Category: Branding and Marketing
-
The Scrolling Experience and “The Fold”
Newstand by Berenice Abbott, 1935 In print design, the expression “above the fold” dates from an era where broadsheet newspapers were folded in half and piled up in stacks in front of newsstands, showing only the upper-half of the front page to potential customers. If an article or a picture did not appear “above the…
-
OMMA Nom Nom Nom
I am going to be speaking today, June 17th, at the OMMA Publish conference here in New York City, on a panel entitled “Optimizing for Performance: Adding Value to Your Site”. OMMA is focused on online media marketing and advertising, publishing several trade magazines and sponsoring several conferences each year in these areas. My panel…
-
Doing Things vs. Getting Things Done
A quick thought for this fine Friday: Something about the term “Getting Things Done” always bugged me. Now I know what it is. It’s the passive voice. Instead of the indirect phrasing using the verb “to get”, maybe we really should simply say “Doing Things“. GTD isn’t about getting other people to do things —…
-
Design Research is a Design Process
I have a tendency to be extremely skeptical about user research in the design process. This is mostly because so much of it is, IMHO, (a) fundamentally bad (e.g., employing sloppy research methods or hamfisted statistical analyses), (b) flatly dishonest (e.g., dressing unscientific research in pseudo-scientific drag in order to justify a desired result), and…
-
Kindle Review in the Form of a Photo Collage
‘m not going to say much about Kindle — as an iPhone owner, I find both the device and the service colossally dumb. But the breathless excitement over the supposed “death of the book” is even more preposterous, especially to book lovers like my wife and me. For us, books, periodicals, and printed matter of…
-
In Defense of Graphic Design on the Web
At the Speak Up graphic design blog, Armin Vit laments the lack of “landmark” or canonical web designs. After giving several examples of iconic designs that are truly landmarks in the history of graphic design, from Paul Rand’s IBM logo in the 1950s to Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters in the 1990s, he writes: Myself,…
-
Lying with (Advertising) Statistics
—
by
A running theme here at graphpaper.com is the debunking of shoddy research methodologies and junk science used to lend authority to and help guide decisions in the design professions. I want to encourage my readers, and the industry as a whole, to (a) stop being so gullible about the research they hear about in the…