Less is More: Building Simplicity into everything you do.

People visit your website because they’re looking for something. The best thing you can do is give them what they want. Quickly.

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It’s not the size of your logo, it’s the size of your “why”

“Make my logo bigger!” It’s a request from clients so common, in fact, it has spurred entire parody websites, browser plugins, and even music videos.

While this type of request certainly isn’t without merit, I often find that it is missing the strategic ‘WHY’ behind the request.

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Design Systems: A Recap of O’Reilly Design Conference & A Preview of DrupalCon Baltimore

Designing with a system goes by many names: atomic design, pattern libraries, modular design, component-based design…but regardless of what you call it, implementing a system can help make a project more consistent and scalable, and your team more efficient. In the recently released 2017 Design in Tech Report from John Maeda, shareable design systems are specifically called out, suggesting the method definitely having a moment. But, one thing we’ve noticed about all the discussion about design systems is that—generally speaking—they’re all from in-house groups. What about using a design system as a consultant?

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Ah-ha. Secrets to human-centered design.

After three very helpful, informative, conceptual and practical days of sessions at NTEN’s NTC, my final day was more refreshing and clarifying than I had expected. I chose well, in attending these two sessions.

An exploration of human-centered design

The first, My Dad and Other Real People Designed Our Online Strategy was led by Trista Kendall of the newly rebranded Stand.earth and Danielle Siembieda of Leonardo/ISAST

The session was an exercise in questions, essentially. We talked about who to ask questions of, what questions to ask, and how to make sure you’re asking the right questions. This was all based on their experience leveraging IDEO’s Field Guide to Human-Centered Design to help with their redesign.

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Thoughts on planning, designing, building, testing and marketing an app from #16NTCBuildApp

I bailed on a Session That Shall Remain Nameless, and was happy I landed at the session “So You Wanna Build an App for That: Experts Share Tips on Taking Apps from Need to Launch” run by communications consultant Lauren Girardin.

While there was some discussion about being sure that you really need to build an app (a topic I have written about previously)  the dialogue and discussions were very real-world focused and intended to get small groups thinking about challenges and considerations around planning, designing, building, testing and marketing an app.

Lauren reminded the group that there is a growing sentiment around thinking about app building as one that is done “with, not for an audience.” This set a great tone for the rest of the discussions and is great for teams to keep in mind throughout the process.

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Lost in Translation: Multilingual Site Issues

As the number of people who are not proficient in English grows dramatically every year, we at Taoti are being asked more and more to create multilingual websites. Drupal is an ideal platform for creating multilingual sites – Drupal core provides the fundamentals, while extended functionality is added via actively maintained modules from the open source community.

If your site requires the interface to be displayed in multiple languages or if you need to customize the interface of a single language site, the first step is to enable the multilingual capabilities of Drupal.

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Hex Codes: Spell your fav colors

HTML Color Chart

This page is really just a color code lookup chart for our clients who would like to specify exact colors. When referring to colors, please refer to the 6 digit color code (called the “hex code.”)

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Simple logos: complicated matters

Simple logos: complicated matters

Logos are not really all that big of a deal to make.  But if you want to do it right, you need to realize a couple of very key things:

The point of a logo is to provide a visual element that people can look at and instantly recognize.  Bonus points if the logo somehow reflects what you do or in some other way symbolizes something unique about your company.

  • Logos are for your customers—not you.
  • Logos need to be scalable and reproducible in all mediums and sizes.

Let’s look at these points in more depth…

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