Front door to Anita Cooney's home, hosting the DI board.

I’m heavily involved in helping DesignInquiry integrate its public website, the DesignInquiry journal website, and archives from as far back  as 2004. In addition, we’ve been working on figuring out our board structure and exploring the future of the organization.

It’s crazy to think about the course DesignInquiry has taken over the past couple of years. I joined the board in 2007, having attended in 2005 and 2006. The organization grew out of the Maine Summer Institute of Graphic Design; in 2005, DesignInquiry was like a miniature grad school with “faculty” including Elliott Earls, Doug Scott, Marlene McCarty, Rick Valicenti and others.

The experience at the time was so amazing for me that I described to friends my emergence on the other side of DesignInquiry as awakening from a “design depression” – something I didn’t even know I was experiencing. It changed the way I thought about design. And in subsequent years, as the structure changed to flat heirarchy, it not only helped me to remember that my particular voice was valuable in design but that intimate collaboration with others can be transformative in the way we think about design and life.

Years later I still benefit from that first DesignInquiry. I believe so much in the work the organization does as it has focused its purpose on creating and disseminating design thought. We have a lot of work to do to figure out where this is going long term, and it’s exciting to be involved.

An improvement, yes?

Beveryl Hsu was an intern of mine over the summer of 2008 and graduated from CMU in 2009.

About a year ago she created some Helvetica cookie cutters which are all over the design blogs right now.

Congrats, Beverly, on the coverage! Now get those cookie cutters into production and make some, uh, dough, while the getting’s good.

You can see Beverly’s Helvetica cookie cutters here.

I downloaded the PDF this morning and it’s a worthy read. Get it here.

• Laminating paper makes it hard (and by hard I mean impossible, because who is going to have the time to peel laminate from chipboard) to recycle.
• Why would a non-recyclable plastic or plastic without a recyclable content indicator be used when recyclable content plastic is no more expensive?
• Did you really choose foamcore as part of your packaging plan?
• Have you considered the environmental implication of every single piece of packaging involved in your custom mold-injected plastic and polystyrene clamshell?

A few weeks ago a bought a candle at Target and was disappointed that the box the candle came in, though about 99% paper, had some kind of plastic – something like transparent tape – holding together the corners. The problem was that this was inside the layers of paper used to build the box, so it wasn’t on the surface and could not be easily removed.

This leaves the consumer with few options: do they recycle the paper & chipboard with the plastic in place, do they throw out the box? For me, it makes me wonder about the choices that were made in creating this box. Did Target even know this was involved in the production of the box? Did they spec it?

I feel constant disappointment with big business that make bad decisions in these respects. I feel like “being green” is commonplace enough that I would expect businesses like Target and others that are progressive with respect to other social issues to be progressive on the environmental front.

What also annoys me is that I thought I was buying a item packaged in a 100% paper carton. I’m not sure if this is a case of “fool me once, shame on you” or “fool me twice, shame on me”. Either way, it serves as a reminder that a little skepticism or cynicism may have prevented this experience.

Go check out:
Pavement Shoes

Lauren Zurchin Studios

Susan Caplan

There are some really obvious decisions one can make when planning print collateral including whether or not the paper we print on is recycled or is sourced through environmentally friendly means, or inks and finishes are low impact (water or soy based). We can look at the print vendor we’re using: are they located thousands of miles from our door and is the shipping from the plant to our threshold offsetting any benefit we might have gained through using other sustainable resources?

I’ve encountered a number of projects recently where the long-term viability of print media is challenged by many factors; changing information is a constant factor in these situations. Companies merge or a rebranding makes collateral obsolete. Hours of operation change, or a major product category is introduced or eliminated.

One of the big things I try to get my clients to consider is sustainability beyond their paper and ink choices. What can we do as a team to help create pieces that will result in little waste, have flexible use, and long-term viability? What are ways that we can make sure that we’re not sending 100 or 1,000 or 100,000 pieces to the recycling bin?

Case in point: One client of mine recently launched a new brand. We had their business cards printed on make-ready stock which actually intervened before scrap was sent to the recycling bin: their job was ganged up on press with another unrelated job. This was an extra step and wasn’t the cheapest option but reduced waste on another company’s project. This was something small that could be applied on a master scale, without a lot of effort, that over thousands or hundreds of thousands of companies could make a really big impact. Virgin stock wasn’t sacrificed in the name of vanity.

It makes me wonder: what other ideas are there for reducing the environmental impact of print pieces and what can be done to improve the sustainability of the pieces that are produced? Ideas, anyone?

What does this mean? That a designer can specify the use of a typeface not on the viewer’s machine!

This has been done before (albeit unreliably) with some technology that Microsoft developed, but this is within a CSS specification which means it’s not a hack! And eventually (at least in theory, even if it’s 5 or 10 years from now), it will work across the board in future browsers.

A few good reads on the topic:
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/beautiful-fonts-with-font-face/
and
http://craigmod.com/journal/font-face/
(Pardon the dumb punctuation in this 2nd one. While it really doesn’t bother me too much in web typefaces, when I see it in another face it doesn’t look so hot.)

I wonder how long it will take to get all of this working

Thanks to Mike Essl for the links and the info that FF 3.5 is out.

(BTW, Turns out Safari has supported this for a while, since v 3.1. How didn’t I know this?)

I was reading through some entries of his from before I added his RSS feed to my reader and came across his entry ‘How to make money with SEO’.

This is exactly the kind of advice I give people when they want to hire me to help them with SEO. I do not offer smoke, mirrors, red pills or blue pills, special effects or any other magic to help a client’s website perform better in search engines.

What I do is make sure we’re using the right technologies (that don’t impede search engines from understanding content) and covering our bases while looking into ways to be findable. I didn’t invent the term findability, but when I had a conversation with a prospect who wanted to be #1 for their industry even though their market share did not make this a likely situation, I had a moment of clarity that helped me to clearly communicate what I could help them with: I would help them make their business findable so that someone who caught wind of their company – even if they didn’t recall all of the specifics – could find them online quickly and easily.

It is rare that a business creates a new market in a region but it does happen. When we opened Dozen Cupcakes nearly 3 years ago, there was another cupcake bakery opening at the same time. I knew that it was unlikely that people would, upon hearing that the cupcake craze had come to Pittsburgh, remember the name of the bakery their friend/coworker/newspaper told them about. But I was confident that many people would go online and search for “pittsburgh cupcakes” or some variation.

We set forth creating a network of inbound links to the site, built our site using properly structured code with the right semantic mechanisms, and crossed our fingers that our competitors would not have the same savvy. They did not. I am confident that this was one of many factors leading to our success: within the next month or two we will have two more stores opening for a total of four locations.

For a business the opportunity to be in this kind of situation is rare. But even so, it was findability that put us at the top. I took an educated guess at people’s searching behavior and it paid off. People found us because we made ourselves available.

When I work with a client, I remind them to think about how their constituents will find them (sometimes the result is that we don’t need to do anything to their website because their constituents won’t be using it). But if their target is online, I help them keep it simple and do their best to speak to the customer in a way that will _help_ them be found and be understood. Successful search engine optimization sets the stage for better things.