Watch Out!

Studio 23 has taken a turn inward and created a set of watch faces for ourselves to test our design skills at a minimalist format. We chose the Amazfit Bip as a platform which is an inexpensive watch that allows for a fair amount of customization and has features for tracking pulse, weather, steps, mileage, and day, date, and of course, time. Working in the small space of a watch face presents many design issues. While the watch can display a lot of data, it became clear early on that as more information is displayed, it became more difficult to read. Unimportant numbers competed with more critical information and, ultimately, we found ourselves gravitating toward simpler, more visual faces. Other metrics are still available via swiping on the watch, but the primary messaging we’ve chosen to display is the time.

We also gravitated to analog faces for their intrinsic simplicity though the we are fond of the digital face with analog second hand. in the middle design. One interesting design note is that since the analog hands are virtual, in some cases we’ve reduced those to a simple marker that travels around the outside of the face rather than a true second hand. This allows us to keep the appearance of an analog watch while introducing something a bit unexpected. We’ve also included our signature orange 23 on several of the faces right where it belongs—between the 2 and the 3. Above are our favorites from the design exercise and if you’d like to download and install any of these faces on your Amazfit Bip, contact us. If you want to see more of our designs, you’ll just have to watch out.

Designing for Other People’s Customers

Most companies create their website with user experience in mind—they make it easy for visitors to do what they want—but they miss the opportunity to create a site to guide the visitor into doing what the company wants. The goals of the visitor to a website are not necessarily the same for the visitor and the company. The visitor may be looking for information, doing research for a future possible purchase. The company, on the other hand, wants to make a sale, collect data, or provide a service. How can you turn a website visitor into a customer? Through good design.

Let’s take a look at four main criteria we can use to judge whether a design will aid in turning a prospect into a customer.

Content

  • Is your message clear? Interesting? Does it speak to the visitor?
  • Do you offer clear pathways for the visitor to follow?
  • Do you offer clear calls-to-action to take additional steps? Do you give the visitor multiple options (such as “Learn more” and “Sign up today?”)
  • Is the language appropriate? Is it gender biased? Could it offend?

Experience

  • Is the site easy to navigate? Are terms understandable and unique?
  • Are calls-to-action similar throughout the site? Is like content grouped by function?
  • Is the site responsive? Can it be navigated on phone, tablet desktop?
  • Is the site free of visual clutter? Is content organized in digestible “screens?”
  • Is the site navigable in adverse conditions? The visually impaired? Screen reading?
  • Is the content searchable? Is it well-organized? Tagged? Categorized?
  • Can the visitor make a direct connection to your company?

Technology

  • Is the technology you’re using appropriate for the visitor?
  • Does the site require technology that is not universal?
  • Is the site manageable by your staff in a timely manner?
  • Is it secure?
  • If you’re collecting visitor’s data, do you have a privacy policy that outlines the scope of what you do with the information?

Aesthetics

  • Does the site appeal to your prospect?
  • Are the images appropriate? Unique? Identifiable as your brand?
  • Are the colors and fonts used identifiable as your brand?
  • Do the colors and fonts aid the visitor in doing what you want?
  • Can the visitor scale the fonts (in case of the visually impaired)? Do the colors work for someone who is colorblind? Is it ADA compliant?
  • Do you prioritize information content and flow on smaller devices?

How does your online communication stack up? There are always trade-offs to be made in creating a website. A page that is aesthetically appealing might sacrifice legibility of the content to a certain degree, but in the end the site may be more effective. We call this disfluency.

Disfluency is the act of making something less clear, of slowing down the process of interacting with a page, in order to attain longer interaction and greater retention. Disfluency is just one of the tools we can use to help turn prospects into customers. To find out more, contact Studio 23. We’re ready when you are.

 

A Lifetime of Education

It’s no surprise that many of our clients are schools, colleges, and educational institutions. As a former director of publications and teacher at two different schools, I’ve seen first-hand the special needs that schools have and know the challenges involved.

Schools and colleges have to address the needs of very different audiences, for example. They need to appeal to 16-year-old high school students applying to colleges, to alumni that may not have stepped foot on campus in 50 years, to professionals and businesses that may hire graduates, to potential educators and staff, and to funding sources for projects, research grants, and scholarships. Then there are the internal brand conflicts that can arise between different divisions with wildly different needs—athletics, academics, financial, to name a few. How can you address the needs of these different audiences while maintaining a consistent brand? How can you speak with a consistent voice while maintaining uniqueness within subdivisions?

Too much variation from a core brand and an institution appears disconnected, losing brand identity. Too little variation compromises the messaging for target groups. An email targeting high school students should share the core DNA with a planned giving brochure for alumni, but the two have very different parameters. Promotional material for the athletics department should share the same DNA as a brochure attracting potential graduate students, but, again, the two target very different audiences.

One of the first goals in designing for education is understanding what the core brand is and what core elements form the identity with the goal of understanding how these elements can be used, manipulated, flexed, so that the resulting designs can be instantly recognizable as connected to the school, but remain fresh and appropriate for the target audience.

Design is a Melody, The Brand is the Symphony

An analogy to this approach can be found is music. Listen to the score of a symphony or even a movie soundtrack. Within this, you’ll often hear a core melody which changes, becomes clearer, more obscured, which is passed between instruments, changed again, returning to its original form over and over. This playfulness is key to keeping the listener entertained and engaged. Periodically, the composer will introduce unexpected elements, quiet passages, loud crashes, syncopated rhythms, minor keys, while keeping within an overall melodic structure. In the end, the work tells a story, completes a picture. In much the same way, designing for an educational institution is like writing that symphony. Individual elements are created that address specific communication needs within an overall structure that is the brand.

Knowing how flexible or how inflexible to be is our expertise. The look and language of a Shapchat filter that targets high school students is different than a dinner invitation that targets your board of trustees. But whether that’s a 1080-by-1920 pixel .PNG file uploaded to a remote server or a 130# uncoated vellum, ivory white, 100% cotton sheet that’s been letterpressed using soy inks, we’ve done it all. We look forward to working with our education clients in the future. As they grow, so will we.

Beautyterm is More Than Skin Deep

1200x700_beautytermLogoWhen startup company Beautyterm needed a brand that portrayed their core business—translation services for the beauty industry—they turned to Studio 23. We created an identity for the company that incorporated a traditional editor’s mark in a simple, elegant form. Next, we developed a brand strategy and applied it to their website, using images appropriate for the beauty industry.

While the site was successful at building a buzz in New York and in America, getting good page rank in Paris proved difficult. To help build their business, we created a second site in French using the .fr domain that was able to do the trick. In addition, we applied the identity to their Paris-based company, Beautélogie, and developed marketing collateral to help them get their message out.

Today the company is one of the more successful firms in the industry and we think that’s just beautiful.

New Mobile Sites for Clients

Mobile Website Designby Lee Willett / Studio 23

Along with our usual web design and developement services, Studio 23 now offers custom mobile website design for our clients. Mobile-optimized sites are created to load faster, navigate easier and read better than a traditional site which often requires pinching and zooming to view content.

But is this an iPhone app? No. But that’s a common question. Some clients ask us to build iPhone apps when, really, what they want is a mobile presence. iPhone apps are great but they’re also proprietary and only work on the iPhone, iPod Touches and iPads. Mobile  websites, however, are HTML-based, just like a desktop site, and can be viewed on Apple products as well as Blackberries, Android and Windows mobile phones. The advantages are that development time is faster, visitors don’t need to download a special app through a storefront, updates are made at the same time content on the site is updated, and companies can promote the mobile site just as they do their traditional URL.

While only a fraction of the traffic we see comes from mobile devices, our clients like to think ahead. We’re right there with them.