In assisting a colleague in preparing her portfolio I have searched the web high and low for excellent examples to assist in pages, headings, and possibly even layout. Finding diverse, responsive examples is not that easy. I believe this is because many ID professionals have an extensive education in Bloom's’ taxonomy, rubrics, effective course development, summative and formative assessments, etc. However, their graphic design education may be limited. This is odd to me—coming from a graphic design and communications background to instructional design. The foundations of graphic design and ID are closely related and in some cases duplicative. It’s all in the execution.

Rather than outline the differences and similarities here, I’ll skip the commentary and share a few well-executed Instructional Designer portfolios that give a comprehensive view of the professional and their skills, while also presenting an elegant layout and design aesthetic.

• Simone Jenifer: this portfolio is a subset of a graphic design portfolio and presents all media and samples on a single, responsive page.
• Kristin Anthony: Another blog-style site with fully responsive designed pages, and lightbox project pages. Beautifully executed
• Rachel Barnum: Blog-style Instructional Design Portfolio page
• Shalini Mathias: Prezi, interactive, motion graphics-based portfolio. THis is an interesting use of this medium. Featured projects are interesting and well-designed.
• Ginger Nichols: Responsive pinboard style portfolio, which features a separate page of individual projects

Once you've been inspired by these take a quick view at best practices for developing your online Instructional Design Portfolio, from eLearning Industry blog.

I have a potential freelance design client who wants her small charter school website to be everything to all current existing, and future potential audiences. It’s always eye-opening to have these preliminary conversations about the goal of the site. She has every confidence that the designer—whoever she chooses to complete this project—will be able to translate the mission, vision, and voice of her school using the web medium—as well as cram in every single tidbit of information onto the homepage, with text links, widgets, and social updates galore. I’m equally confident that she will come to understand the reality of the new site through a little research.

Basically, I told her ‘No’ your site can’t and shouldn’t be everything to everybody. Your site should tell the story of educational excellence, academic rigor, and nurturing mentorship for your students. It should be a useful portal for information gathering...This tool is primarily a sales pitch and secondarily an information hub, wrapped up in your inviting (and truthful) narrative. This means that your entry page will not be all things to all people.

To best explain my point I opened several browser windows with university websites and have her scroll the first page of each, asking her questions as she did this:

• Message: What, if anything can you guess about this organization from the page?
• Audience: To whom does the page speak?
• Action: What if anything do you want to click on, on this page?

 Click to view the mobile home pages of the following universities: Morgan State University Website, Gallaudet University, Loyola University Maryland, Delaware State University, and the newly redesigned Notre Dame of Maryland University: 

I took simple screen shots of each segment of each homepage and stitched them back together. What do you think are the most and least effective sites...do they achieve their goal of marketing the unique university experience..inviting further investigation, answering questions?

In looking at these seemingly unrelated (to her project) websites this client was able to look objectively at the content and come up with her own insights and conclusions without my forcing the issue.

1. There is a balance of information, words, and images that makes a site appealing.
2. There is the need for compelling story-telling to invite your audiences to dig deeper. A successful homepage tells your story and offers valuable information
3. Offering too much OR too little information to your audiences means an unsuccessful design. Which means that you have paid a graphic designer, and spent hours creating and updating content, and maybe even learning a new content management system for very little return on your investment.

After this brief exercise I was able to restart the conversation of the goal of her redesigned homepage and we narrowed her target audience to this: parents of high achieving elementary school students…obviously we dug a bit deeper for a more precise definition of the audience, but that’s the basic gist. After this was established, we discussed the secondary/tertiary audiences. They won’t be left out of the site design, but the information will be placed strategically, to guide visitors’ journey through the site, as they select the audience to which they belong.

There is always more than 1 audience for this the of project. However, in speaking effectively to your primary audience you can—at times—speak just as clearly to others.

I designed and sent out my first corporate e-newsletter back in 2010. The technology and the MagnetMail CMS were both fairly new to me. I was professionally familiar with the concept, but had never before had my designs virtually blasted into the inbox of over 10,000 professionals in one stroke of a keyboard! Years earlier, I was charged with layout of the quarterly (print) newsletter of the American Institute of Architects, a wholly different animal.

Today, I’ve just completed the layout of a new experiment in e-newsletters. My organization tasked me with turning a Google Site into the host and archive for our monthly news. I’m marrying website and newsletter here., now having the opportunity to hide expanded content in the eNews domain.  This is a far cry from the beginning of our marketing efforts…take a peek at the timeline:

From a multi-page PDF, to an online document, to today's site...

First, a print PDF that at times spanned 7 pages, Next 2-page Printable PDF, Now the Google Site

Enewsletters, while distinct in their layout and content are still built on the foundations of effective writing and basic HTML—things many design professions should be grounded in. What’s the difference between the e-newsletter, print newsletter, and a regular website?

Compare: Newsletter, E-News, & Websites

These three are all content marketing tools, simultaneously informational and promotional. However, they employ slightly different delivery methods.

NEWSLETTERS
The newsletter is largely a print publication, with multiple pages, multiple articles, and (usually) multiple advertisements, to financially sustain such a expensive routine undertaking. Printing costs money folks.

• Benefits of a newsletter include, very importantly, the user experience. Newsletters are delivered to members, there’s a exclusivity in membership (… this is not something that just anybody receives)! Recipients of this newsletter can read and reread articles, dog-ear the pages, make notes in margins, use them to augment scholarly work, and save them for later…or even just place them strategically around an office or living room to look smart.
• Cons of a newsletter: a major con is that while everything above it possible, you will rarely know if people do one or more of those activities. Paper and ink do not yield analytics.

WEBSITES
Websites are fantastic for sharing your company, organization, and ideas with your target audiences and anyone else interested in your topic—who stumbles across your site. It’s a fact that many of us who should be updating our website content on a regular basis, rarely do. Instead websites are repositories for much important, if static, information. We more often rely on social media for up-to-the-minute updates for our clients, audience, and followers.

• Benefits of websites: your voice, your design, your rules! This is a huge benefit over having an online presence comprised only of social media. As for others, your website is a unique URL that can the address for seekers of knowledge, truth, or your expertise. The more it gets known, the more it is shared, and saved, and distributed by search engines. It can grow in popularity without any additional monetary output on the part of your audiences ...hopefully that makes sense.
• Cons of a website: remember to update your website! Larger sites can become unwieldy and difficulty to keep up-to-date on a regular basis. Sad but true.

ENEWS
This medium relies upon two things we’ve already discussed, effective writing and websites. The enews letter is not a fully developed website with sub-pages, main and secondary navigation. Instead, it’s snippets of useful, interesting content that leads the reader AWAY from the newsletter TO your websites, or contact forms, or articles, or informational pages…things that invariably live on your website, related websites, or your social media platforms. They also rely upon pithy, interesting writing.

www.kb.mailchimp.com/campaigns/ab/about-ab-testing-campaigns

Effective writing is a science: Enews designers go through rigorous testing—of seemingly simplistic aspects of the content—to find a formula that works. In my career, I’ve worked with different communications teams to test various aspects of organizations’ newsletters for the winning combinations that yield a  greater rates of  opens, click-throughs, reads, subscribes (as opposed to unsubscribe), and shares… much of the important testing starts at the subject line. Poorly written subjects mean your email might never get opened. Effective e-News testing goes beyond that, of course, from the placement of images in relation to text, to different ways to present seemingly indistinct information.

• Benefits of ENews: If you want to know how many of your audience is reading your newsletter, it’s all right there in your analytics. Enews publications also dive traffic to other places here you can track your audience, your website, and social media streams.
• Cons of ENews: Brevity is the key here. Your enews article MUST be a textual sound bite—the appetizer that entices your reader to click to read more, learn more, or sign up! It’s possible to host a feature article in your enewsletter, but it’s a terrible risk that your readers will stop there and not interact with the rest of the analytics driven document. Needless to say, you want good writers working on the e-news, people who can turn a phrase….not the most verbose member of your team.

Learn more about testing Enews and mailing lists from Media Shift
Learn more about testing campaigns from MailChimp

Your Website Vs. Social Media Presence


Social media platforms are great for building community and knowledge of your goods, services, brand...but you don't own or control the platform. We'r all aware of the ever-changing landscape of social media: look at how 'groups', 'pages', 'individual' Facebook account (sharing and privacy) rules have changed in the past few years. Users get very little input on how these evolve.

A website allows you to market yourself on your own terms. On your own site you get to:

• set rules and guidelines for how you share content
• have and build direct relationships with your audience
• organize your branding content how you want  it organized

Roberto Blake gives a lot of food for thought on the topic:

This week, I'm taking my own best advice; creative professionals need to have an accessible online presence and a place to showcase their best, recent work.

It's time again for me to update my website. In the last 3 years I've completed several campaigns, design projects, and PR writing gigs. It's been a busy thousand(+) days! My current website doesn't completely reflect these fresh new projects; they really should be collected in that location. Plus, there are 4 blogs that I maintain--this blog, a personal blog, and two educational blogs that I use for undergraduate courses. That's a lot of web assets! Hence the update.

While I still rely on a responsive design model for this site, my approach is more personal (updates should be completed byAugust 28).

Here are a few shots of what's to come:

The brand is creative, informal, and personal. A change from the last, a quirky take on academia.

In my current site I reference student work--posted on the educational blogs--but now I showcase them.

 If you haven't seen my last site update. Check out my last redesign--way back when.

Yesterday a colleague engaged me by lamenting her current job search—she’s now on to the third interview. (sarcasm)That’s great. People in human services have three—maybe four interviews. You know what graphic designers have? Homework.

When I mentioned homework to her she paused, nodded and said “oh, yeah. You probably had to do things with PowerPoint, right? I decided not to take the bait. Besides she wanted to talk about her current precarious position in the deep, uncharted waters of the job search of a new grad school grad.

Let me tell you, graphic design interview homework can be intense. Although it was a few years back I remember this one vividly. I designed a marketing strategy to engage a young, civically engaged audience, who wanted to live greener. In addition to the communications plan, I also built social media sites (FB, Twit) a blog, a fully functioning website and a print events calendar that could fold down into a recycled billfold wallet.

And you want to talk to me about a grueling three interviews. Puh’lease.




-Simone

Lately I've been pondering the range of skills that I've cultivated after X years out of graduate school. Well, actually thinking about my skills as compared to those who graduated from the same program--at the same time. Back in school, I could see my future laid out plainly: a few years developing my craft in nonprofit organizations as the graphic designer, then maybe another volunteer or pro bono role at a professional organization, but eventually landing as director of design strategy / communications / marketing for a large national nonprofit--like the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (kind of finishing up where I started).

After school ended and I delved into work in the nonprofit sector my interests grew and my focus changed. Eventually I followed a different thread into higher ed. It's been interesting and challenging. Challenging because of the tools, and interesting because of the messages. Marshall McLuhan famously stated that 'the medium is the message,' and boy was he right. Across so may industries, the messages are universal.

This past weekend I'm talking to a girlfriend who's in year two of conducting a passive job search; sometimes she looks and decides not to apply, sometimes I look for her--and she decides not to apply. It dawned on me that we both graduated in the same major, around the same time, and we're both in higher ed. However, that's were the similarities stop.

This good friend of mine is an excellent technical writer, designs almost exclusively for print, takes most of her own photographs (for publications), and she has much more person-to-person contact at work. Conversely, I work mostly in web and digital media (although I'd give an eye-tooth for more print projects), my writing is almost always editorial, and some days I'm half-crazed because I over eight solid hours of computer screens.

It's not bad just different. We'll never be in competition for the same job.

My recent ponderings got me thinking about what other fellow grads are doing with their advanced degree in Publications Design (with concentrations in graphic design, writing, or digital media). I grabbed the first ten names in the private UB Pub Design group on LinkedIn (to which I belong), extracted their names, gender, and current position in order to build the graphs below. Here's the skinny, as illustrated by PowerPoint:

60% Female, 40% Male - 40% Directors (Communications, Marketing, Art, Design, and Production), Yes, I'm represented in this group as well--as one of the instructional designers (close enough).

Late last summer I got the proclamation from on high that my team was entering the mobile app business. After purchase of DPS we’d be tasked with creating a digital mobile app to distribute to our various constituent groups. And I’d be in charge. It was an exciting prospect and the time has finally come for this work to begin.

This community technology mobile app—that drops in a few months—will be written by me, designed by me, tested by me, and marketed by me. Sound like fun? In the past week I’ve created a rough outline, listed existing and necessary assets, and worked out an editorial schedule; that’s right, I’ve got to create copy for a couple dozen articles of varying lengths. My calendar has already been blocked out and the editorial process begins next week. Following that, I’ll visit our marketing department to scour their image database for photogenic people interacting with technology to liberally pepper the app pages. Then the real work begins.

Also in the last week I checked out some fantastic DPS apps for inspiration. That was a fruitful endeavor. In addition to seeing how developers market their completed creations, I also downloaded several of the design and played with the functionality. Skylife is my absolute favorite!

More to come!

Washington Post just tweeted this and I had to share. The Animated GIF has gone from unsophisticated cartoons meant to distract on early websites to  an art form.  The winner of the Inagural Motion Picture prize is shown at the top of the WP Style Blog article. However, these runner ups are my favorite:

Finalist, night category (Matthew Clarke/Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London)

Finalist, action category (Micaël Reynaud/Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London)

Well, I've been doing responsive site designs for clients in recent years but have neglected to update my site with the proper code and functionality. earlier this year I took the time to rectify that issue and also added higher quality images; owing to the mobile move toward retina displays (more about that in a future article).

The redesign also has to do with my current work in teaching, training and academia. One website reviewer said that she noticed that my site was much more academic than in previous iterations. I'm happy with the result.

With out much more ado, here's a preview of simonejenifer.org:

Thanks owwwlab!

Stock Images can be expensive, those of us in the non-profit sector, education, and rapidly-shrinking in house design departments are well aware.  Here are some sites that can give you the free images that you need to really make your designs pop!

Public Domain images and materials are ‘publicly available’ and not covered by intellectual property or copyrights. Today, graphic a design and digital media is abundant, so there is a high demand for images for use in print, web, and multimedia.

Here are are four public domain sites to pin and save. Enjoy:

http://publicdomainpictures.net

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://photos-public-domain.com

http://www.sxc.hu

This week is actually a bear. I've had meetings and appointments early and for the next two days there will be 8-hour trainings. The icing promises to be a few more meetings on Friday followed by a brainstorming session with a student; who knows how that will turn out.

My free time is occupied with a fun web project, that will encompass social branding as well as the redesign of two sites. This client is a dynamic accountant--you heard me--who needs an online refresh. I've just got some preliminary before and afters. There will be more about the process as this project nears it's end. For now, here are a couple quick pics:

This is the starting point...

... And How to Avoid Them

You’ve picked the pieces to showcase in-person and in your online portfolio. Links to your portfolio now live on all of your identity pieces and you’re all set to get your new awesome job. So, how come employers aren’t champin’ at the bit to contact you after seeing your mad design skills?

It could be that you’ve made one or more of the following mistakes on your portfolio site.

1. POOR TYPOGRAPHY IS A TURN OFF
Typography is one of the main pillars of graphic design. As someone in the market for a design job you’re expected to have a good grasp of typography best practices. Without these, even the least qualified art director will overlook you and your site.

THE FIX: Once you’ve created your site and included all columns of type, step away from it for a few hours. When you come back, review a wordy column of type and see if it needs any tweaks in the leading or tracking; do the headlines command attention or do they blend with your paragraphs? Finally be sure to keep line-length to below 80 characters—to enhance readability.

I just participated in a conversation on the topic with colleagues. It was a bit like preaching with a choir, but I want to share some of the commentary here.

I recently had the chance to work with a newly graduated designer who habitually goes straight to the computer whenever a design project is presented. If needing to change gears or develop more design solutions, there was always the need to go back to the drawing board; I personally, found it an inefficient process.

When faced with a new design challenge I always whip out my pencil and sketchbook. This is owing to my fine arts background; it's how I brainstorm, storyboard, script, plan, and develop my ideas. Plus, my poor memory means that I take a lot of notes, so there's always a hard-bound sketch book in my hand.

Here's how some of my seasoned colleagues replied when asked, "Do you sketch before you design?"

"Absolutely! I almost never design on the computer. The computer is a tool and that's it. My creativity flows faster and easier with a pen/pencil and paper. Plus you have a reason to spend an insane amount of money on cool drawing utensils and books!" - PD

"There has to be some preparation before spending the time in design. UX items need to come into play and UX protype tools such as Axure let the designer plan out the site and give it a testing before going into the visual design work. Or, it can be as simple as a drawing in a notebook to plan out a page. So, a sketch is part of the process and can give you as a designer a clear vision." - MS

"Absolutely, I can usually get half-a-dozen concepts out sketching in the time takes my computer to get warmed up. Purely from an efficiency perspective it makes sense." - JS

"90% of the time I do. The other 10%, I do what I call block sketching. It is where I go into Illustrator and just create shapes and build them together. I do this to create a font or build a wireframe for a website. It's quick fun and doesn't take long to get the idea from your head to screen." - TS

"Design begins with the thought process that follows a thorough investigation of the client's needs and the market they're in. Generally for me that is word based, especially for branding. I distil everything down to what I refer to a key words, a very concise summary of the discovery process. In turn this is the start of creating visual proposals and working with the client as 'ownership' by the client is vital. Other projects may be layout and production only where the client has already compiled the material but lacks the ability, skill and experience to turn the material into a professional piece of literature, or other form of marketing or promotional material, exhibition or packaging. Sometimes it is a combination of both. The vital skill for me is drawing out the essence of what is required before any form of creative work begins. Do I draw or sketch first after this? Yes, the pencil or pen is much more flexible than the computer. Do I present this to the client? Sometimes." - RS

Although he didn't participate in the disucssion, Milton Glaser said this about jumping on the computer to create  design, "Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking." Hey, the soup is hot, but is it good?

I really can't go into all of the details right now, but I will make the presentation available online to the Instructional Design Group for feedback once my first draft is complete. The goal of this training is to help instructors organize their course content to keep students engaged. Too often, academics believe that online instruction is akin to in-person, and it's not. Lectures no longer work. Therefore, presenting wordy blocks of text and exhaustive lists will get your course content ignored. Period.

Broken down to the barest of facts,  effective course pages and homepages both:

• introduce the subject matter, 
•  present clear navigation, 
•  are easy to visually scan, 
• and lead to more in-depth, robust content.

For the first time in recent history--four years or so--the graphic design job market does not lead the pack in creative services job postings. A newly graduated friend sent me his portfolio to review and then wanted to talk about the fact that his job search seemed to be in limbo. He's been applying for a couple months now, with nary a nibble.

Hey I just realized that I haven't made any recent updates on my work projects. It's that that I haven't been busy because I have! Recently completed was a web style guide for online courses, plus a workshop on using video lecture capture. Also a book and presentation of effective graphic design. There's also the freelance website project for a local Lutheran church, and I can't forget the infographic project that's almost complete. There're one or 2 other things, for now take a look a the evolution of the HTML5 video player that I've been developing for my university's streaming media server:

This is the final version. Look below for all it's iterations.

This screenshot looks more sophisticated than the actual page.

More realistic.

This is the out-of-the-box, page that I threw together. T'was step 1.

We started with this Open Source Flash Media Player that only supported FLVs. With the advent of HTML5 and the proliferation of mobile and handheld devices, Flash is now only  a good fallback option, not a first solution.

Like many designers in my peer group, I loathe conventional drop-down menus. Where once they provided added functionality and a sneak peek at the site map, many companies overuse the poor things. Often drop down menus make simple navigation complicated. At times I yearn for the day of the landing page.

Enter the Mega-Menu:

I saw this, www.eatright.org, the updated website of the American Dietetic Assn.Thank you,  Davis Design Partners  for giving  the dropdown menu back its dignity. This was achieved by creating a hybrid landing page/dropdown; when users roll over an item in the main navigation the content area changes to reveal the MEGA-menu:

• a section description
• “featured content” a.k.a your dropdown menu
• a beautiful user interface.

This is achieved through advanced javascript and incredibly elegant, functional graphic design. Kudos!!

In my frantic search for creative commons I came across a gorgeous design site. The subtle, clean color scheme and the simple navigation reminded me why I love web design. More specifically why I love portfolio design. Here's a sampling of the design that took my breath away. Cline&CO Graphic Design Studio

Writer and poet, Simone Eva Alexis has more talent in her left eye than I do in my whole being when it comes to the spoken and written word. She amazes me every time I see her.
Her site did not, however. We discussed a redesign over a year ago and played phone tag or just drank wine when we should've been talking business.

Today we've begun a project that will make her site more accessible and easier to navigate.  The first problem with the original site is that it does not work in most browsers.  Early version of IE, yes. But Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, or even IE 8, not at all.