Increased access to personal data has enabled brands to communicate more effectively with their audiences. R/GA’s Chloe Gottlieb looks at how this information is now being used to motivate consumers to change lifestyles

We’ve seen some great gadgets and equipment for designers. So many cool stuff, that we could actually assemble infinite perfect office spaces! Every week we’ll assemble a perfect office, and we’d like you to help us. What equipment would the perfect office have?

Not only gadgets and equipment, but also furniture, sound system, gaming stuff (for lunch time!). A designer is totally allowed to dream with the perfect office, and that’s what we’re gonna do here! Comment telling us your suggestions, or even better, you may tell us via twitter.  Alright? I hope you guys enjoy this brief selection. Cheers!

Copenhagen Chair

Mid-century modern design meets old-world club attitude in the Copenhagen Chair. Sporting an egg-like design inspired by 1950s Danish design, the chair is wrapped in hand-distressed leather for a look that belongs in a long-standing cigar bar, and sits atop a brushed aluminum base that lets it swivel 360 degrees. Also great choice for the aspiring villainous world dominator’s desk. (at Uncrate)

Smash Hit – Shelf

From “The Who” to “The Clash”, from Jimi Hendrix to Kurt Cobain, guitar smashing has become a time-honoured sacrament of rock ‘n’ roll. Bring this gesture of irreverence and fervour to your home, captured in a truly unique design that’s ready to steal the show in any ambiance. Smash Hit’s delicate matte lacquer finish is complemented by striking vinyl wall decors, which can be interchanged, allowing you to always update the shelf with a fresh and intriguing new look. (at Design Spotter)

Monsters Seating

Giant, soft, elastic monster seating “trained to put you in very uncomfortable positions.” The project is a collaboration between Pieke Bergmans and Innofa/Stretch Textiles, exhibiting at via Tortona 12 during Milan Design Week. (at Moco Loco)

Offside Wenge Table Football

A convertible foosball table that can be used as a dining table. The “playing surface and bars can be removed and hung up on the wall like a painting. In its place a wooden board can be used to make it a normal table.” A tempered glass table top is also available. (at Moco Loco)

Log & Squirrel Self Watering Planter

Pour water into the log and wait for the little squirrel to pop up and say hello. As long as you can see the squirrel you’ll know that your plant is a happy little plant but if the squirrel ducks back down into the log, it’s time to water the plant! It’s a perfectly pleasant planter for the home or the office. (at 7Gadgets.com)

iCharge Eco DX Solar Power

The iCharge Eco DX Solar Power is capable of harnessing the Sun’s power to recharge your cellphone but it is also possible to use a USB port or an AC Adapter to recharge it’s included 1350mAh battery. (at7Gadgets.com)

Preparation is key to successful management of any project, and design projects are no different. The more preparation that both client and designer do right at the start, the more smoothly the work will go.

I find checklists can be very useful, so I’ve prepared a checklist of things that clients should provide their designer at the outset. To follow this list will ensure the client and designer are dealing professionally as well as creating an efficient workflow.

A budget

Knowing the client’s budget allows the designer to establish what they will be able to realistically achieve for the money, and to perhaps suggest a range of options.

A complete list of the client’s design requirements

The client must make clear at the beginning just how much design work they will require, e.g. layout for a business card, letterhead and envelopes OR logo design plus web design plus email marketing template. Occasionally unexpected new design needs emerge for the client when a job is well underway, but any “extras” which are requested after work has commenced will involve more time and money, and should be bound by a new contract.

I once had a prospective client say “We don’t know yet how many layouts we want, so can you just give us a rough quote estimate in the meantime?” How can a designer quote on an unknown quantity or scale of work? That would be like asking an architect to quote for designing your house but not telling him how many rooms you want. It’s impossible.

A clear outline of why the design work is necessary and what the client expects to achieve

Whether it’s a print campaign, posters for a conference stall or a multimedia presentation, every design job involves a goal to be fulfilled. It’s good for the client to think through precisely what that goal is when preparing to meet with the designer. Equally, it’s important for the designer to ask questions about the client’s objectives, because the designer’s job is primarily about meeting the client’s needs.

An outline of who the target market or audience is for the design work

This is very important information which will guide a designer in all aspects of the work they do. An advertisement or poster aimed at teenage boys will look vastly different to one designed to catch the attention of their parents. Look at a well-designed promotional campaign and you will easily be able to tell who it has been designed for. A client who has a detailed understanding of their target market will get the design which best suits their needs.

A deadline

Even if the work isn’t urgent, a deadline is important for effective time management. Unless the scale of the design work is small, it may be useful for the client and the designer to negotiate a series of deadlines for stages of work.

High quality images

If the client has an existing logo to be used in the design work, it should be provided in vector format. The most common vector formats are Postscript (.eps) and Illustrator (.ai). A vector format allows the logo to be made bigger or smaller without losing image quality and clarity. A .jpg file is not a vector format and may not represent a client’s logo at its best, depending on its size.

Any photographs provided by the client should have a high resolution. The best resolution for photographs is 300dpi (dots per inch). I always recommend this to my clients even if the photographs will go on the web. Although the final photo will be published on the web at the lower resolution of 72dpi, I prefer a higher resolution to begin with. This enables me to better optimise any photographs (where necessary) and there is greater scope for resizing.

Images and text in their final form

Any text, photographs, illustrations or other material provided by the client should be given to the designer before work commences. It can be a drain on time and resources if a designer is left waiting for these things halfway through a project. All materials provided by the client should be in their final form with no future revisions necessary. Any changes which have to be made after the design work has been done will cost time and money.

Ownership info for third party images and text

When the client is providing images or text sourced from someone else, it’s crucial to also provide information on the legal permissions which have been obtained for the use of the material (if any are required). If attribution is required, the details should be provided to the designer before any work commences. This also applies for any other material (e.g. music or video) obtained from a third party.

Samples of previous design work (where applicable)

If a client has a seasonal marketing campaign, or their corporate identity needs to be revised, it will help to provide past design samples to the current designer. It’s useful to discuss what worked or didn’t work for the client last time, particularly in terms of customer/audience response or the direction which the client and/or their organisation wishes to take in future.

This may seem like an extensive list but all of the above can easily be covered during the first meeting to discuss the design brief.

I’ve written before about the valuable role that skeptics play in a creative team. Although these poo-poo’ers that love to find fault with new ideas can be annoying, they’re always helpful – and essential to making ideas happen. Without them, we can get intoxicated on idea generation and fail to focus, refine our ideas, and follow through enough to succeed. So skeptics are good.However, skeptical does not mean cynical. I have observed in some teams a dangerous dynamic where skeptics turn cynical and negative. Rather than try to fix problems, they obsess over what is broken. Not only does this further obstruct finding an expedient resolution, it also sucks energy out of the team.

Here’s the difference:

The skeptic: “I’m concerned about the issue, and I think we need to revisit X and Y. Perhaps we want to try Z instead? Or maybe there is a way we can tweak Y to work?”

The cynic: “We did not discuss the issue enough. X and Y are both wrong. We’re not approaching this in the right way.”

Notice how both people disagree, but the skeptic is pushing the search for a solution while the cynic is simply focused on what is wrong.

Rather than try to fix problems, they obsess over what is broken.

In a creative environment that moves a mile a minute, everyone should act with a bias towards resolution. This means discussing the problem with the intention of solving it rather than embellishing it. As a leader of a creative team, you should expect possible solutions from everyone, even those that are pessimistic. The possible solutions don’t need to be the right solutions, and they don’t need to be fully constructed.

The process of discussing a problem in the language of resolution can help a team maintain enough energy to debate the options. Like throwing spaghetti on a wall, the more solutions proposed, the more likely one sticks. If you’re the team skeptic, you can rest assured knowing that debating the merits of various solutions will shed more light on the problem.

Many leaders insist that adversity only serves to strengthen a team. Problems help us better understand our product and further refine the way we work. Unfortunately, problems also bring out the worst in people. Tempers, insecurities, and fears are most likely to flare up during conflict. Nevertheless, the best teams are able to weather the storm by keeping their eyes on the prize – the prospect of resolution.
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This post was written by Behance Founder & CEO Scott Belsky, whose new book, Making Ideas Happen, chronicles the methods of exceptionally productive creative people and teams. Learn more about MIH.

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I’ve seen many blogs and many people (usually people that hates Flash) telling that search engines can’t index content inside Flash movies and that Flash websites can never rank high, and that’s not true at all.

Google started indexing the content of Flash movies in June 2008 and have been improving the way it works since then.

This presentation points out some things that can be done to improve flash websites ranking:

One big advantage that blogs/wikis and other HTML sites have over Flash websites is that the content carries many semantical markup that helps the crawler to specify that the content is more relevant to a specific topic while the flash content doesn’t carry any extra information that differentiate heading, subhead, paragraphs from a decorative text… – for the crawler is like opening a simple .txt file – another major “issue” is that Flash websites usually have a different structure/navigation/content than HTML websites, it’s really uncommon to see a website with a lot of textual content (like a wiki or blog) done using flash, and that’s one of the reasons why it usually ranks worse than other kinds of websites.

A huge misconception is believing that a website is going to rank higher just because it was created using HTML instead of Flash. If the website has the same kind of interaction, navigation and content than a Flash website and it heavily relies on JavaScript to work (load external content, navigation, etc..) it will probably rank worse than a Flash website since web-crawlers doesn’t process JavaScript very well. – Of course there are ways to make Ajax/JavaScript search-engine friendly but most people don’t do it.

Make websites for users and not for search engines! A good user-experience worth many times more than a good markup, the number and quality of links pointing to your website is a key factor for the rank positioning (much more than the quality of the markup). Create a remarkable experience and interesting content that users will want to share, that’s the best way to have a successful website…

That’s it!

The Day AbairLeat! Pilot was unleashed… Put together by Pat Comer (Legend)

Google Buzz, the addition to Google Mail that lets users share thoughts, links, photos and more with their friends, is off to a big start: hitting 9 million posts and comments before the end of its third day. That comes out to 160,000 posts and comments an hour — what Mashable (the blog world’s social media Bible) calls a “staggering, staggering number.”

But will it catch on? Does the world need another news-sharing device?

To be honest, my first instinct was skepticism. After all, I already have places to share my favorite links: Twitter, Facebook, emails, Gchat away messages and conversations. Why did I need another platform? Of course, that was a common reaction to Google chat as well. Most Gmail users at the time were already using instant message services like AIM. They didn’t “need” another IM program. But the simple genius of Gchat was its location. The email window turned out to be the logical place to have real-time conversations because it was already a window dedicated to keeping in touch with friends and colleagues. And Gchat took off.

The simple genius of Google Buzz (if you’re already a Gmail user) is also its location, directly under your inbox icon. This just makes sense. When users sign into Gmail they see two numbers in the top left corner: first, the number of unread emails, and second, the number of unread Buzz items. One number for the things other people want you to do, and one number for the things other people want you to read.

Much of the commentary on Buzz has focused on whether it “kills” Twitter or Facebook. I’m not ready to give the emperor’s thumb down to either of those behemoths, but certainly Twitter has more to worry about. Facebook for me is still a pulsating yearbook first, photo album second and news sharer third. Twitter is a news sharer exclusively, and it’s seen healthier days. Homepage traffic has flat-lined recently, and it’s conceivable that — given the now-famous statistic that more than half of Twitter registers have never tweeted — we’ve entered a period of decelerated excitement about the product. Buzz, which can import Twitter feeds (along with Flickr and Google Reader), debuts with an audience of 150 million and growing. What’s more, it’s an audience that is sticking around, since I’m inclined to agree with Farhad Manjoo that it’s the best mail service on the planet.

But eyes on the prize: What does this mean for advertising, which drives more than 90 percent of Google revenue? It’s wise to think about Buzz in the framework of Google’s ad strategy, which emphasizes the growing mobile market. Fundamentally, Buzz gives Google’s ad robots a better sense of what you’re reading, what you’re interested in, and accordingly, what you’ll buy.

Des Bishop visited St Joseph ’s Secondary School (The Bish) on Friday  to promote our very own “AbairLeat!” programme for teaching Gaeilge. A number of 1^st year classes in the Bish are taking part in the nationwide Pilot Scheme. Des  has contributed freely of his time and energy in preparing content and in promoting the online programme (maith an fear Des!)

We wanted to document  firsthand how it is being used by the teachers and students so we enlisted Galway’s very own award winning Film maker Pat Comer, keep an eye on abairleat.com for the footage.

A number of Galway’s finest press gang showed up for the event so hopefully we’ll see some media coverage.