sky featuring blue-green hues. Also gone from the old plate is the well-known "Big Sky Country" monicker, which was placed under an ornate and elaborately written "Montana" in an Old West style.

"MONTANA" will be spelled out in plain, white capital letters along the bottom. It will be followed by "10," to denote the 2010 year of issue. Montana plates used to come stamped with a year of issue through about the 1980s.

From a design perspective, it looks much better than the other license plates being updated throughout the country. What do you think? Do you like the "retro" feel?

Montana goes retro with new license plate design

Live from The Market Research Event: The Evolution of Packaging and Purchasing Environments

We're live this week at The Market Research Event 2009 and we'd like to share with you one of the many great presentations at this year's event. To find out more about the conference and to follow us live from the event, please check our our blog and follow us on Twitter.

Proof Symposia: The Evolution of Packaging and Purchasing Environments

The Evolution of Packaging & Purchasing Environments

Craig M. Vogel, FIDSA, Associate Dean, DAAP,University of Cincinnati

This session covered the evolution of ideas and how they connect to what’s going on today.

Coca cola is one of the most powerful global brands. When does a brand become known? When enough people have a visceral understanding of the brand.

How do you understand how your brand is viewed externally?

There are five ways to look at your brand:

• Differentiate
• Collaborate
• Innovate
• Validate
• Cultivate

A company needs to understand when a product is invisible to the consumers. The package delivers the message about the product, from first buy and throughout use. It’s starting to lose its ability to build on any more equity than it can handle.

When you change the images of your product, you can increase the value, stronger message, and then shift the strategy of the packaging.

In the 1990s-2000s, experienced economies are primary drive to buy people to buy more and more services. With failure of the economy, many products are sliding back to basic goods, and few are staying up at premium experiences. Many products people buy are from choices.

Companies can no longer sell one dimensional products. Many companies must create messages about personal values and global issues. Box stores are obsolete concepts because of current costs and overinvesting. Many people are moving back to cities. Companies are creating local stores, example – Wal-Mart. Many of these large needs and want centers are going ot go back to decentralized shopping. Smaller scale neighborhoods and investments. Starbucks will go into contextualized stores without name. Mega centers are too hard for people to get to.

Spring Design Alex: dual-screen Android-based e-reader

Engadget.com reports today that Alex, the dual-screen e-book reader from Spring Design has been unveiled just one day before the much-anticipated e-reader from Barnes & Noble. It features a 6-inch E-ink EPD (electronic paper display) and 3.5-inch LCD running Google's Android OS for browsing the web or viewing video, audio, photos, and notes. It also packs a removeable SD card, speaker, headphone jack, and WiFi or 3G EVDO/CDMA and GSM radios. An interesting Duet Navigator feature even lets you toggle content captured on the LCD and present it back to the EPD to save on battery life. The device is planned for release sometime this year without any details on who might be involved in that exercise.

Vancouver Unveils 2010 Olympic Medals

Vancouver, the world's home for the 2010 Olympics has unveiled its designs for the Olympic Medals. According to the press release these medals, "...each feature a different crop of larger contemporary Aboriginal artworks and are undulating rather than flat -- both firsts in Games history. The dramatic form of the Vancouver 2010 medals is inspired by the ocean waves, drifting snow and mountainous landscape found in the Games region and throughout Canada. The Olympic medals are circular in shape, while the Paralympic medals are a superellipse, or squared circle."

Critics say the the medals look like they have been melted, or left too long in the sun. Its a different design from "traditional" Olympic medal designs -- what do you think?

Archived Web Seminar - Do Consumers Really Care About Corporate Social Responsibility? New BuzzBack Case Study with Nestlé

If you weren't able to make it to yesterday's live web seminar "Do Consumers Really Care About Corporate Social Responsibility? New BuzzBack Case Study with Nestlé" here's your chance to view the archive. Martin Oxley, Managing Director at BuzzBack Europe and Jeremy Pace, Consumer Science Specialist at Nestlé showcased new online research techniques that identified consumer driven issues and emotions of CSR.

Watch the hour-long archive. Enjoy!

You design the ride

At Epcot's new Innovation Pavilion at Disney World, a new ride opens today that allows children to use math and science to design and ride an amusement park ride that is designed by them. After attending a tutorial, a touch screen helps users choose ride cars and tracks through the use of mathematics and engineering to design their preferred ride. Read more about the new ride here.

Vacuum maker Dyson unveils its latest household device - a fan with no fan.

The Daily Mail reports that Sir James Dyson, inventor of wildly popular vacuums, has created a new invention-- a fan without a fan. Reports The Daily Mail,

Launching the product yesterday, Sir James explained that he got the idea while developing his Air Blade hand dryers, which force air though a tiny slit to 'brush' water from wet hands.

'We noticed that the hand dryer was drawing in a lot of air from its surroundings,' he said.

'So we started to think about how we might be able to put this effect to use.

We thought about creating an air moving device with no propeller or fan blade. Three years of development plus another year of testing later and this is the result.'

Read more here.