You can now access the whole archive here.

I hope you find it useful.

A Utah company that builds and hosts websites has been ordered to pay more than $700,000 in damages to an Orange County golf club manufacturer for helping create and promote a website that sold counterfeit clubs.

Attorneys for Roger Cleveland Golf Co. said the verdict marked the first time that a website support company has been held liable for aiding in the sale of counterfeit merchandise.

L.A. Times

Let’s be clear here: BrightBuilders was dumb. No matter how you look at it, they should have known they were aiding a counterfeiting outfit. You don’t design an e-commerce site without knowing what products are being sold. Also, it was in the damn name.

What this means: if you participate in designing a web site for a nefarious organization, you could be held liable for the illegal activities they use that web site for.

That said, if you design a web site with good intentions and your client starts using the site for illegal purposes after the fact, you really don’t have to worry. You can’t just bury your head in the sand, working for an illegal operation acting as if you have clean hands in the matter.

Legacy of Letters from Luca Barcellona on Vimeo.

This is literally one of the coolest videos I’ve ever seen. The skill and inherent talent in Luca Barcellona is simply impressive. I am sure Barcellona practiced and planned this video beforehand. Still, to be able to freehand letter forms like this takes a level of skill that builds admiration, inspiration, and (to be honest) a bit of resentment in me.

Through the month of January, I had a chance to work with one of my favorite clients,  BrightArch, once again. This time, I got a crack at their web site.

Nick Peters, BrightArch’s CMO, contacted me around the holiday season asking if I had an opening for a short project in 2011. Jumping at the opportunity to further move their brand forward, I immediately said ‘yes.’ BrightArch already had a web site, but it was done in house and rather hastily. The groundwork was laid by a Joomla theme and some plugins. It was certainly workable, but nowhere did the company or their software really shine through. Below is a look at the old site:

The initial brief was simple: This was a redesign and not a ground-up project. I needed to work within their preset Joomla framework and make modifications from there. No new plugins, no new UI paradigms, no creating a theme from scratch — just a branding spruce-up.

After the initial briefing, I quickly started making mock ups. I wanted to incorporate elements of the brand that were started in the brochure I had done a few months earlier and create a cohesive brand experience. BrightArch might be a smaller company now, but when they get bigger, I want their brand to follow them along that path.  So my initial mock up followed along exactly with how I originally designed their brochure. I reused elements, created a very restricted color pallet and allowed a lot of whitespace around grid-locked elements.

From my initial mock ups (left), a few things occurred to me: this web site was not so much a corporate site, but a software promotion site with a little bit of corporate mixed in. Ideally, these would be separate sites, but considering the constraints of the project, this was impossible. So, I went with it, and after some struggle, I created a site mockup that integrated both brands seamlessly (right). Because BrightArch only currently offers one piece of software (OrganizationWeaver), essentially, they are their software.

What the site eventually evolved into, through a whole lot of CSS trickery and a bit of javascript tweaking, was a much more integrated experience than before. I made the homepage more comprehensive as a landing page, created a more human theme, and cohesively tied the brand with a more understandable UI. I think the overall experience is a whole lot more modern and gives BrightArch one more step toward being a full-fledge brand — something I have been cobbling together for them over the better part of a year.

Visit the new BrightArch.com site here

As a side note: Remember how I said this was going to be a short project? Well it was. BrightArch needed to present this site to investors before the end of the month. So, I worked fast, and the design deadline was nailed in a matter of two weeks. The site was completely launched after only three.

As a slight caveat to all this, this meant I couldn’t completely re-haul every single page, (though I certainly tried) leaving only a few rough patches here and there (they will be taken care of in due time, however).

Risk Retention Services is a national product liability service who I had done some work for in the past. They recently wanted to have their web site redesigned. This was a complete overhaul in terms of content and design. Their previous design was done nearly a decade ago and relied heavily on tables and old web standards.

They had a few requirements coming into the project:

• A new, more professional face for the company.
• A more robust web site in terms of content and design.
• A way for them to update their monthly newsletter, which is typically emailed in a PDF format.

With that in mind, I immediately headed toward WordPress as the back end. This was done for a couple reasons: I love working in WordPress; and the blogging platform is dead simple, giving the RRS guys the lowest barrier of entry in terms of updating content.

This, of course, required a new template, which I created nearly from scratch. The core of the site is strongly gridded (of course), maintaining a look of solidarity and structure. And, although RRS didn’t have well-established brand, I restricted the pallet to what is essentially two colors: an aqua blue and a steely grey. The result is a  web site that can stand the test of time.

I intentionally stripped the blog portion of the site down to its basics. This is a newsletter, after all, and doesn’t need categories or tags. It serves more as a simple archive for the RRS clientele.

As far as coding goes, I created a CSS-based grid structure which consists of consistent classes, making a nearly perfect semantic HTML structure.  All of the navigation is generated in PHP, and all the pages are fully editable by the RRS crew making future upgrades very simple. I also improved the site’s SEO with the help of a great WordPress plugin (the results of which were almost immediately recognized by Google and the like) And, of course, the site is fully cross-browser compatible (with some slight concessions made in the IE6 version).

Ultimately, the site met all my and RRS’ criteria, and goes a long way to help establish a stronger brand in the future.

Visit the new Risk Retention Services web site here.

This interview with Matias Duarte, the new head designer for Android user experience, and Engadget‘s Josh Topolsky is a great discussion on the future on Android. Duarte was the original UX designer for Palm’s webOS (which, in my opinion, is easily the best mobile operating system).

What’s great about Duarte is that he is a man with a vision, and that is precisely what Google (and more specifically, Android) needs right now. Especially with Google’s notorious design-by-committee approach.

CES 2011 is now in progress and while there is a lot to love coming from the show floor, I want to talk about the gross gadgets coming out of some of these companies. Particularly in the phone space.

The smartphone market has grown exponentially in the past year. When HTC came out with the Hero, there felt like a revolution was headed our way. HTC had poised itself, in my mind, as the next great hardware design company, right next to Apple. HTC was going to make my next phone.

Since that time, however, HTC has slipped considerably. With the release of the Incredible, we saw what amounted to be a powerful phone with a great Android skin that actually added functionality (Something not to be overlooked for sure, but that is outside the scope of this post). However, the design of the phone was something to be desired. While not BAD, it was nowhere near beautiful.

The back of the phone featured a gimmick. Nothing too offensive, but a gimmick nonetheless. It was bumpy and weird. Maybe it meant to imply “high-tech,” but it actually implies the opposite. This is simply unacceptable, in my mind, for a company that wants to sit in the realm of great hardware design.

Since then HTC has released a bevy of other phones with less-than-stellar looks. But in comparison to some of its peers, HTC is still a bastion of hardware design, and it’s is that which I have a problem with.

The first image in this post is the new Motorola Cliq 2. It is Motorola’s second (possibly more) attempt at a lower-market smartphone with a keyboard. Which is exactly what tipped off this rant.

Look at that monstrosity. First off, this phone does not run the new version of Android codenamed “Honeycomb,” but even if it did, this would be offensive.

A keyboard that draws that much attention to itself serves nearly zero purpose. A phone’s keyboard is supposed to function first and sit in the background of your fingers. You will never marvel at your keyboard after days of use. Even if you loved the look of this keyboard (I question your taste, but I’m willing to overlook differences in preference), this would still be bad design.

A smartphone’s main event is the software, NOT the hardware (I will not even start on Motorola’s Blur skin for Android). If a company wants to make a cheap phone, then what is so wrong with making a generic-looking phone. There are many ways to make generic work with many different options for form.

Take, for instance, the new Google CR-48 laptop that is kicking off Google’s Chrome OS pilot program.

This laptop is beautifully generic. No frills and, above all, no gimmicks. Just function. Well-constructed function.

This sort of thinking would do Motorola (and other companies) well. And while cellphones are no stranger to gimmicks, I could forgive an immature market. We are more than a decade into this marathon and design like the Cliq 2 only hurts the overall design culture.

I’ll leave you with Dieter Rams’10 principles for good design. Read them and just try to apply just one of these rules to the Cliq 2 and other crap you see coming out of this year’s CES.

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design helps us to understand a product
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is long-lasting
8. Good design is consequent to the last detail
9. Good design is concerned with the environment
10. Good design is as little design as possible

In early 2009, I did some pro-bono identity work for a startup named “The Daily Blank,” a satire news site for the Chicago area. The founder, Nick Peters, is a young entrepreneur who turned out to be a great contact.

Less than a year after my work for “The Daily Blank,” Nick was contacting me from Oslo, Norway with a new business he was involved with. The company, owned by Tor Kielland and founded by his grandfather, used to be in the textile business but was now moving into the digital age with a rather pragmatic goal. They were interested in creating products for people within new and merging businesses.

My role in this was to create two logos: One for the newly renamed company, BrightArch, and their first product, Organization Weaver.

With the BrightArch logo, the goal was to establish a strong mark that could be attached to future products ̶ meaning a look and feel that was open and easily adaptable to future products. The name BrightArch needed to be established with this logo as well, so a wordmark was necessary. And because this company was still in the early stages, they needed a font that was easily accessible.

The solution was a square (representing a rigid corporate structure) being sliced by a number of arches (representing paths through the corporate world). Ultimately, these arches form an abstract ‘B.’

The base font was the humanist Myriad (modified for the wordmark). Because Myriad is installed with nearly every Adobe product, it was an ideal choice.

From there, the Organization Weaver logo was created, based on the work that had been started with the BrighArch logo. The idea was two abstractions weaving themselves together to create one larger whole. A number of visual metaphors are at work, but the one that I focused on most was creating a sort of road-map feel implying that Organization Weaver would be your guide. Keeping with abstractions creating letters, the mark also works as an abstract ‘W’.

What I like most about these two marks is how distinct both of their shapes are. Particularly the Organization Weaver logo. Both would be easy to draw from memory and look great in black and white (where the whole process started).

To finish this project, I also created some business cards. These were a big help in guiding the future of the brand.

Nick had this to say about the process:

“Chris was amazing to work with throughout the entire design process. From the ideation and concept phase all the way through to the pixel-perfect finishing phase. He has a keen design sense for what will work and what won’t, and focuses his effort on building an ideal design from a solid concept. He also manages to find the middle ground between being flexible and taking principled design stances. We wholeheartedly recommend Chris because of his skill and professionalism.”

BrightArch was a great client and I can only hope to work with them again.

Because it’s very easy to get caught up in the political end of a discussion that involves an issue such as this, we decided to take a very humanistic approach. The main focus of this project was up-close interviews with the members of the EIU division of Pride. I handled much of the cinematography and all of the video editing. We used three cameras per interview, collecting different nuances of the participants. Although I’m pleased with the way the videos turned out, there were some audio issues and a short deadline left the videos feeling a little unpolished. In one respect, however, I like how raw they appear. I would have liked, though, to have made a few of the cuts in greyscale.

My goal with the website was to present the content in a serious tone. I intentionally used grey as my base color with only the rainbow sidebar using color. This approach was meant to appeal to the ambiguous nature of the topic (no black or whites, only areas of grey). This seemed appropriate, and I think the result is very up-front and personal. I learned a lot from the experience and I’m proud to present it to a general audience.

Being that brochures are one of my favorite forms of media to design, I put a lot into this project. It was an exploration in grids and rigid typography, and with little direction from the department, I was able to do a fair amount of design exploration. I wanted to convey the experience of new media and overall progressive attitude the EIU journalism department encompasses. I think this brochure completed that nicely.