As part of iPhone creative minds this week along with Apple’s WWDC, post-it can be used for iPhone paper prototype in a fashionable way!

There is a post-it design contest around it too! Have fun designing with paper!

Tags: creative post-it, design, design contest, iphone, iphone app, iphone prototype, paper prototype, post-it

One true and beautful thing about working on the websites is that you can let your imagination fly and do a lot of possible crazy or cute things.  I was reading Nokia Lab’s articles and found one page interesting enough to share with you.

Business Case: Nokia Lab has a beta database that failed one time. The situation impacted a lot of users who were using that database. Of course, that was a very bad experience and definitely bad impact on Nokia’s brand.

How Nokia reacted to this: They published one article about the problem the next day explaining the cause of the problem and they apologized. The article’s title stated clearly “my deepest and most sincere apologies”.

How they communicated this out: let a sorry dog tell visitors how sincerely they apologized

Result: The comments on this page show a strong positive feedback. This is how you can handle a bad situation with creative idea and even turn it into a good experience. Well done!

Tags: communication, creative, design, nokia

To continue the theme of 2009 trends, I want to share some of the web design trends that interest me.

Out-of-the-box layouts: it’s an old trend. Being unique and innovation always win. The hard part of having a out-of-the-box layout is how the uniqueness of one particular design can be tied with the business success as well. You can have a great and very different design, which might not generate any business results (if it’s a business oriented website :).

More white space than ever: as people understand more about web layout, people should value the white space more. It’s the “breathing” space, that gives your own design enough space to express the main idea. It also gives customers enough space to navigate freely and comfortably.

Social design elements: more buttons or links (like Twitter, Dig, Facebook…) to help people share and communicate with friends within their existing page flow.

Speaking navigation: this technique helps to make the navigation more meaningful to users by explicitly explaining what one particular navigation section is about. In stead of having a navigation button as “works”, it can be “See what other projects we have done”.

Dynamic tabs: the more meaningful interaction with the user, the better a site can serve the user need. Once a user moves mouse over a tab, it expands to have more content/actions. It’s basically “interaction on-demand”.

Author icons: not sure since when, but having a real person’s image next to some content seems to be more trust worthy. And it also adds more social & human factors into the page.

When it comes to real one web site design, it’s the fun and challenge to put some or all of these things together to make it work.

See orginal post from SmashMagzine

Tags: design, trend

When business gets crazy and serious, don’t forget to have some fun when ever you can. StumbleUpon had this cute error message page. It turned my bad experience (error message page) to a smile and a good story to tell my friends. What a small cute idea!

Tags: design, web marketing

I saw these V4 Frerrari concept pictures on one blog, and they keep coming back to my mind. Which style do you like? or which style you belong to?

The difference between these two styles can be seen not only on Ferrari, but also every where. Web design approach, communication style, fashion, archetec, food…

So, which style do you like? or which style you belong to?

Tags: design

I have been thinking about “design concept” a lot recently. I ran into something interesting today, and it is one educational presentation “THIRST” that won SlideShare’s best presentation contest. I like the slides:

• message is better delivered and remembered as a story: this presentation did what a story telling does
• one image is worth thousands of words: utilizing image wisely grabs people’s eyes and make the story easy to be understood and memorized
• make the connection between your message and the audience: people only are interested in the things that matter to “me”

When I went to the creator of this presentation’s website, I found one more interesting thing on their contact page. It’s pretty funny.

Tags: design