Well, it has been over a month since I’ve posted anything, and life has been pretty busy and exciting for me. The year of the dragon is off to a fantastic start!

To start off the new year, I decided I would take a chance and present a strategy for a website redesign to the President of Finished Art, Inc. I used the skills I developed in graduate school and it paid off! I was not sure how my diagrams and sketches would be perceived since it was the first time I tried it out in a business setting. The management team was impressed, so I am currently spearheading a website redesign and the creation of a new blog.

The different backgrounds, interests and talents of each member of the Finished Art team is what sets this company apart from other small agencies. I wanted to find a better way to share this diversity and passion with FA’s clients and potential new business partners, as well as give each team member the opportunity to grow and explore his/her interests.

Most graphic designers can relate to the lament that many jobs coming in are not always interesting, so my hope is to give each employee the chance to be creative in their downtime and be involved in shaping the direction of new business. Ideally, the posts they publish could intrigue a potential client, then they could get the chance to work on a project related to their interests.

In other news, I am moving to New York in little over a month! It has been a long time coming.

Recently, Coca-Cola has received some backlash from the release of the Arctic Home white cans. It is the first time in the company’s 125-year history that the cans are not mostly red. So, was the decision to produce these limited-edition white cans a good one or was it a poor strategy to raise awareness?

As someone who has worked on Coca-Cola Holiday packaging for a few years, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Coca-Cola was really going to make a statement this year by producing limited-edition white cans. I was especially pleased that Coca-Cola was trying to do some good by partnering with the World Wildlife Fund to help protect the polar bear’s habitat. In years past, I was used to highlighting chances to win a PS3 or XBox360 on holiday packaging. The white cans seemed like a refreshing change that would really force consumers to take notice, and I applaud Coca-Cola for taking this risk.

However, now I am reminded that most people are afraid of change — particularly if the change seems out of their control. People literally freaked out over the fact that their Coca-Cola cans were no longer red. Some people even believed the secret formula tasted different in the white cans. On a recent flight, I overheard a flight attendant complaining to a passenger that she has trouble telling the difference between the white Coca-Cola can and the silver Diet Coke can. It turns out she is not alone in this confusion despite the seemingly obvious differences between the cans.

Because of this, Coca-Cola will be phasing out to red Arctic Home cans (although the company says it was always part of the plan — who knows?). Is this the right decision? Does this mean the white cans were a mistake?

At first I thought the campaign was a great idea, but in hindsight I now think a change in strategy could have made the white cans successful. I believe consumers felt as though the white cans were forced on them and they had no option to drink out of their beloved red cans. So, what if Coca-Cola released both the white and red Arctic Home cans together instead of phasing from one to the other? What if white cans could only be found in select fridge packs? Would they then be desired and sought after instead of rejected?

I remember when Star Wars Episode 1 came out and Pepsi featured the main characters on its cans. I feel like a dork admitting it, but my sister and I kept buying more and more Pepsi (although we were typically Coke drinkers) because we wanted to collect all the characters. Think about it. Different Coca-Cola packaging is usually desired and even sought after by die-hard fans and collectors. People loved the Coca-Cola Holiday orb bottles that were sold the past few years. Maybe the complete change to white was just too much too soon for most consumers.

If fridge packs were the only way to find the white cans, then that would eliminate the confusion for people reaching for single cans at convenience stores. Most people who sell individual cans would be purchasing in larger bulk sizes that would not include the white cans. Even the businesses that do purchase and sell cans from fridge packs would still have a majority of red cans to sell to those who prefer them. The exterior of fridge packs would remain red, so people would have no confusion at grocery stores.

I think this could have been a way to make people excited when they found one or two white cans in with the red cans in their fridge pack. Maybe then people would have paid more attention to the cause than the pure shock of the disappearance of red Coke cans.

What do you think?

Method is known as an industry innovator with its eco-conscious line of household and personal care products. The company’s latest innovation in sustainable packaging is a bottle made out of plastic that washed up on beaches from the North Pacific Gyre, often referred to as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex.

For those unfamiliar with the Garbage Patch, the infographic below gives a great explanation. I’ve always cringed when I thought about animals getting caught in the floating debris, but what I didn’t realize before is that the patch is not made up of plastic bags and empty bottles. It’s made up of billions of tiny pieces of plastic, and it’s practically invisible unless you’re floating in it. This may sound better, but it’s actually much worse for the environment.

Image via GOOD – Transparency: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Method’s new bottle is 100 percent post-consumer polyethylene — 25 percent of which is plastic from the Gyre. Partnering with Envision Plastics, Method was able to make bottles out of a new plastic material — Ocean PCR.

This new material required Method and Envision to develop a new recycling process that allows the plastic to be cleaned, unwanted contaminants removed completely, blended, and then remanufactured into high quality plastic. This creates Ocean PCR plastic that is the same quality as virgin HDPE plastic.

“We’ve created a usable bottle from ocean plastic and upcycled it into something useful that can be recycled again and again. Our ultimate goal is to raise awareness that the real solution to plastic pollution lies in reusing and recycling the plastic that’s already on the planet.”
     – Adam Lowry, Method co-founder and chief greenskeeper

If you happen to be in Oahu on either November 19th or December 3rd, you can volunteer to help Method collect plastic for the initial production run of bottles made of ocean plastic. Contact oceanplastic@methodhome.com for details on location and time.

You can read more about the bottles here: Method Ocean Plastic Initiative – TheDieline.com.

HOW Interactive Design – Bad Inforgraphics

Lately, I’ve come across quite a few articles about infographic design — determining whether or not it is overused and discussing proper usage. Here are two articles and my favorite takeaways:

The Do’s And Don’ts Of Infographic Design from Smashing Magazine.

• Show, Don’t Tell — A rule of cinema is to show, don’t tell. The same holds true for infographic design. The foundation of any good infographic is data viz.
• If the Client Wanted an Excel Chart, They Wouldn’t Need You — It might sound harsh, but it’s true. If infographics were as simple as laying out a bunch of standard charts and graphs on a page, then clients would not need to search out great designers.
• Typography Should Not Be a Crutch — Typography can make or break a design, but it should not be the solution to a data viz problem.
• Tell a Story — All good stories have a beginning, middle and end. Infographics deserve the same treatment. At the beginning of the infographic, introduce the problem or thesis. From there, back it up with data. Finally, end the infographic with a conclusion.
• Visualize the Hook — Every good infographic has a hook or primary takeaway that makes the viewer say “A-ha!” As a designer, you should make this hook the focal point of the design if at all possible. Placing the hook at either the center or very end of the infographic is usually best, so that it grabs more attention.

Quit it With All the Infographics Already from HOW Interactive Design.

• Most infographics aren’t accessible for the visually impaired. The point is to convey information succinctly, right? That info is lost on people who use screen readers if all the text is within an image or if your infographic is Flash-based. If your infographic is readable by low-vision assistance software, does the sequence of the content makes sense to someone who can’t see the graphic?
• Most infographics aren’t search-engine optimized. Likewise, search engines won’t know the content of your flashy chart if it’s all just an image. Malcolm Coles suggests breaking down infographics into HTML and using text or ALT tags for both SEO and accessibility.
• Those super-long infographics are practically useless on a mobile device. I don’t know who started that trend of making infographics approximately 400px wide by 45000px high, but it isn’t a great user experience on an iPhone, and it must stop.
• Of all online infographics, 89% contain statistics of dubious veracity. This is a joke. But with the speed that infographics are appearing online—often about an unquantifiable subject matter and/or produced by an entity trying to make a point—the era of reliable, vetted infographics seems to be over. People might not care if the information in a graphic is correct, but you should.
• Many infographics are just plain bad. I don’t want to name names. But sometimes I just don’t know what people were thinking—some situations just don’t call for infographics. (However infographics that are intentionally meaningless can be quite awesome.)
• IF YOU MUST DO IT, DO IT WELL. It’s certainly possible to make infographics that are useful, beautiful and accessible, especially with HTML5.

Here is where you can find some GOOD infographics.

After initially writing this post, I also came across this great video on the subject:

The Value of Data Visualization from Column Five on Vimeo.

Mike Biddle: We can recycle plastic | Video on TED.com.

Less than 10% of plastic trash is recycled compared to almost 90% of metals. This is because of the massively complicated problem of finding and sorting the different kinds of plastic. Frustrated by this waste, Mike Biddle has developed a cheap and incredibly energy efficient plant that can, and does, recycle any kind of plastic.

Because many plants can only recycle certain plastics, people are often confused about what they can and can’t recycle. Hopefully this technology will eventually help to recover and recycle more plastics around the world.

Biddle’s business model is sustainable from both an economic and environmental standpoint.

1. Avoid rules. Avoid order. Don’t just embrace chaos, but create a little bit of it. Constant change, from the top-down, keeps people nimble and flexible (and shows that you want constant change).
2. Give yourself and your team permission to be creative. Permission to try something new, permission to fail, permission to embarrass yourself, permission to have crazy ideas.
3. Hire weird people. Not just the tattoo’d and pierced-in-strange-places kind, but people from outside your industry who would approach problems in different ways than you and your normal competitors.
4. Meetings are a necessary evil, but you can avoid the conference room and meet people in the halls, the water cooler, or their desks. Make meetings less about delegation and task management and more about cross-pollination of ideas (especially the weird ideas). This is a lot harder than centralized, top-down meetings. But this is your job — deal with it.
5. Structure your company to be flexible. Creativity is often spontaneous, so the whole company needs to be able to pivot quickly and execute on them (see #1).

via Creative Cultures: MailChimp Grants Employees “Permission To Be Creative” | Fast Company

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

– Steve Jobs (Stanford commencement speech, June 2005)

As I’m finishing up with an online Financial Management class that is all numbers, I was just thinking how I’d rather be facilitating creative thinking right now. Then I started thinking back about a presentation my former classmate Rebecca Mahl and I did on the problem solving methodology synectics, as well as a new methodology she created called Pughsion™.

Synectics combines group interaction rules with a creative process centered around the use of metaphor, drawing analogies from diverse disciplines. For our presentation, Becca and I discussed the history and general principles of synectics, then led the class in a group exercise to try out the method. I created a spinner with different objects and ideas that people could use as metaphors, and we asked the class to think about how we can help make recycling a habitual part of everyday life. This was how we connected this assignment to my final project, and Becca also connected this to her project.

Becca found that our class seemed to be very engaged in the synectic class exercise, and they came up with some interesting connections between recycling and their randomly selected concept. However, the class had trouble converging back to finding a solution to the problem. The synectic exercise promoted divergent thinking and aided in changing perspectives and how we viewed, comprehended, and went about solving the problem, but a point that was raised was, “…ok now what?”

Enter: Pughsion™.

Pughsion Diffusion from Rebecca Mahl on Vimeo.

I found Becca’s new method to be very interesting and the results generated from the process were inspiring. Be sure to check out the Pughsion blog at http://pughsion.tumblr.com to see some of the undergraduate Industrial Design student concepts that came from using this method.

This is very entertaining to watch. In this TED Talk, magician Marco Tempest uses three iPods as props to discuss truth and lies, art and emotion. I can’t imagine how long it took to execute this perfectly!

Designing A Difference – Smallbean Part 2 on Vimeo

Almost one year ago, I wrote about a collaboration between Design Museum Boston and Smallbean to develop the next generation of Smallbean’s solar suitcase in a post titled Designing A Difference: Smallbean’s Solar Suitcase.

Here is phase two of the project, which focused on refining concepts and prototyping the new solution.