PixelMEDIA

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the Ad Club’s Edge Conference. Positioned as “It’s where you go to get inspired,” the conference focused on topics ranging from the effects of technology on the creative process to the extremes agencies go through to retain a large client.

The presenters included an impressive list of industry heavyweights like Baba Shetty, Chief Media Officer at Hill Holiday, Suzie Reider, Director of Ad Sales and Marketing for YouTube, and Lance Jensen, Creative Director for Modernista! All had engaging presentations but the most profound (at least to me) was Brian Collins, Chief Creative Officer and Chairman of COLLINS. His discussion touched on a few, well articulated points, but the most interesting to me was the effect of society and its direct influence on art and creative endeavors. (more…)

I’ve been working with a client who came to PixelMEDIA looking for an Information Architect to turn an existing desktop application into a browser-based user experience. They invited us to support their in-house programmers and a third-party visual design company. At the initial project kickoff meeting, it became apparent that the three parties at the table had wildly differing ideas on how the application worked and what the vision for the next version of the product should be.

But it also turned out, that the majority of the client stakeholders were puzzled as to what PixelMEDIA was providing. They didn’t understand what Information Architecture was, and hadn’t even thought about the overall user experience for the product. Yet, they had requested an IA. How odd. (more…)

A few weeks ago, I posted a question on the whiteboard outside of the Experience Design Cubes:

What’s the difference between ‘information” and “content?”

I wasn’t looking for answers, just ideas and maybe a spirited discussion. Heck, the best I could do was. “I know it when I see it.” Check out some of the responses from the whiteboard.

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Well, Bill Gates said it during his CES keynote, which sucked by the way. Surprise. The Wiki has a page on it, however anemic, and there’s a group called NUI (e.g. – Natural User Interface) that has assembled to explore this emerging area of interaction design.

So I of course explored last night; thinking what is it? A new word for the same old shat, or something truly different? And if it is different, how different, and how does it compare with what we’re familiar with today, or is that not fair to ask? NUI is actually pronounced ‘new’ - so maybe someone’s thought real hard about this, being new that is.

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